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Ryland Grace is dying of starvation.
It's not a surprise. He knew before he changed course from his homecoming to Earth to the rescue mission of Blip-A that he would reach the point where all he had to eat was the remnants of the coma slurry that fed the crew on their way to Tau Ceti. He should be fortunate that there is enough leftover for him to consume at all, even if it tastes as bitter as ground aspirin tablets and makes him physically nauseous. The nutrients had been enough to keep him mostly operational at the beginning.
Now, curled up on his bunk in the Hail Mary and orbiting Erid, he is just waiting to die.
Rocky is adamant that he'll survive, and he assures Grace that the thrum of Erid's best and brightest are intent on helping him, but Grace knows hunger like this. He can remember the aching pang roiling through the pit of his belly like gnawing teeth. It had been a long time since that shadowed memory was held to light.
His sporadic memory feels flimsy in the details, but his body knows the horror of hunger that cannot be satiated. Once, he had starved.
Had it been from sickness? Stubbornness? Punishment?
No. Poverty.
All too soon, his mind flutters through the memory of a warm bowl pressed into his hands, the savory saltiness of soup broth tinging the steam curling up from its surface. He's young enough that his eyes barely reach the top of the kitchen counter. Still, he notices that there’s a can of Campbell's chicken star soup sitting open, set off to the side to be thrown away. There's a picture of Clifford the Big Red Dog on the can. He loves Clifford. How can a dog be so big? It's so silly. He and Colt will watch an entire episode with rapt attention without getting distracted by something else.
A voice skims past the edge of his consciousness with a whispered assurance: it's all for you. No, I don't need any. Colt has his own bowl, so that one is yours. All kids eat first.
His memory is fickle. Grace is used to it by now.
The starvation saps his concentration as deeply as it ravages through his muscle mass and bone density. These days, he can hardly manage to succeed at anything more than opening his eyes and watching the occasional Eridian scurry along the Hail Mary's floor in the pursuit of research to keep him alive.
He can understand most of the clicking, hums, and trills he catches from time to time, but he's starting to realize that Eridians, like humans, each have their own accent. Some rumble with sub-harmonics that betray nervousness, and others are shrill with boisterous excitement at the prospect of scientific research. Rocky speaks the softest of them all when he speaks with Grace, as if he's shushing a startled animal prepared to flee.
Rocky talks to him with the same gentleness that reminds him of a half-mumbled lullaby from so long ago. He can't remember the words of that lullaby anymore. He isn't sure if it is a side effect of the drugs Stratt pumped him with to send him off to die, or if it's a side effect of aging itself.
He has been dying in space for a long, long time, now, even with accounting for time dilation.
Either way, he listens to Rocky's purring chatter with half-slit eyes and dozes for a long, long while. The Hail Mary keeps a steady orbit around Erid's atmosphere, just enough to stay aloft, and the rotation does not falter or shake the ship in any way.
He still imagines the sensation of being rocked, lulled to sleep by a long-lost lullaby and gentle sway, as if becoming so much younger. He feels like there are arms there around him, swaying him back and forth, back and forth, back and forth.
Starving is a painful death.
He writhes in his bunk, shaking even as sweat beads his brow. Fever-stricken. That had not been fun to explain to Rocky and the other Eridians. Hey, my body recognizes that it's dying and chose to crank up the heat to a degree that can boil my brain out of my skull. Cool, right?
He knows it will pass in time. He thinks of star-shaped soup again, and the memory of that salt-saturated broth makes him lick at his chapped lips in longing. He can practically feel the spoon against his mouth, tilted up to catch any stray drop. He trembles against a wave of sensation: a scratchy blanket pulled up to his chin, a cool cloth draped over his temple, an indistinct figure sitting at the edge of the bed cradling a bowl of soup.
Nice, Ry, just one more bite for me? I know. It's okay, take a breath. Get it all out. Just one more bite.
Grace closes his eyes and parts his lips in silent supplication. Music twinkles nearby. It is just a brief, worried melody. He's already asleep by the time Rocky climbs up into the bunk alongside him and burrows into the spot at the small of his back. Even through the xenonite suit, he can feel the abnormal burn of fever radiating back at him.
Rocky watches him sleep. Grace dreams, and dreams, and starves.
Ryland is crying. There are great, rib-heaving sobs ripping through his lungs. It's so hard to breathe past the floundering panic.
"My book!" He wails. The colorful pages lie limp in his cradled hands. He's too frightened to move an inch just in case it damages the book's spine beyond repair. It's not his book about fish. He borrowed it from the library to read at the playground, and now it's broken.
It’s all his fault that it’s broken now.
"Hey, hey," a voice soothes. He feels a figure crouch next to him, and he lets a pair of calloused hands take the book's remains from his loose grip. Ryland is sniffling too hard to manage more than a pleading, wordless whimper. It’s the only way to convey his desperate plea to fix it.
"It's just a book, Ry," the voice says, achingly gentle. "I can pay for it, and the library will buy a new copy to replace it, okay? You aren't in trouble."
"It r-ripped," Ryland sobs out. He's starting to hyperventilate. "It's broken."
"Shh, buddy, c'mere," the man says. He tucks the mud-spotted pages of the ruined book under one arm and hauls Ryland in for a hug with the other. Ryland wraps his arms around the man’s neck tightly and burrows his face into the man's shoulder with a stuttering cry.
"I'm sorry," Ryland warbles out. It's not quite a stable sentence, by any means, with every syllable snapped and threaded with his hitching breath. Yet the man hums soothingly and pats Ryland's back with a large hand in a steady rhythm.
"You aren't in trouble, Ry. It's all going to be fixed."
Ryland delves deeper into that warmth, chasing its comforting stability, and he cries until he nearly falls asleep while standing straight up.
When he opens his eyes, Grace finds Rocky there, watching with a low hum of concern.
"Hey, buddy," he mumbles.
GRACE STAY ASLEEP A LONG TIME.
"'M tired," he agrees. "Old bones and all that."
Rocky trills a low note of annoyance at the joke that Grace can't quite translate. He furrows his brow, deciphering each rattled syllable, but comes up empty. He's going to need to hook up the ship's translator program to connect to the dormitory so he doesn't have to think so gosh-darn hard about it.
Grace coughs to clear his throat and tries again. "What was that?"
GRACE IS SICK, Rocky chitters. His voice wavers with each musical note. ROCKY WILL FIX.
"You can fix," Grace whispers, half-asleep. "You always fix it."
YES YES YES.
He doesn't remember falling back asleep, but he doesn't need to ask Rocky to watch. His friend has no intention of moving from his spot curled up next to him. Rocky watches the shallow rise and fall of Grace's chest and listens to every gurgling cry of his empty stomach with hollowed-out fear.
Rocky cannot watch another one of his crew die, and not like this, so close to the safety of his home planet. He has to fix this.
He has to fix Grace before he dies, too.
"What did you call him?" Colt demands.
The boy is a grade above them, and he's holding Ryland's glasses high above their heads with a smirk leveled directly at him. "Crybaby, crybaby, cry—"
"Colt," Ryland interjects weakly. It’s half a warning and half a plea. He's so embarrassed that he thinks he's going to throw up.
It's all he manages to get out before Colt leaps forward and tackles the older boy to the ground. The two go rolling around in the grass as Ryland stands stock-still, mouth hanging open in horror. Despite himself, hating himself, he feels tears well up in the corners of his vision.
Crybaby.
"Take it back!" Colt roars. His legs are wrapped around the boy's waist, pinning him against Colt's body as he smacks against his face with an open-palmed slap, slap, slap.
"Psycho!" The boy shrieks back. He hurls Ryland's glasses across the grass and manages to twist around just enough to land a solid blow to the side of Colt's ribs. With a ragged wheeze, Colt goes limp, writhing in pain with a hand clutched to his side. The boy rises to his knees and swears down at Colt with a bunch of words Ryland has never heard before.
He would definitely have to apologize if he said anything like that to someone else.
Ryland knows exactly where the bully threw his glasses, but he chooses to fling himself onto the other boy's back, wrapping his arms around his neck tight enough to summon a gargling choke in response. The boy thrashes in his grip like a wild animal, but Ryland thinks about Colt lying in the grass, overcome with pain, and he squeezes the boy's throat harder.
Harder.
Harder.
"Colton Gentry!"
A pair of hands yanks him away from his death grip. He digs his heels into the grass to slow his unplanned retreat, glaring with feral rage at the way the boy doubles over, coughing desperately for air. The boy is crying, his lip trembling with panic, and a teacher's aide crouches over him, rubbing his back in silent comfort.
He doesn't deserve that sort of comfort. He hurt Colt.
The teacher who grips him by his shoulders hasn't realized which twin he is. Over the roaring pulse in his ears, Ryland hears her ask Colt if he's okay and to ask where his glasses have gone. Colt gives her a thumbs-up and points to the patch of grass where Ryland's glasses were flung.
"Oh no, honey, the lenses are cracked," the teacher says. She sounds genuinely sorry about it.
Ryland focuses on leveling his breathing, but the shock is settling in his marrow with frigid dread. He attacked someone. He choked someone. He hadn't wanted to stop until that boy was no longer a threat to his twin. It makes him tremble to even conceive of that untamed blood lust. He's going to be in so much trouble.
"Everyone to the office, I need to call your parents."
They shuffle along from the schoolyard to the principal's office in a parade of sullen faces. The other kids stare at them, wide-eyed, but Ryland stares at his untied sneakers as grass turns into concrete, then linoleum, then carpet. Colt sticks by his side in rigid determination, his fingers curling into the fabric on the back of Ryland's t-shirt as a lifeline. In his other hand, he holds the broken glasses with reverence.
"That was badass," Colt finally whispers in his ear.
That snaps him out of his solemn repentance. He gapes at his twin. Colt's blond locks are tousled from the tumble in the grass. That fearless gleam shines in the blue of his eyes like starlight. Fights never scare him the same way that they scare Ryland.
"You swore," Ryland hisses back. He glances nervously at the receptionist's desk, but she's talking quietly on the phone with one of the parents and taking notes on a legal pad. She hardly notices the two grass-stained boys muttering at each other.
"You can do it," Colt assures him softly. He looks excited about the idea itself. "I won't tell on you."
"No!"
His surprise is too loud. The same teacher's aide who went to comfort the bully in the grass gives him a striking glare that makes him stutter out an apology and stare back down at his feet. Colt lays his head against Ryland's shoulder in silent comfort.
Ryland can sense, rather than see, the smirk on his brother's face. He loves to rile up Ryland and get them into trouble. Ryland hates it as much as he loves his twin to the moon and back.
The boy that Ryland choked had been ushered into the nurse's office immediately, and when the office door opens with an abrupt creak of the hinges, he looks up, dreading to see him standing there. Except it's not the boy at all.
The young man scans the office, eyes narrowed, and the simmering irritation clears away in the instant his blue eyes fix upon the twins.
"Boys," he sighs out. It sounds like this is the first time he has found the breath to manage to speak in a long, long time. He crosses the room in three quick strides, and both Ryland and Colt fling themselves into his waiting arms like drowning men clinging to a life raft.
He holds them back just as tightly, pressing his cheek to the crown of Ryland's blond locks. Ryland cries into his shoulder and hardly notices the acidic stench of motor oil and engine grease smearing across his forehead.
He's safe, here. Nothing will hurt them now.
Ryland Grace hurts everywhere.
"Ow, that hurts," he tries to say. It comes out in an incoherent rush of mumbling. The boulder on his bed rustles at the sound of his voice. He blinks, dazed, as the rock stands on five appendages and trills at him with a musical lilt.
"Hm?" He grunts out. His throat hurts too much to try speaking again. What he really means is: what on Earth is that rock doing walking around?
The rock chirps at him. It sounds disapproving. Did he make a rock angry? Is that a thing he does?
It hurts too much to argue with a rock. He closes his eyes and pretends he can't hear that rumbling musical chatter of annoyance.
He wants to go home.
"Okay," that familiar voice says. There's an edge of patience there that seems to tread on the verge of impending incredulity. "I'm not mad. I want to know why."
"I was helping the bird," Ryland says, his voice painfully small. He points up at the cluster of twigs and feathers high above them. "It fell down from all the way up there."
The man's face softens. It makes him look even younger than usual. The ridge of his nose matches Ryland's and Colt's nose. They have the same eyes. His hair is a darker shade of blond, even under the sunlight freckled through the leaves of the great big tree in the front yard. It's all so familiar to him that it hurts as sickeningly as a solid blow to the stomach.
"You could have been hurt," the man says quietly.
He crouches down to meet Ryland's eye at his level. He's still wearing his work uniform with his name stitched in red across his right breastbone: COURTLAND. There's a smear of black at the line of his jaw, right beneath his cheek. He always had oil on him, even when he came home late from work at night and started cooking dinner for the twins.
"I wanted to help," Ryland's eyes well up with tears. He hates crying. Colt cries when he does, and he hates to see his brother cry. They just spend the whole time looking at one another and weeping helplessly.
"You did," he agrees, kindly. He draws Ryland into a hug, letting the tears roll down Ryland's cheeks and soak into the pad of his shoulder. "You saved a little bird's life, Ry. I'm so proud of you. I'm only scared to think you could have gotten hurt."
"I'm scared, too," Ryland whispers to him.
His grip tightens on Ryland. "Why is that, buddy?"
"I don't like being high," Ryland admits shakily. It feels so silly to say it out loud. When he sniffles and chokes on another sob tinged with fear, he feels even worse.
"Then you were very brave," the man whispers, and he sways them slowly until the tears run dry. Back and forth, back and forth, back and forth.
Ryland Grace doesn't feel very brave until he's staring down at a plate of… him. At least, it's the food derived from his very own DNA to synthesize the proteins. He might get sick if he thinks about it too hard.
GRACE EAT AND GROW STRONG, Rocky demands. He's bossier than ever now that Grace is coherent enough to translate every note of disappointment. Grace has missed his attitude almost as much as he's missed real food that isn't coma bagged slurry or nutrient-barren Taumoeba.
"Okay, okay, just relax," Grace huffs out a laugh. He makes a show of taking a bite of the suspiciously shaped loaf of his own cells. It reminds him of the puppet shows he used to mimic scientific concepts with for Rocky. That was back when they shared no common language and could only stumble through the dark alone with no one but one another. That had been so very long ago.
GOOD GOOD GOOD, Rocky trills happily.
"I taste pretty good," Grace admits. He takes slow bites of the sample meal, waiting for the telltale twist of disgust to churn in his gut and ruin his appetite, but his body behaves in a strangely tamed manner for this meal. Perhaps the new texture and taste are enough to keep him from throwing up everything he just ate for once.
GRACE BRAVE TO EAT HIMSELF, Rocky says. The flat monotone of his voice is underplayed by a sub-harmonic chime of amusement. He's teasing Grace as usual.
Grace chews slowly, eyeing the dwindling pile of his own meat on the plate, and takes his time swallowing down the portion. He savors it and tries not to think about concepts such as variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease or star-speckled chicken soup.
When he finishes his last bite, he opens his mouth to show off both his cleared plate and his successfully empty mouth to Rocky. His best friend reels in disgust and chitters out a long string of curses that have yet to be translated. They're still working on it. They have all the time in the world, now.
"Sorry, sorry, that was bad manners," Grace chuckles to himself. "My dad would be so disappointed."
Rocky gives a curious three-note chirp. It takes him a moment to gather a coherent sentence, as if he’s testing the waters of this new topic of conversation. GRACE TELL ROCKY ABOUT FAMILY, QUESTION?
Grace blinks. The back of his eyes aches with the memory of tears he no longer has the mental bandwidth for. He's still filtering through the stack of childhood snapshots that the starvation and fevers drained from him like an infected wound.
"Okay," Grace agrees quietly. "Um, I have a twin brother, Colt. We come from the same embryo. I was born six minutes before him, but he never really seemed to mind. He likes to call me old even though we're the same age."
He trails off. The revelation cuts through him as cleanly as a knife. Time dilation is a bother. "Um. We used to be, at least. Remember when I told you about relativity? Well, that means he's much older than I am now."
SORRY FOR GRACE AND COLT, Rocky trills sadly.
"Thanks, buddy."
Grace stares down at his empty plate and suddenly wishes he had more food, if only to distract himself from the memories pressing down on him. He settles for reaching up to tuck one half of his glasses over one ear, then hangs them down below his chin. It's a reckless, familiar rebellion. He had cried the day he got glasses, all while Colt was not allowed to pick out a matching pair. He had hated being separate from his brother even in that small way.
Now they live light years apart. They were born of the same embryo, and now they will die as far apart as two humans have ever become.
"Uh," Grace stumbles on, clearing his throat roughly. "Our dad is the best. He's always there to support us. He would make us soup when we were sick, and he would let us stay up late when we kept asking him to read us books in bed. He never yelled."
GRACE DAD IS NICE, Rocky chirps.
"Gentry," Grace says without thinking. Then, he blinks. "His name, I mean. His name was Courtland Gentry."
Rocky pauses. His carapace shifts ever so slightly. Grace knows him well enough to sense that his friend is scanning part of his body language, gauging the conversation carefully.
GRACE SPEAKS IN THE PAST TENSE, QUESTION?
"Yeah," Grace says softly. The tears still don't come, even if his heart feels like it is slowly crushed in a vice grip. "I don't remember how, but I think he passed away. I just… feel it."
He taps his chest twice, right above his heart. Rocky taps his carapace in his matching two-tone rhythm.
SORRY SORRY SORRY, Rocky trills quietly.
"Thanks," Grace says. He feels sadness pooling in the pit of his stomach, but it doesn't crawl up his throat and choke him. He's okay for the moment. "It was a long time ago. I made peace with it."
THAT IS JUST SOMETHING YOU SAY, Rocky accuses him.
Grace can't help but laugh at that. "Yeah, you got me. I miss them. But I got to meet you, and you're my family, too."
Rocky chitters out a happy melody, shuffling closer to press into Grace's side. Grace pats the top of his carapace and murmurs, "Happy, happy, happy."
He is happy. The memories will come soon enough. He'll remember more of his father and brother as time passes and the effects of the drugs wear off. He can only imagine all the things he's missing. Birthdays, holidays, summer vacations, and many years' worth of inside jokes and silly incidents.
In time, he might even remember what happened to his father and give himself the chance to mourn it. For now, he thinks about the warmth of his hugs and the comforting murmur of his voice, and that settles his nerves enough to focus on the immediate tasks at hand, such as building the biodome on Erid.
He has his life ahead of him. It's looking to be a very good one.