Chapter Text
The stars will have the last word
and out-shine us;
"I beg to differ,"
said the red fox.
colleen - the stars vs creatures
Ryland Grace is, relatively speaking, fifty-five years old when he learns that he will die of a curable disease sometime within the coming decade.
He makes his peace with it.
Rocky doesn't.
Rocky terrorizes the scientists about the immunosuppressants that aren’t working, spends twenty-eight days combing through all of the medical textbooks available because they ‘must have overlooked something, stupid stupid stupid’, blows out his vents when Adrian brings up his rude behavior, and then hides out in the biodome for another fourteen days.
They let him process it.
Grace feels darkly amused by, resigned to and irritated by his own fate, all at the same time. He doesn’t believe in the divine, not beyond a general sense of awe for the endless complexity of the life around them, but now and then… It feels like some sort of karmic payback he didn’t know he was in for. Like the universe is saying, what, the most at home you’ve ever felt just happens to be with people entirely unlike you? Well, now the only thing that could possibly fix you is a stem cell transplant from a healthy donor!
There aren’t a lot of those to go around, on Erid.
The fragility and, well, volatility of Grace’s health always put Rocky ill at ease, even during those few, good years where nothing was hurting too much. Ha. Imagine that, no shoe pinching. It was nice while it lasted.
The bad years are etched into Rocky’s memory, same as his mission crest and their partner-bond are carved into his carapace. He had front row seats to Grace’s prolonged face-off with death by malnutrition; he witnessed how easily the biological scales could tip. The human body is as fragile as it is resilient and as mercurial as it is adaptable. Idiopathic conditions are simply out of their control, and if there’s one thing Rocky can’t stand, it’s not being able to fix something by just deciding to put his mind (and hands) to it.
Which is why, on the sixteenth day after the Adrian fallout, Rocky blows his vents out again, but this time at Grace.
“There’s nothing we can do, buddy. We just gotta, you know. Take what we can get,” Grace shrugs. He’s half-aware he’s slipping into teacher mode again, arms akimbo and all. Explicating a process to break down the logic behind the end result. “I’ve had a lot of good years, here. With you, and our family, and our friends, and-and my students, and everyone. You’ve—you gave me more than I could’ve ever asked for. And whenever my time comes, I’ll go out happy. I mean that.”
Rocky isn’t having any of it.
“No!” he bellows, twisting his carapace for a head-shake, then pressing his front two arms together and lowering himself to the floor. “No, no, no… We can’t just GIVE UP! Ten more years is nothing, and that's the best case scenario! Bad, bad, bad, bad, bad. Human life expectancy is much longer than sixty-four Earth years. I won't watch you die just because your stupid fucking body DECIDED to stop making enough blood!”
“You’re forgetting something here. Average life expectancy. I’ve had a rough go of it, Rock’. Even if this hadn’t happened, I was most likely never going to—”
Rocky shrieks a pained, warbling, thrill. Grace flinches. Yeah, that wasn’t his best work.
“Shut UP, Grace! Stop. You can’t say that. This is stupid, you’re being stupid. There has to be a solution. I can’t do this. I can’t…”
He shudders and slumps onto the floor. He’s shaking and venting steam and Grace feels a little bit like the worst person on Erid. Maybe he is. Because ultimately, this isn’t about his own feelings about death, is it now?
Grace winces as he lowers himself onto his knees next to him. Ouch. This getting old stuff sucks.
His eyes sting and his throat starts feeling tight the moment he really lets himself look at—and feel—Rocky’s distress. This is his best friend and life partner and… whatever other words the English language contains with which to insufficiently describe the bond they’ve cultivated. The trials and tribulations and everything that came after, it feels too big to pack it into a couple syllables. ‘Soulmate’ is pretty corny. Eridians have a similar concept, though it doesn’t have a real equivalent in any human language. It’s less esoteric, much more tangible in what it implies, a compound phrase that translates to something akin to ‘mutual holder of hearts and mind, nest and crest, things small and large and in-between’.
Yeah, that one is corny too, but it’s the truth. Let them have their dang corn, okay?
Grace presses his side up against Rocky’s and pulls him close (by which he means himself, because Rocky doesn’t budge). He wraps his arm around Rocky’s carapace and places his hand on the warmed xenonite wrapped over his friend’s fluttering vents.
“Look, I’m sorry. I know this is… not what we planned. It sucks, it’s — I might never get to see your littles in my classroom — not fair. But it isn’t over yet, right? I’m still here. I’m not going anywhere.”
Suddenly, Rocky stills. The agitated clatter of his shifting vent-plates makes way for silence.
Grace utters his (very) poor approximation of a ‘question’ particle, which is ultimately a click-hum in the back of his throat. He even taps Rocky's suit twice for emphasis.
More silence. The xenonite smooth and familiar under his hand, Grace spreads out his fingers, counts the chipped edges of Rocky’s carapace. Some of the imperfections are left from their stunt on planet Adrian. More keepsakes. Half of their bodies are memories.
“There is a solution,” Rocky hums, lowly. He’s dragging out every sound, a deliberate adagio that means he’d rather not be saying them at all. He shifts in place. “But you are not going to like it.”
He’s right about that.
Grace sure as all flipping fudge does not like it.
In fact, he has some choice words to say about it. So many choice words, it turns out, for Rocky to decide he’d rather stop avoiding Adrian than keep listening to a rant that could possibly go on forever.
Everyone notices the change, including their young ones.
Adrian gathers them after their stay in the node’s collective nursery, once, and attempts to explain both Rocky’s and Grace’s conditions in age-appropriate terms, but they’re hardly out of hatchling age. They’re scared without quite understanding what it is they’re scared of, and yet they feel the gravity of the situation.
Rocky spends half their time infused with mindless restlessness and the other half in melancholic silence. The latter of which is a cognitive state they never displayed before returning from their long, long mission. Their harrowing isolation. This… shutting down is not behavior commonly observed in Eridians, though it isn’t entirely unheard of. Adrian has come to understand the rare affliction better, now that their mate suffers from it.
Rocky poses every kind of hypothetical they can think of, anything and everything that crosses their mind. They are out of themself. They even start rambling about possibly accompanying Grace to Earth and returning after the human’s passing. This is the source of their second fight, because Adrian will allow them anything, anything but this, and despite knowing better than to attribute this to a lack of care on Rocky’s part, they are still hurt by the mere insinuation. Their children have just stopped being considered hatchlings, they are anything but independent! As much as child-rearing is a collective task:
"You are still their parent!"
Rocky goes back to the biodome for a day, and returns with a begrudging apology. (To the same extent that Adrian mediates between Rocky and Grace, the latter mediates between Adrian and their mate. They have an unspoken agreement, of sorts.)
Privately, Adrian thinks Rocky should not be meddling this much.
Not so privately, they mention this to Grace: “You should know I support whatever choice you make. It is yours. Even if my mate disagrees with it, even if they are hurt by it. You live and die on your terms.”
But of course, in the end, Grace holds only sympathy for Rocky. More sympathy than he holds for himself, even.
Grace might understand better than anyone the ways in which fear holds Rocky hostage. It traps them in their own thoughts, chases them like prey. Their universe has collapsed into itself, and now there’s only the dread, the knowing of what is to come. And because Rocky is Rocky, and their world is xenonite filament and structural adhesive, all they want is to fix it.
Terror, salvation and a straight line binding the former to the latter, a bridge built no matter the consequences laid upon the land which supports it.
For the sake of familial harmony and their mate’s fragile state of mind, Adrian indulges Rocky’s requests to consult with the other scientists. The preliminary thrum consists of four senior xenobiologists in charge of Grace’s care, three voidspace engineers, one physicist, two computer scientists, and Adrian and Rocky themselves.
They conclude that it is possible. Risky, but possible, and many of the risks can indeed be mitigated if improvements are made to the ship’s computers and medical systems. They have spent the last thirteen years studying, replicating and improving upon human computer design, communications systems and sensor equipment. Should it be necessary, they could increase the reliability of the artificial-sleep management system.
This is all hypothetical, and it will remain hypothetical until they reach any kind of consensus.
It falls to Adrian to drag their mate back to their human’s quarters and address the impasse.
Grace breaks first.
In the end, they are all sat in bed.
Adrian has brought a script tablet to share some of the predictive models and approximate calculations they have done pertaining to possible scenarios for Grace’s return to Earth. The probe they sent out to collect data on Sol’s luminosity has confirmed what they were hoping for—Earth received the Taumoeba and worked out the solution—but this can’t tell them what state the planet itself is in. There are many unknown variables in this equation. It is, as Grace puts it:
“—just another Hail Mary, Rock’. I mean, if you want me gone that bad, you can just say it, you know?”
He laughs at his own joke, but it is self-conscious.
“No, you idiot,” Rocky chuffs, annoyed. “You’re playing stupid again. You know perfectly well I want to keep you forever. Keep, keep, keep. I love you, Grace. But the chances aren’t as shitty as you say. This is better than certainty of death.”
Grace is quiet for a moment, drumming four fingers against his chest. When he replies, his clipped speech is quiet, hardly a whisper.
“I’m not sure it is, buddy.”
“I am.”
“Even if we never hear each other again? Even if—”
His voice is tight, emotional. Adrian can hear the fluid gathering at the corners of his light-sensing organs, but even if this weren’t the case, they would still know he was on the verge of crying.
“I keep thinking back to when we first got here, and you, hah. You almost jumped one of the doctors — Uhura, wasn’t it? — for insinuating that you were behaving erratically, and that you should better go home and see Adrian instead of fussing and hovering over me. And then you got all hissy and grumpy when I made friends with them—” He smiles smugly, a flash of predator-teeth. “—because you didn’t wanna share me. I just don’t… What happened to that Rocky? The one who wouldn’t, wouldn’t let go for anything—”
His voice breaks.
Rocky is quick to lift their carapace and climb up to Grace's chest, arms bracketing the human’s torso as they maneuver upward and then settle there, oh-so carefully balancing most of their weight. Careful, careful, careful. Adrian never knew their mate so careful with anything before they brought Grace home. In many ways, their time away has matured them. It was a painful process. But growth usually is.
“Same, same, same. I’m still the same,” they say, thrumming quietly against Grace’s chest, the sound of which is nothing but a physical sensation to the human body. “Still scared for you, still love you, still strongly dislike Uhura. I still want you healthy. If this is the only way of keeping you alive, then this is what I want.”
They pause, considering. Grace opens his mouth, but Rocky utters a sharp, reprimanding noise. Grace snaps his mouth shut, and Rocky continues.
“Adrian says I’m selfish, and yes. Maybe I’m fucking selfish. But I know it would hurt much worse to see you waste away. You’re already—you’re already weak. And the way you're deteriorating... It scares me, Grace.”
Grace shakes his head, closing his eyes against the anticipatory grief in their mate’s sound. He looks as though in physical pain, and his speech is even thinner, more toneless than usual.
“This is my home, Rock’. You, our family. Erid. There isn’t… there’s nothing for me out there. Nothing I want.”
He trails his five fingers over the side of Rocky’s carapace, then settles over the mission crest on their arm. The marking is mirrored over Grace’s shoulder.
“You don’t know that,” Rocky protests, with an annoyed noise. “What about human children? Stupid, stupid human children. They need all the teachers they can get! What about trees? And new Meryl Streep movies? And cats?”
“The animal or the musical?” Grace snorts.
“Not the point,” Rocky says, steaming in mild agitation. They press one of their hands to Grace’s, the same one still resting on the xenonite mesh around Rocky’s arm.
“Listen. Use your bad human ears and listen. You know our physicists think they will be able to successfully observe state changes over long distances soon. Quantum teleportation! It’s very very very impressive! And it means—instantaneous communication with Earth could be possible if the Earth scientists receive detailed instructions and replicate the findings.”
Grace rolls his eyes, but the playful annoyance is half-hearted and hardly conceals the tension in his voice.
“Even if they manage to work that out, and that's a big, big, big if, we'll never—it’s never going to be the same as this.” Grace gestures at where they’re lying, their entangled limbs. “Instant messaging through entanglement is… well, it’s exciting and awesome beyond belief, in the scientific sense, but it isn't this, Rock. It can't be.”
“Agree,” Rocky trills, quiet and somber. “It's not the same. But if I know you can live, and if I know that otherwise you would… not… I would rather hear you from a distance than not at all. I'd rather you hear Earth again, breathe your horrible atmosphere, see all the things Erid can't give you. It's better than nothing at all. Much, much, much, much better.”
Grace looks at him in a kind of reverent silence for a moment. He thumbs the precious stone he’s wearing around his neck today. The color is ‘amber’, and it supposedly matches the ear-jewelry he received from Life-Scientist Dax when they began working on scientific scripts together.
He isn’t leaking from his face, not yet, but the threat has emerged once more.
“If you love something, let it go, huh?” He laughs, but the sound is hollow.
He shuts his eyes, his facial muscles twitching almost involuntarily, an indicator of strong emotion. The fluid slips from the corners of his eyes and gravity takes it down the side of his face, soaking into his hair.
“God. Who came up with that bull-crap, anyway?”
In the morning, they’re at the beach again.
He woke up early with a headache and decided he would rather take a whiff of the morning air than twist and turn in bed for another two hours.
Grace lets the low hum of pain in his limbs anchor him as he lumbers down the incline leading up to the house, his little home perched atop the hill like a bird’s nest. The fog clings to them, the air thick and humid in the dewy twilight. They walk up to their favorite spot. Rocky does, anyway. Grace does his arthritis shuffle with the cane.
They sit for a while, and finally, he draws in a breath.
“Can I think about it for a little longer?”
“Yes,” Rocky says, immediately.
The low waver of concern-uncertainty-fear remains, curling around his his sounds like smoke on the horizon.
For three hours, Grace thinks about it. He considers every angle of this ultimate dilemma of his life, studies it like an Eridian sculpture or a new specimen under the microscope, sitting there at the beach. He laughs a little bit, because isn’t it ironic that he’s right back in that office? Isn’t it funny, really, that it should supposedly be for his own good, this time around?
“What if it turns out I don’t want to live?” he asks the cliffs and the foam and the joints of his personal sky, those imperfect mirrors where the large xenonite panes meet. He’s crying now, voice choked by the very idea of being adrift and alone again.
“How would I even... What if I go back there and I can’t do it?”
The beach rushes up to him, and he stretches out his legs deliberately, lets the water soak the canvas of his shoes and the cuffs of his pants. The makeshift tide comes and goes and comes and goes, the cycle clocked perfectly to the 1/244th Eridian second, forever reliable and steady while his thoughts unravel.
The beach refuses to give him an answer.
For three days, it's always there in the back of his mind, all the while he's dragging his feet over his floors and through his pebbly sand and making his lesson plans and getting to know his new rotation of students, every single one always so ready to soak up knowledge.
For three weeks, it sneaks up on him suddenly, ambushes him whenever he has to cancel a lesson because he's too tired and he can't walk in a straight line, whenever his nose bleeds and he finds another three bruises just because he dared lean his hip against the kitchen counter. Rocky's worried drone fills the air as he curls up beside him in bed, food looks unappealing, and sometimes his head hurts so much he has half a mind to tell them to shut off the entire illumination rig.
For three months, it follows him like his own shadow, floats in the air like the fog, intangible and unaddressed but always present, always just out of eyeshot. A frequency he can’t hear. Something in his bones, quite literally, his cursed stem cells and his dropping blood count. He invites the scientists to thrum in the auditorium just to feel the infrasound shiver through his bones, just to know them there. His bones, his friends, his options. All of them are limited.
They’re doing what they can, but listening to them spit-balling isn’t doing anything to fix him.
Rocky is more anxiety than mercury these days, but he never pushes it. Which is to say, he does, but not more than he pushes anything else, and that does mean something when it comes to Rocky. He's trying to be patient, but it’s only play pretend for Grace’s sake. Around everyone else, he’s unraveling, impatient and snappish and hot-headed and distracted.
He picks some of the coping mechanisms from his time on the Blip-A back up: Pacing in convoluted patterns, counting and measuring things, talking to himself, burying himself in information and raw data. Adrian starts bringing over their pebbles more often because keeping them around Rocky in this state wouldn’t do them any good. This isn’t going to last.
So, Grace makes his choice.
For three hours, he’s at the beach, takes off his socks and hikes Ilyukhina’s dress up, and stands in the water. He left the cane on the shore; it hurts to let his frame bear the brunt of gravity unsupported. The reliable tide, just cool enough to chill him a little, laps at his shins.
He closes his eyes and tries to forget about himself, the familiar ache in his joints and spine. Allows himself to imagine something else.
A different truth, a hypothetical, a thought exercise.
Maybe he’s someone who wants to stop feeling like a sickly rescue at an animal sanctuary. Someone who gets tired of pacing the square yardage of about half a soccer field. Who wants desperately to eat Chinese takeout instead of his own cloned tissue. Maybe someone who likes the idea of food that tastes like something other than at least it’s not scurvy! Maybe he wants to go out on a windy day and watch someone teach their kid how to fly a kite. Or to watch seagulls circle, pining for an abandoned fry.
Maybe he could even be someone who can hold a conversation that is about one thing and one thing only. Someone less volatile, less in his own head, less combative. He could be someone who wasn’t left alone with his books and his own thoughts for most of his formative years. Who heard the phrase I’m proud of you more times than he was told not now, Ryland. He could even be someone who’s never felt out of place. He could be someone who knows what day it is. Someone who isn’t so foggy-brained he can’t even parse the braille of an Eridian book. Ideally, he would be someone who isn’t afraid of elevators or induced comas.
If he was all of those things, he could be someone who doesn’t hate the thought of giving Earth another shot. Who asks for help and doesn’t feel like he’s giving up, saying you were right, admitting he’s weak.
In a world like that, Grace could be someone who needs Rocky to be at peace more than he needs that peace for himself.
It turns out, that last one is easy to imagine.
There's talk of sending a select few Eridian diplomats and scientists with him, both for his sake and theirs. He's told some volunteers have repeatedly voiced their interest during the past few thrums, and many others are burning with curiosity.
For a while, his ever-helpful, stress-addled gray matter uses all its creative processing power to dream up every possible worst-case scenario.
The pebbles don’t understand, except that a) he’s leaving, b) it’s for his health, and c) they soon won’t see each other again, and that’s enough to make them want to permanently move into the biodome. For the next few months, his house is never empty, always filled with little chirps and clattering sounds and broken things and everything else you get with Eridian children. It makes him want to laugh and break down crying with sheer affection and punch things and himself. (He only does two of those things.)
The smallest one, whom he calls Blip, is around to watch him startle awake from a nightmare, once. They perch on his chest, still a comforting weight at their age (though not for much longer) and want to know what’s wrong, why he isn’t sleeping the way he should be. Grace doesn’t manage to explain it very well, not to an Eridian who isn’t yet a toddler and doesn’t grasp the concept of nightmares—but it does open his eyes to his real worry. What the ambiguous dread haunting his sleep means.
He can’t let it happen.
They don't know what state Earth is in, what kinds of people wield power. What kinds of motivations might be at play. Human beings have evolved a myriad of wonderful, social attributes that help them survive and thrive. They have also been cruel to each other since the birth of their species. So, he puts his foot down, and says no. They can’t assume the Eridians would receive the same kind of warm welcome on Earth as he did here. No. They’re already taking enough risks as it is. He can’t let them do this, not for all the scientific curiosity and goodwill and hope in the world.
You'll have to excuse him for not trusting humanity any further than he could throw Eva Stratt.
The day they're meant to put him to sleep, Rocky changes his mind.
To be exact, he changes his mind twenty-eight times within the span of these five hours.
First, he realizes he can’t live without Grace while he’s listening to the doctors chitter their anxious preparedness. But then—then he watches the engineers rush between the research building and the space elevator, sees all their drive and optimism, and he remembers himself, who he is. An engineer, a mechanic, someone who looks at a problem and devises a solution. And then, he feels a void open up within him as he surveils the computer scientists at work. They’re none the wiser to his unbecoming; they review and retest and reconfigure the ship computer’s improved monitoring systems, and Rocky is standing there, silently drowning within a loss not yet endured.
Then, he wants to march into the sea, sink beyond the waves and not emerge until it’s all over, until they’ve sent their—his—savior back to the stars. He wants to hide from Grace’s final conscious moments on Erid so that he won’t do something stupid, like kick the doctors away and screech a tribal war-cry and tell them don’t touch him don’t you DARE fucking touch him I want to keep him I want to keep him he belongs to us he belongs to ME—
But of course, he isn’t going to actually do that.
No.
Because in the end, Grace is dying. And if Rocky has to crack himself open and take a sharp thing to his soft insides and rip out one or two or three of his five hearts to fix it, then that is what he’s going to do.
If he has to send a part of himself away forever, he will. He will do it if it’s to give Grace, who is so painfully young by every measure except his own, the chance at another Earth decade. Perhaps even two or three, if his willful body is kind to him. It’s an exchange, of sorts: Rocky will trade one of his hearts for a decade of his friend’s life. (Grace would laugh at him if he were to hear this. Rocky never gets this… lyrical about anything. But today’s occasion warrants it.)
Now, Grace is back aboard his ship for the first time in a decade. He’s sitting atop the bed of his sleep cubicle, his long legs dangling and his five-fingered hand tapping against the aluminum frame—and Rocky changes his mind once again.
Nobody should be asleep for so long without supervision, even less so a sick person, and have they all gone completely insane? What was he thinking? They can’t be doing this!
When Rocky stumbles into the dormitory, half out of his head the way he has been this entire time, Grace smiles, small and brittle and too knowing.
“Hey, Rock’. You change your mind yet?”
He has, unfortunately, never been immune to Grace’s teasing, so he puffs in indignation and thunks his carapace against his friend’s dangling leg. Grace puts his feet on top of him, and Rocky shakes him off.
“No,” Rocky chuffs, truculent. He’s trying to convince himself more than Grace. “Everything is ready. We made Armando less dumb and clumsy, and Mary counts as your sleep-observer. And you have mine and Adrian’s markings. Will keep you safe on your journey.”
Grace’s smile slips away, leaving him afraid and adrift.
Rocky climbs up to the bed. Pressed up close to his human’s side, he soaks up the shivers emanating from Grace’s body with the vibrations of his thrumming organ. Grace curls around him and says nothing. He just trembles in his too-thin, squeaky medical garb, and his breath hitches around unspilled tears. They stay this way, afraid and together, basking in each other until Adrian arrives with the doctors.
The scientists have determined that sedating him twenty-four hours before they induce the artificial-sleep will give his body and mind the best chances of withstanding the journey, and so this is what is to be done.
The condensation of his wet breath fogs up the breathing mask, and Rocky is—despite the doctors’ protests—stubbornly perched above him as they administer the sleeping drug through the line piercing his wrist. No, Rocky can’t take away the danger, the fear, or the grief. But this, the safety and comfort of knowing each other close, this is what he can give to his bonded friend in his last conscious moments above Erid.
Oh, he would give Grace everything. Even a life he doesn’t want.
“I will think of you always,” Rocky hums, and he is only aware of half the words he’s saying, so absorbed in Grace himself, his complex facial expressions, his physiological changes. “Will think of you every day until I die. And! And, I'll tell the pebbles all about your most embarrassing moments, like when you almost swallowed your tooth and then spit it at Dax and they were so scared and disgusted they ran away. And then they became your friend anyway. Will make sure everyone remembers the bravest stupidest smartest human on Erid.”
Grace doesn't smile at the joke, just blinks up at him, slow and tired.
“I’ll miss you, buddy, Rocky. More than anything. All of you. You’re, you’re my, uhm—I love you. I can’t… I don’t, Rock, I can't—”
His voice lifts, into a distressed, higher octave, and Rocky presses closer against him, humming a comforting buzz.
“Yes, you can. You're Grace. You're brave.”
“I wish, I... had more time…”
His eyes flutter close and his anxiously pounding heart finally begins to slow. Rocky almost changes his mind again.
“I love you, you stupid creature. My friend. My Grace.”
Grace falls asleep.
“You are going to live,” Rocky tells his sleeping body, distress and desperation piercing through the devastating silence of goodbye. “You’re going to fucking live, Grace. And we will hear each other again. I have to believe it.”
One of the younger doctors chirps, scandalized, at his vulgarity, but Rocky doesn’t give one single scrap.
(What if I don’t want to? Grace asked, brittle, after he’d reviewed the results of the doctors' latest round of tests. Biomarkers. The blood count never improved; every other indicator was as good as it would ever get.
Try, Rocky insisted, selfishly.)
Yes, Grace is going to live, he decides. His human will taste and touch and feel the bounties of Earth again. He will hear its sounds, perceive its ‘blue’ skies, the star-studded nights, see all these… impossible mammalian creatures again. He will, he will, he will.
Rocky spends the next few days sitting with Grace’s sleeping body, watching over it one last time. He changes his mind ten more times. He wails and steams and collapses in Adrian’s arms. He commits all of Grace to memory; not that he could ever forget. But still, it seems important to do once last review, to run one last inventory: Every last protruding bone, every layer of variably squishy tissue, every disgustingly wet contraction of his organs, the air flowing through his cavernous lungs, a movement steady like the tide.
The constant, reassuring beat of his human's singular heart. It kept him sane and anchored even at a time he thought his mind long lost. Erid will sound empty without it.
Rocky almost changes his mind again, but the truth, in the end, is the same as before. The universe at large, the looming void beyond their incompatible atmospheres, soon separating them—it would sound even emptier if Grace’s heart ceased beating entirely.
Thirty hours later, they send him sailing again, with all the gifts, love and gratitude the Hail Mary can possibly carry.
Rocky just hopes it will be enough. Hopes, hopes, hopes. That is all he is made of, all he ever knew how to fucking do, insufficient as it often was.
All he knows is to claw at hope with so much desperation, so much ferocity he cracks apart with the force of it. Grace knows this, because Grace has seen him for what he is, and he chose to embrace him in spite of it. Because of it. All the insufferable, greedy, selfish parts of him: Grace has accepted them and sacrificed his own wants for Rocky’s needs once more.
What greater declaration of devotion is there? What greater love?
Rocky goes home, having sent three of his hearts away, and he hopes.
He fucking hopes.