Chapter Text
“You know what we haven’t talked about?” Grace asks, staring up at a cluster of gauzy clouds. “Adrian.”
The one right above him, a little to the left, looks exactly like a sausage dog. He squints. Or maybe a horse.
“How’d you two meet?” he continues. He decides it’s a sausage dog and closes his eyes. “Did you have a meet cute? Spill pebbles over each other?”
Rocky’s spindly limbs click and tap. Grace knows what’s coming before it’s even said.
“How is meet cute, question?”
“It’s a… It’s a way to describe when the way you meet someone—your mate—is kind of stereotypical. So you accidentally spill coffee over them, or mistake their scent for someone else’s—you know, that sort of stuff. It’s mainly used in movies, but it happens in real life sometimes.”
Grace interlinks his fingers behind his head. His knuckles press into the grated platform of the Don’t Go Crazy Room. The metal is bitingly cold. “You have that on Erid, Rock?”
“Mm,” Rocky’s voice rolls, slow and halting with thought. “Is many popular Eridian stories about finding mate. Hatchlings always talk about it.”
Grace hums interestedly. Do Eridians have their own version of Cinderella?
“When Eridians are small, teachers tell story called First Resonance.” There’s a faintly wistful lilt to Rocky’s voice. Grace wonders if he’s homesick, then he wonders if all this time lazing about has turned him stupid; of course Rocky is homesick. “Is about two strangers trapped after tunnel collapse under ♫♪.”
Grace’s eye cracks open a sliver. He blindly reaches for the laptop, which is more of an accessory than anything else, these days. His Eridian studies have been slow going, but going well.
“What’s that last one again?”
“♫♪,” Rocky dutifully repeats, “means lots of rock fall. Block entrance exit. Stuck inside.”
Finger tapping idly against the ‘u’ key, Grace infers, “We call that a landslide. Or if it’s snow instead of rock, it’s called an avalanche.”
The week when Rocky discovered snow was hard to forget. Grace has never built so many virtual snowmen in his life. The only reason they crawled out of the Don’t Go Crazy Room at all was because Mary kicked them out, and sealed the hatch for good measure.
“Anyway,” he closes the translation program and sets the laptop to the side. “Story. Yes. Go. I want to hear the great Eridian love story.”
Overlapping the artificial breeze, Rocky’s pincers click apart. He’s probably tinkering with something again; Grace is too lazy to tip his head back and check.
“Not as good as Earth movies,” Rocky admits reluctantly, “Is simple. One Eridian call for help. Other Eridian answer. But cave walls distort sound, so both think other is very far away. They travel many cycles toward each other.”
Kinda like you and me, Grace thinks, and reprimandingly pushes his knuckles into the grating until his fingers feel like they’re squeezing through a netted fruit bag.
“Important part is harmony,” Rocky continues, “Two voice make good sound together. Vibrate same frequency. Stone carry noise farther than two voice not matched. Story say they know they are mates before near each other because whole cave sing with them.”
“Huh. That’s actually… pretty sweet.”
Rocky makes a sound like a departing steam train. “Is only story. Resonance not actually predict compatibility. But is comforting.”
“I bet,” Grace murmurs.
He gazes into the fake grey sky. It was blue just a moment ago, wasn’t it? He can’t remember.
“What happened with you and Adrian?” he asks, “Did you meet in that cave? Sing kumbuya together?”
“Mm… no understand word.”
Grace smothers a smile. “It’s like a religious song, don’t worry about it.”
“Not make song,” Rocky’s fiddling tapers off. There’s an unusual airiness tacked onto the end of his intonations—embarrasment, Grace realises, delighted. “Rocky drop tungsten sample on Adrian in front of many friends.”
Grace’s eyes pop wide open. “No way.”
“Way,” Rocky says, forlorn.
“That’s your meet cute?”
“Rocky apologise many many many times. Adrian scream at Rocky long time. Best day of Rocky life.”
Grace laughs, “Okay, Casanova,” and before Rocky can ask: “That’s someone who’s good at charming people.”
Fresco-like, the sky splits and drips into a deeper pigment, on the brink of a torrential storm. There’s no wind of course, but he can imagine it well enough.
Grace’s eyes slide shut. Wind nips at his cheeks, the tip of his nose. Or at least the memory of it does.
“Grace also Casanova, question?”
Grace does snort this time. “Grace not also Casanova. Statement.”
Xenonite scuffs against metal and Rocky’s spindly limbs edge into view. Clearly he’s been watching too many cat videos. He’s started sitting like one, tucked into a loaf. A weirdly angular, unfortunately endearing loaf.
“I was way too awkward to charm anyone,” Grace says. There’s a laugh in his voice but a weird half-lump in his throat. “Back home, they probably thought I was more than a little weird.”
You have no immediate family, he thinks, you don’t even have a dog.
The dark canvas of his eyelids is splashed with Stratt’s hair, long and pale and draped over her shoulder. All of his memories of life before rousing on Mary are like that, foggy around the edges, a shade away from monochrome. Sometimes it feels like they’re not even his.
He can’t be sure if Stratt’s dipping eyes, glancing over his defective scent gland, is something that actually happened. Most days, Grace decides he’s made it up. The alternative is too painful to live with.
“Rocky like weird,” Rocky protests. “Glad to meet Grace instead of other humans.” He drums against the xenonite ball; it sounds like a xylophone chiming. “Other humans stupid.”
Grace should probably argue. Maybe at least offer a token protest. But—yeah.
He reaches behind himself and lazily pats the ball. “Thanks, bud. I like your weird, too.”
Rocky makes a dubious rumble, otherwise known as [unsure/offended/skeptical(1)]. “Rocky not go that far.”
“Nope. You’re weird. We’re weirdos. Weirdos in space together, saving the universe one fishing trip at a time.”
[Unsure/offended/skeptical(2)] makes an appearance. Grace just raises his eyebrows over his slipping glasses and nods—or, like, as well as somebody can nod whilst lying down.
“You want to watch a movie?” he suggests on a whim, letting his arms and legs splay out over the edges of the platform. “We can finish watching uhhhh…”
Jeez, the days blur into each other. They’re a year and a half into the journey to Erid, which is great and all, except they ran out of useful things to do eight months ago. The time since has been spent giving Rocky a crash course in human culture—otherwise known as answering his many, many questions whilst rewatching old runs of Spongebob for days on end.
“You can pick,” Grace finally gives up. “I might take a nap.”
“Nooo,” Rocky’s valves flutter like a flute being puffed into. “Grace stay awake and answer questions. Want to know more about human courting.”
Grace closes his eyes and snores loudly.
“Gra-a-ace.”
“Can’t hear you, pal. I’m asleep.”
He snores again for emphasis. Rocky huffs and puffs like he’s trying to blow the house—ship?—down, tap-tap-tapping away in his fancy hamster ball.
“Will tell Grace about Eridian courting,” he offers and, at Grace’s lack of reaction, grumbles: “Will tell Grace more about how Rocky Adrian become mates.”
“Really?” Grace perks up. He gets a palm beneath himself and pushes, vertigo momentarily swarming his vision, “I’m all ears, lay it on me, Rock, come on.”
“Grace not all ears. Also annoying mouth.”
Despite his apparent vexation, Rocky creeps forward to sit closer to Grace’s side, slumping in a mimicry of human posture. Grace turns his face away to hide a smile—which he belatedly realises to be futile—and inches sideways a little himself, until his thigh grazes a xenonite panel. On the other side, separated by so little, one of Rocky’s arms twitches. His claws unfurl and clench.
A low, untranslatable croon spills into the negative space. Lightning cracks across the panel right above Grace. A shivery twitch starts in his nape and ekes down every rung of his spine, itchy. Winding around to his front, looping through the slades between his ribs, knotting behind his sternum, red and yellow and blue like the wires running through Mary, twisted into a bunch.
Grace rubs absently at it, opening his mouth—
And a lone, soft trill slips out.
“Something the matter?”
Stratt looked up from her tablet. The creases between her brows were only growing more pronounced as the months wore on. Grace couldn’t remember the last time he saw her smile.
“Just logistic troubles. JAXA’s applicants are all alphas despite my,” she pressed her lips together, “explicit wishes.”
“You don’t want an alpha on the crew?” Grace glanced over, surprised. “Aren’t you—I don’t know. Aren’t you cutting the selection pool too small?”
In all honesty, he still didn’t understand Stratt’s reluctance to have a woman on the Hail Mary. It wasn’t like the crew would spend the entire journey screwing—they’d be in comas. And when they woke he guessed it would be hard to get privacy. How would it even work?
Grace tried to imagine it and cringed, full body.
“The crew must be betas,” Stratt said. “Not alphas or omegas. A rut or heat or God forbid, a feral episode—no,” With a sharp swiping motion, the screen cut to black. “It’s too great a risk.”
Grace glanced away. Buried in his pockets, his fingers restlessly curled and uncurled.
“Even with suppressants?”
She looked at him. In hindsight, it was arrogant of him to believe she didn’t know. Stratt knew everything. You couldn’t even pick your nose without her catching wind of it.
“They would run out eventually,” she shook her head. “And the consequences would be…”
She never finished. She didn't need to.
“Grace worry worry worry,” Rocky says anxiously, mirroring Grace’s erratic pacing on the other side of his habitat. “Why, question? Not understand. Grace must tell. Grace… scaring.”
All along he’s known the supply aboard the ship would run dry and leave him in a pickle, but he figured he’d cross that bridge when he got to it, or slap a little duct tape on it and call it a day, or—or just something. Neither Mary nor Armando even alerted him to the imminent disaster, so he doesn’t know what he’s got to work with, if he has enough suppressants left to reverse engineer a solution, artificially make more—but no, the lab isn’t operational and the lab won’t be operational because if they drag out the journey to Erid any longer, Grace will be a pile of bones long before they arrive, and he realises all of this in one slew as he’s frantically rummaging around in Mary’s underbelly, hunting for a needle to stick himself with.
“Armando!” he shouts, yanking himself out of the draw, “Armando, get in here! Mary!”
“Is there a problem, Dr. Grace?”
“Yes! Yes there’s a problem!”
“What?” Rocky says loudly, “What problem, question? Grace tell Rocky what problem!”
A big fudging problem, that’s what. If he’s truly out of suppressants, blockers, everything, then things are about to get very, very bad very, very fast.
“Armando! Armando, come here, give me—give me—stick me! Blood test, scan me, do—just come on, I need—”
“Cardiovascular elevation detected,” Mary’s calm voice says, “Excessive perspiration, emotional instability: detected. Initiating protocol: Screw the Head on the Chicken. Please sit down, Dr. Grace.”
Against his will, Grace crashes to the floor hard enough to jar his pelvis, and the involuntarily pained, punched noise that scrapes from his lungs alerts him to the shallow way he’s breathing, the thick underwater ringing between his ears, the clamminess of his palms. And he is excessively perspirating—when did that happen? When did any of this happen? Why is his brain flaking apart like—like freaking Mary all those months ago? Why is he losing it?
Stop losing it, he tells himself stupidly. As expected, nothing happens.
As unflappable as ever, Mary directs him to put his head between his knees. Grace’s body complies automatically. If anything, hearing his own deflating-balloon-breathing, edged with that high-pitched helium whine, amplifies the awfulness, not alleviates it. That’s without mentioning his heart’s violent attempt to rip out of his chest. It gives another stretchy shudder and Grace slams his mouth shut, lest it squirm into his throat and leap out that way. Which is a real concern at the moment! Everything is a real concern at the moment!
He’s dying. He’s going to die.
It’s not irrational or hyperbolic; that’s what’s going to happen because he went against medical advice and thought he knew best, and to be fair, it was all fine for decades. Three of them! He took triple the recommended dose and skipped out on everything unpleasant he wanted to skip out on with basically no side-effects! Apart from the, like. The irreparable damage to his scent glands that ended every relationship he attempted, and the frequent vomiting spells, and those times his cephalic and basilic veins turned black and it turned out he had a bad case of atraxine poisoning—but!
Grace would’ve been just dandy living out his life on Earth. Really. The problem is he’s not on Earth and he’s about to go cold turkey on a drug he’s been irresponsibly taking non stop for three quarters of his life. And it’s not a matter of sweating it out. Oh no.
He turns his face into his knee, squeezing his eyes shut.
With no other—no alpha, or no other omega, the withdrawal will kill him. It will. He’s going to die up here, in another solar system, as nothing more than a feral animal.
And Rocky has a front row seat to the show.
An avalanche of despair has Grace crumpling further forward, pressing himself into as small a shape as he can manage. Mary’s voice drains away—everything drains away. Hot vomit builds in his throat, and he bites the fabric of his pants to keep it in, palms pressing over his ears.
“Dr. Lokken received your blood results today.”
Grace winced before he could help it. Stratt’s eagle eyes impassively tracked the movement, then returned to the paper she was holding.
“It is a… concerning read, Dr. Grace,” she said mildly. “I would be interested in your thoughts.”
Jeez-louise. Grace slid down in his chair, foot hooking restlessly around his desk. He didn’t need to see a sheet of paper; he knew he was every medical doctor’s sleep paralysis demon.
Withholding a sigh, he leant forward and took the paper Stratt was offering. A glance revealed the exact garble of medical jargon he expected: chronic endocrine dysfunction, apocrine gland atrophy, chronically low oxytocin, blah, blah, blah.
“My thoughts are Dr. Lokken should invest in a Canva subscription, switch up this whole, uhhh,” he gestured to the paper, “Whatever this is. It’s just so boring. So unoriginal.”
“Dr. Grace.”
Grace grabbed the open pack of Twizzlers in his top draw and stuck one in his mouth. “Mm?”
For a moment, Stratt only stared at him. He wondered what she was thinking. He was always wondering what she was thinking, even though he had known her for a year.
“Actually,” she said finally, “I was specifically referring to the results for the coma resistance gene. It appears you have it. Congratulations.”
“Wh—oh,” Grace narrowly avoided swallowing too soon. “That’s—yeah, that’s cool. Pretty, uh. Pretty neat.” His mom used to say he was one in a million. Guess she was somewhat right. “You’re not going to send me up there now, are you?”
As he looked up, he was smiling. Stratt wasn’t. Her eyes were leveled on his fingers, and Grace realised at some point they had drifted to his neck, began to roughly scratch his scent gland.
Flustered, he tore them away. But the itch remained, swollen with a foreign, second pulse.
The set of her mouth unreadable, Stratt made a dismissive noise and turned on her heel. “Dr. Shapiro is in room three of the east wing. If you are not busy, your presence could be useful.”
The door had already clicked soundly shut by the time Grace managed to answer, “Right.”
“Grace tell Rocky what wrong now, statement,” Rocky demands.
Grace sniffles wetly—a disgusting noise, even to him—and tips his head back to rest against the wall. The dome of impending doom has retreated an inch, made enough space for Rocky to barge his way in, and you can bet your biscuit he jumped at the opportunity. Literally. He’s in the xenonite ball, and that’s likely the only thing holding him back from clambering onto Grace’s chest and shaking his head clean off his shoulders.
“You remember… oh, jeez,” Grace sighs, scrubbing at his cheek. “Can it wait until tomorrow, Rock? I want—I just want to go to bed, forget about all of this.”
At his request, Mary dimmed the lights as low as they’ll go, but his temple is still throbbing. It’s a constant, nauseating ache. And his entire face stings from crying his eyes out. Overall, you could say Grace is having a pretty bad day. He doesn’t want to exacerbate it by giving his alien pal a crash course in the complications of secondary sexes.
“No, not wait until tomorrow,” Rocky insists, “Grace tell Rocky everything. Must tell. I can fix!”
The likelihood of that being true is laughably low. Human and Eridian biology exists at two drastically different ends of the spectrum, let alone with the omega gene stacked on top.
Grace’s lungs hitch around a breath and air floods out of him, unbound. He leans his hot temple against the cool outer surface of Rocky’s ball. It used to be too warm to safely touch, but boredom is one hell of a fuel for innovation.
He wishes there didn’t need to be a wall at all. He wishes they could touch without killing each other. He wishes he rationed out the breakfast burritos instead of eating them in the first two months. Oh God, he misses proper, solid, greasy food. Burgers too tall to cram into his mouth, sickeningly cheesy pasta, even—even salad. He misses fresh salad so, so bad.
Stomach gurgling, Grace swallows a mouthful of saliva and whacks his head once against the xenonite.
“Okay,” he relinquishes. “Okay, fine. I’ll tell you.”
“Humans,” Grace starts, punctuating his very bad stick figure with a sad face. “Are classified by two things: primary sex and secondary sex. The primary sex is what you’re born as, so male or female, though there are some people—”
No, no, wait. He’s not standing here for five hours trying to explain the incredible complexity of human gender expression and societal norms to a hermaphrodite. That’s a migraine waiting to happen.
“You know all about that anyway,” he glosses over, “I guess what I didn’t go into much detail with is, uhh, secondary sexes. Alpha, beta, and omega. Following?”
“No,” Rocky says, “Am sitting.”
Grace shoots him a deadpan look. He returns to the whiteboard and draws three bubbles, then connects ‘omega’ to his stick figure. “You’re not… born with your secondary sex. Or you are, but it’s like—it’s dormant until you hit puberty. You go through a kind of metamorphosis. It can be… really painful, more so for alphas and omegas than betas.”
“Was painful for Grace?” Rocky tilts his carapace, “Ques-tion?”
Idly, Grace spins the pen between his fingers. “Yep. It was—yep. Pretty bad. But anyway, once you present, your paravomeral glands develop to help you identify pheromones. You know pheromones?”
Rocky’s valves expand and compress. “Grace explain before: human smell important. Same as light to make shape colour, question?”
“Very good!” Grace claps. He then realises Rocky isn’t a sixth grader and awkwardly transfers a hand to his nape instead, rubbing. “Sorry, uh, yeah. Yes. Eridians primarily use sound, right? But humans have five senses: sight, smell, taste, touch, and hearing, so the input load is balanced. Though once you present, smell, like, shoots way up on that list. Your brain starts autonomically perceiving a whole new layer of information—things like illness, emotional state, familiarity. Still following?”
“Hm,” Rocky draws out, crystal gun pointing at Grace’s sloppy attempt at a flowchart. “No, do puppet show.”
“What?” Grace stops and stares. “I’m not doing a puppet show. How would I even make a puppet show out of that? You do puppet show.”
With a grumble, Rocky settles down. “Grace no fun. Is party pooper.”
“Where did you even—you know what, I don’t care,” Grace resolutely turns back to the board, “Chemosignals. They’re tiny chemical markers produced through the paravomeral glands. Very, very important to humans. On Erid, you guys have—thrums? This is kinda the human equivalent. We call them packs.”
After a moment of consideration, he deigns not to mention his lack of personal experience in the subject.
“A pack is built on compatible scents and—honestly, a whole bunch of stuff. It’s complicated,” Grace waves dismissively, “When I left Earth, there was a lot of speculation alpha/omega presentation would eventually die out because we’d evolved past the need to hunt and gather and dance around fire, all that jazz. And human evolution works really, really slow, right? It took eight million years for use to evolve from apes. So…” he pauses. “What was I talking ab—oh! Yes, so. What I was trying to say is all these characteristics caused by secondary sex presentation, as modern medicine evolved, they figured out a way to…”
Grace trails off. He stares vacantly through Rocky and tries to parse a tactful phrasing of this. “Supress. These instincts.”
Before astrophage started nibbling on the sun and threw the world into a global crisis, you couldn’t switch on the news without seeing some protest or other over the immorality of—what was it again? Going against nature’s wishes? Something sanctimonious like that. From what he remembers, which admittedly isn’t much, there was a radical movement gaining traction, claiming artificial blockers were the devil’s work. Petitioning to have them outlawed, for people to live as ‘God intended’.
There’s a reason Grace didn’t pay much attention to it.
“Supress…” Rocky wonders aloud. His tone is slow, which usually means he’s thinking hard behind that poker face of his. “Why suppress senses, question? Need for human survival.”
Grace pinches the inside of his cheek between his teeth. He doesn’t really know how to answer. How to quantify the first split in his life, before presenting and after. The five days he spent locked in his body as it twisted itself inside out, screaming for nobody to hear. That being an omega feels like being a balloon pumped with unbearably hot air, and always this air is trying to escape, pressing up against the raw, rough seams of his person.
Most of all, what he struggles to articulate is the wrongness of it. Like one day, a passenger was shoved into his brain and he can’t evict it, so now he is constantly, harrowingly aware he is coinhabiting a space that should be only his. All he wanted—and still wants—is it gone.
The suppressants granted him that wish. And now they’re gone, too.
“Many reasons,” Grace settles on. “Humans are weird.”
“Humans so weird,” Rocky agrees. “More emotional than Eridians.”
Grace’s laugh is so sudden it jars him. These mood swings are giving him whiplash. “Hang on, didn’t I catch you crying to The Notebook the other day?”
Rocky’s whole body twitches, central valve fluttering drastically. In other words, he’s blushing up a storm. “Not cry, statement. Rocky not have eye holes. Cannot cry. Grace lying liar who lies.”
“No, no, you were definitely weeping a little, Rock,” Grace sinks into a crouch so they can be face to carapace. “It’s okay, I won’t tell anyone. Except maybe Adrian.”
“Adrian not believe you,” Rocky insists, puffing up. “Adrian know Rocky is bi-g strong—”
“Aha!” Grace points, “I heard that! Now who’s the lying liar!”
“Grace hear nothing. Grace hear things,” Rocky blusters, “Had dust in ♪♫, that’s why leak like Grace. Not because movie. Dumb boring movie not sad at all.
Grace tilts his head. He realises he’s smiling, that’s why his cheek aches. “Statement?”
“Statement,” Rocky says firmly. “Statement statement statement.”
“Wow,” Grace says. "That's a lot of statements."
A strange sound, like a purr, rumbles through the barrier. He blinks.
“Rock?” Grace says—except he doesn’t. What trips out is a rusty replication of that noise, one hundred percent omega.
Not again, he thinks, distantly. Please not again.
He has never told Rocky this, but there are days he wakes and he’s not sure if he’s still dreaming, still in a coma, still on a one way trip to Tau Ceti. Days where he is afraid to close his eyes and terrified to let this slip through his fingers. The way he misses his students is a gaping crater in his chest that will never go away, but Grace is beginning to think, maybe—
When he realised he had to turn back, leave Earth and any chance at life behind, there was a significant part of him that loosened in relief. Between saving himself and saving Rocky, there was hardly a choice to be made. At least this way it was out of his hands. At least he could pretend it wasn't what he wanted all along.
You will be remembered as a hero. Somebody said that to him, Grace thinks. But he never wanted to be a hero. He never wanted to be martyred. He just wanted to teach his kids.
It's very simple: what he has always wanted is to live.
He jerks back, alarmed, tearing his palms away from where they’d gravitated to press against the barrier. But the noise doesn’t stop, the vibrations tingling in him like sand static, tiny pinpricks popping and exploding in his peripherals. Dizzy; he's so dizzy. He doesn't know—what is this? Is Mary—what's wrong with Mary? Something has to be wrong, the fuel, the acceleration rate—something to make it feel like he's drowning in molasses.
Against his will, he’s slumping like a cut rope, or at least he thinks he is—is he? He doesn’t—oh, God, he doesn’t know. It’s reaching for him with large, cupped palms, and he cannot move, and he's tired. He's had enough, enough, enough—
[nails tearing into soil, cold cheek shoved into dirt, red mouth open wide, trying to swallow proof of his own existence, or prove his own existence to himself, to let the Earth sit in his stomach and grow anew, someplace they won’t be able to tear from him]
[violet sky—darker, periwinkle squeezing into ice, striped arc in the sky bleeding pale, opaque, blurring; grass dead and yellow, heart dead and brown, falling through him now, sinking into the soil]
[violet is only one letter away from violent. Do you ever think about that?]
“Grace?”
“F-Fine,” he gags, “Fine, I’m fine, I’m—”
With a ragged heave, his voice wavers and crackles and shatters over the floor. From his exposed epicentre, deep red bubbles forth, and out leaks a plaintive whine, the likes he hasn’t made since he was a kid.
Higher, Rocky’s vocal chords shake around a chitter, “Grace!”
What’s wrong?! he demands, sticky with panic, repeating it over and over again.
Grace buries his head in his hands, and he thinks everything. Everything is so, so wrong.
“It’s going to be a lot more of that,” he tells Rocky, exhausted. “I’m going… I’m going to be volatile and emotional; you can’t trust anything I say anymore, Rock. Because—”
Grace swallows. His throat constricts.
“Because I’m going to forget everything. I’m going to forget you.”
Long term suppression use is so dangerous. He knew the consequences and judged them acceptable. A necessary evil. Cross that bridge when he gets to it.
Well, he’s at the bridge now. And he’s staring into a fifty foot drop.
“I’ll—I’ll start getting confused. I’ll find it difficult to speak. And then…”
God, he doesn’t want to think about this. He just wants to wake up.
“I won’t be the Grace you know,” he finishes softly.
“Grace always be my Grace,” Rocky warbles, nudging harder against the xenonite ball. It’s resting between Grace’s legs, his knees. As close as they can get to each other. “Rocky will remind. Will fix.”
It hurts to swallow. It hurts even more between his eyes, a thousand teary needle spikes Grace tries fruitlessly to squeeze away.
“Okay,” he whispers. “We’ll figure it out, huh? Together?”
“Together,” Rocky promises, carapace straining forward to match the press of Grace’s forehead.
Neither of them comment on the lie.
The facts:
He’s going to go through a horrific phenomenal crash. He has no pack, no mate, no other human within ten lightyears, let alone one. Nesting will do very little. He cannot use Yao and Ilyukhina’s things, their scents, as a substitute, because his olfactory nerve is deep fried and his scent gland has atrophied. Armando can do nothing for him beyond a liberal painkiller dosage every few hours—Grace has checked.
He can’t take the coma option. He can’t—can’t do that to Rocky. Make him sit there and watch Grace wither away, just as he did his crew.
Grace picks a hangnail with his teeth. He turns his head. He finds Rocky, his stiff, slumbering form, cozied as close to the barrier as possible.
His fingers press against the loose curl of Rocky’s claws. They splay out over the xenonite, a dying five point star.
He thinks: I want you to save me, too.
He carefully doesn’t think about how many nights like these he has left.