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Grace is intoxicated when he goes through his belongings. Intoxicated might be putting it mildly. He's halfway to blackout drunk. Can anyone blame him? He's just woken up in deep space, surrounded by dead bodies and with no hope of ever going home again. Of course he's going to tear through the vodka.
Being as drunk as he is makes it easier to stomach going through everyone's personal belongings. There might be something useful there. Useful for what, he's still not entirely sure. But it's not like he has anything else to do around here. Taking inventory is a good way to pass the time. The vodka makes it tolerable.
His first pass through the storage cubes, he'd given everything a brief glance, ruffled long enough to find clothing, and called it a day. Night. Whatever it was on the ship. He's methodical now, removing things one by one and sorting them. There's clothing, pictures of loved ones, little trinkets that almost certainly meant more to his dead crewmates than Grace could possibly comprehend. He wishes they were here to explain. He wishes he weren't alone.
Grace takes another hefty swig of the vodka before finally moving on to his belongings. He'd saved them for last. Just looking at it makes him sick, but it needs to be done. Another sip of vodka. Just to be safe.
He's already poked around in here to get his clothing, but he's more careful now. T-shirts are piled separately from socks, his hoodie is set aside from the cardigan, his shoes and spare glasses go in corners of their own. He expects to find more pictures, some evidence of family or friends like he found in the other boxes, but all he discovers is the singular polaroid of himself. Maybe he was conceited.
There's a few toys, little balls and fidget spinners he refuses to believe he wanted packed for himself over any real memories. A fox keychain to go along with the fox cardigan. He must have been really into foxes. Once again, he questions his past self's sanity for choosing keychains and science pun t-shirts over anything that could jog his memory.
At the very bottom, Grace finds a pair of electric candles wrapped in some sort of shawl. They're long candlesticks, an antiquated design that feels more like something he'd find in his grandmother's house. Are these his grandmother's? No, Grace is pretty sure his grandmother didn't own electric candlesticks. He's not sure why anyone would.
Finally, Grace pulls a small rock out of the bag. He turns it over in his hand a few times, searching for an inscription or anything that might tell him why he used valuable storage space to bring a rock to space. Did it fall into his things by accident? He hopes not. The thought of things accidentally making it on an interstellar ship doesn't inspire a lot of confidence in the ship itself.
Grace tosses the rock back into the storage cube and sighs. It's not like he expected to go through his things and suddenly regain all his memories, but he'd hoped it would help. At least, he figured he'd have more personal items, pictures of whoever was mourning him back home. Instead he has too many t-shirts, electric candles, and a pet rock.
Grace puts the vodka straw back in his mouth. That's enough chores for today. Back to drinking now.
***
Slowly, Grace starts to piece himself together again. There's a lot missing. There's more missing than what he has. But anything is better than the empty shell he'd woken up as. He remembers teaching, the love he had for his kids, how scared they were as he explained the Petrova line to them, getting whisked away to make humanity's first contact with the space dots, begging for a chance to keep working on the project. Grace has a feeling that last part was unusual for him, that he was far more often the kind to run away and hide when things got tough.
A feeling is what he has about most things. Ask him about his hobbies, his friends, his family, anything other than work and Grace can't offer much. Just guesses he's pieced together. He had a family once, parents that loved him until their dying day. He knows that as innately as he knows how to breathe and walk. He can't remember a thing about them, but he's sure he was loved. He just feels it. The same way he knows he didn't have very many friends before being recruited into the project and that if he can't remember any hobbies, it's probably because he didn't do much more than wake up, go to work, and go home.
Loser? he scrawls onto his whiteboard. The question mark feels like he's being a little too kind to himself, but Grace leaves it on anyway. He's drifting through space, alone and with hardly a clue who he is. He can afford to be a little nice to himself.
Grace leans back and rereads the half formed thoughts and notes he's scribbled on the whiteboard. Sometimes, he can force a new memory to surface if he jostles thoughts around long enough in his head. Mostly, it just leaves him with a headache and an aching loneliness in his chest. Still. Not much else to do these days.
He tears open a bag of dehydrated apple slices as he stares. He'd been hoping to remember if he has any friends, but a flash of nostalgia runs through him at the first taste of apple.
There aren't any clear images in his head, none of the violent flashbacks that leave him feeling uneasy, but grateful for a clearer picture. No. All Grace has now is a fond memory of apples dipped in honey, the crisp sweetness and cool fall air. Maybe apples and honey is just a snack he really liked, but he has a feeling there's more to it than that. Grace can feel that there's more to it, just out of reach.
He reaches, desperately, into the corners of his mind, shoving apples in his mouth and closing his eyes, keeping them half chewed on his tongue, focusing on the taste, hoping he can trick his brain into giving him more. But no. All he has is a half formed memory of his younger self making a sticky mess. Everything around him is a helpless blur.
Grace sighs and uncaps the marker again. At the bottom of the list, he writes, apples and honey?. It's not much, but nothing is these days.
***
He's young. He doesn't know how young, but he thinks he might be in preschool. He's on a beach, though the sky is gray and there's a cold breeze whipping through. Even the surfers aren't around today.
He's in bright yellow rainboots and a windbreaker that absolutely dwarfs him. His grandma said he'd grow into it. He doesn't mind. He likes disappearing in it and feeling small.
Someone is holding his hand. A faceless figure that he knows is his mother. On his other side, an equally indecipherable man is kneeling at his level and tearing chunks off a piece of bread. This is his father, he knows. A small piece of bread gets put in his palm.
"You take this and you throw it in the water," his father explains. "It's like taking all the mistakes you made this year and letting go. You just let them drift off into the sea and start fresh. Isn't that nice? To be able to try again?"
Grace wakes with a start. Armando whirrs into motion above him, but Grace waves him off and makes a hurried escape out of the dormitory. He doesn't know what that was. A memory, clearly, but it only leaves him with more questions. It's the youngest memory he's gotten so far. The first hints of his childhood. He wishes it had been more illuminating. Or, at the very least, that he could remember what his parents looked like.
Throwing bread in the ocean? Grace paces near the lab, as if restless motion might make things fall into place. Why would they be doing that? It couldn't be good for the fish. Did his parents have some sort of weird hatred for ocean life? No, it was clearly about something bigger than just throwing bread in the ocean. Maybe they were new wave hippies. Had Grace been raised by new age hippies? He can't imagine how someone goes from a new age household to becoming an astronaut, but maybe that's just prejudiced thinking.
His pacing leads him to the simulation room. The Don't Go Crazy Room, as he's taken to calling it. It's hard to tell if it's working or not. Grace doesn't think he's going crazy, he thinks he just woke up crazy already.
He sets it up to play images of a beach. There's no cool breeze here, no bread crumbs to throw at the screen, but if he closes his eyes, he can almost pretend. He stares at the panels around him and plays the dream over and over again in his head. He barely moves as he does, just keeps his knees tucked against him as his gaze straight ahead. Maybe he can trick his brain into thinking he's still dreaming and show him more of what he's missing. It doesn't work often, but what does he have to lose?
Grace stares and stares and stares until he's almost convinced himself it's real. He swears he feels the wind in his hair, smells salt on the breeze, feels the waves coming up to splash around his shoes. For a moment, it's like he's home. Not stuck in whatever hell this is.
He hears someone approaching by his side, even if it makes no sense. Grace turns to look and in the distance, he sees someone he thinks might be his father walking to him. He wants to call out to him, maybe stand and run to close the distance between them. So many questions and missing pieces could be answered by this, he just knows it. But he's afraid to even breathe, afraid of ending what must be a hallucination.
In the end, the ship starts blaring about engine cut off and Grace has bigger things to worry about. He scrambles up to the cockpit and the moment is forgotten.
***
He's not alone anymore. Grace doesn't let himself appreciate that as much as he should, because thinking about having Rocky around for company leads him down the path of thinking about saying goodbye and Grace doesn't want to think about saying goodbye. It's the same fear of endings that stopped him from so many beginnings when he was back on Earth. He still has only a blurry picture of who he was outside of Project Hail Mary, but one thing Grace is sure of is he was never very good at opening up to people.
Somehow, Rocky wiggles his way in regardless. It would have been inevitable, seeing as they're the only two intelligent life forms around for who knows how many trillions of miles, but it helps that Rocky is genuinely charming to be around. He's smarter than even Grace, funny despite the clunky translations, relentlessly optimistic after the years of solitude. Grace can't see how anyone could be around Rocky without getting attached.
The long hours explaining Earth culture to him as they head to Tau Ceti e are some of the happiest days of Grace's life. Sure, he doesn't remember much of it, but he has a feeling Rocky would top the list regardless. The planet is getting ever closer and soon, Grace knows they'll get back to big science. For now, he just enjoys giving Rocky a virtual tour of Earth and hearing stories about Erid in return.
Rocky's just finished telling Grace about some of the holidays celebrated in his part of Erid. He'd even shared about one that celebrated a folkloric figure who had defended an ancient village from predators by confusing them with some distinctly unEridian behavior. In their honor, the mountain Eridians of Rocky's hometown got together every thirty-six Eridian years and spent several sleep cycles breaking social norms. Including, he had admitted reluctantly, eating in front of others.
"You'd hate Earth holidays, pal. They basically all center around eating. Except for sometimes when not eating is the point," Grace says. "And there's plenty of holidays about engaging in taboo behavior. I grew up with one that was all about dressing up in costumes, putting on funny skits, and drinking. Lots of drinking. Way more than you typically would, because getting lost in it was sort of the point."
"Human food obsession is disgust," Rocky says. Even the robot voice Grace has given him sounds appalled. "But interesting. What holiday name, question? Show on screen!"
"The holiday's called, um, it's called..." Grace frowns. He can't remember. With actual work to do, he's worried less about regaining his memories. The relevant things still come back and occasionally, like he'd done now, he'll talk without thinking and say things he doesn't fully understand. He grasps at his words for a moment, trying to coax out anything else, but he can't remember. Halloween, maybe? "I think it's Halloween. Definitely lots of drinking on Halloween after a certain age. I'll show you."
Grace finds several clips of trick or treating, children in costumes, college parties, and even shows him the Halloween scene from ET for fun. Rocky is equal parts disgusted by the eating and amused by the costumes. Grace lets the rest of ET play and tries not to dwell on how wrong the clips felt. Whatever holiday he'd been thinking of, it definitely wasn't Halloween.
Whatever it was, Grace can't remember. Maybe it'll come back to him, maybe it won't. Doesn't matter much either way. He's never going back to Earth to celebrate any of these holidays again. Grace wraps an arm around Rocky's ball and settles in closer to him to watch the movie. The aching emptiness of his memories is easier to ignore in Rocky's company.
***
Rocky is dying. Maybe he's already dead. Grace doesn't know. It's hard to tell. Grace wishes he knew more about Eridian biology. He hates himself for wasting so much time with his silly movies and Earthscapes when he should have been learning about Rocky. Learning about his body and health and how to keep him safe when terrible things happened.
Adrian had been a disaster. Sure, they'd gotten their sample and Grace might now be in possession of a solution to save both their planets. But everything leading up to it? Grace can't close his eyes without reliving every horrible second.
He doesn't know what they could have done to avoid it. That part scares him the most. That they could do everything right and still end up in disaster. It makes him want to curl up under his blanket and just wait for their orbit around Adrian to degrade enough that they both go crashing to certain death.
But he can't. Grace knows he can't. Rocky might still be alive and when he wakes up, Grace plans on getting him back to Erid safe and sound and with a solution in hand. So despite the pain he's in - shockingly, being hit by large pieces of the ship flying loose and burning half his body with superheated ammonia aren't the sort of injuries you can just sleep off in a day or two - Grace gets to work.
He solves what he can, takes meticulous notes of what he needs Rocky's help to figure out. Grace only manages to work in short bursts before the pain and exhaustion inevitably sends him back to his careful watch over Rocky. He's done everything he can think of. There's nothing left but to wait.
Grace leans his back against where Rocky lays and pretends he can feel his warmth. He doesn't know what he'll do if Rocky doesn't wake up. He feels useless. He hates it.
Did he ever pray? Grace tosses the thought around for a moment before deciding that no, he doesn't think he did. Did his parents pray? Harder to say. The only new thing he's managed to remember from his childhood is a dog named Kugel. Not exactly helpful.
Grace comes to the conclusion that they did. He can't remember much - what else is new? - but if he strains, he can almost remember chants and melodies, things in a language he doesn't understand. Were they immigrants? No. Grace is sure they spoke English around the house. This is how it always goes. He'll have the slightest recollection and end up with a handful of new questions. It used to bother him more. Now, Grace is too worried about Rocky to concern himself too much with his memories on Earth.
He shifts to be closer to Rocky. Gently, so not to hurt himself any further. It's hard to get comfortable with a body full of chemical burns and a few cracked ribs. He'd be better off just staying down in the dormitory, where the surfaces are at least soft. That would mean being away from Rocky, though. He'd take a million more ammonia burns before being away from Rocky.
Grace keeps a hand pressed to the xenonite panels, wishing Rocky would wake up and reach out to him again. He'd give anything to hear Rocky asking to fist his bump again. Grace's mind wanders back to his parents. Would they have prayed for Rocky's health now? Probably. Grace wishes they were still alive. They'd died before he even left Earth. That's among the things he just knows, though he can't recall any details. He doesn't wish the pain of watching a son go off to die on anyone, but it would have been nice to know there was someone praying for him on Earth. Even if Grace doesn't believe in any of that. Not really.
He's tried everything, though. It can't hurt to add this one last thing, can it?
Grace doesn't know how to start. Is he supposed to get on his knees and steeple his hands? Is there some secret opening phrase he should be saying so God listens? The few memories he has are in a language he doesn't understand. That's probably relevant, right? Will it still work if he has nothing but English at his disposal? He doesn't really think God is going to swoop in to save them. He doesn't know why he's so worried about logistics.
There's a melody scratching at his mind. He can't remember any words to it, but he decides not to care. He hums as best he can to the tune in his head, mumbling gibberish to fill the silence. Rocky doesn't stir, of course. He just lays there, maybe alive and maybe dead. But Grace can feel his soul steadying. His hands stop shaking, his heart doesn't stutter and skip. He's felt so alone with Rocky asleep, like when he'd first woken, but now, it's almost like he can feel something grounding him back to Earth. An ancient string between himself and his humanity.
He doesn't remember the words, even after running through the melody over and over until his throat is sore. A name comes to mind. Debbie Friedman. He knows, on instinct, that it's not his mother. Maybe a relative? Some preacher from his childhood? He'll try to look it up later. For now, he doesn't want to leave Rocky's side. He stays, humming and singing nonsense to him until he drifts off to sleep.
***
He's in San Francisco. It's his first time here in a couple of years, since he'd been forcibly moved into Stratt's Vat for the project. The skyline makes him giddy. It makes him sick. It fills him with every sort of complicated human emotion he's spent his entire adulthood running away from. He's half tempted to turn right around and take a jet right back to the Vat.
Of course, those choices aren't entirely up to him anymore. Stratt is at his side to remind him of that. She has her tablet in one hand, phone in the other. Probably replying to no less than five world leaders at the same time. That's become increasingly common the closer they get to launch. She doesn't look at him when she speaks. Grace has come to know her well enough to recognize that this is a carefully rehearsed casualness.
"We have a few hours before the drive to Palo Alto. If you would like to take the chance to explore," she says.
Grace looks her way knowingly. "Weird how that always happens, huh?"
Grace might not always be the most perceptive, but it's not difficult to piece together how Stratt always seems to find these convenient little outings for them. A training session with Roscosmos on Ilyukhina's birthday weekend. An in-person meeting with CNSA on Yao's anniversary with his wife. A media day that just so happened to be in a studio right next to DuBois' parents. A demonstration at Stanford on Grace's parents' yahrzeit. It's not exactly rocket science, is it?
She might have earned herself a reputation for being heartless, but Grace knows her well enough to understand it's a uniform she puts on to save the world.
She doesn't even acknowledge his comment. "You can take the car, if you need. The driver has clear instructions to bring you back on time."
"And you?" he asks.
Stratt barely shrugs. "I have an endless backlog of calls to make. I can make them from here."
Grace looks around the runway where they've just touched down. Sure, there's a few offices, but it seems like a miserable place to wait. Before he can think better of it, he offers, "You can come with me? If you want. No, uh, no pressure or anything. It's not like I need you to come with me, I'm fine on my own, it's just, I figured, maybe you'd want the company. But-"
"Dr. Grace," she interrupts. Which thank gosh for that, there was probably a whole lot more he could have humiliated himself. "If you would like my company, I suppose I could go with you."
"Oh. Good. Well. Let's go, I guess."
It's not too long of a drive to the cemetery, but it feels eternal. She makes her calls and Grace just stares out the window. She would probably talk to him if he wanted, but he doesn't know what to say. This day is hard for him. He would have probably ignored it if left to his own devices. It's what he usually did.
Maybe he should have done the same this year. Would his parents be offended that he's only visiting because the world is ending and his benevolent dictator boss dragged him here? It doesn't matter, Grace doesn't really believe they're watching over him right now, but the thought looms as the car pulls to a stop at the cemetery entrance.
It takes every ounce of what little bravery he has to step out of the car. He refuses to cry, but there's not much he can do about how his hands shake as he starts the walk to his family's plot. It's not as familiar as it should be, but he'd only needed to make the walk once to have it burned into his memory. The closer they get, the tighter Grace's chest feels.
Stratt can tell. Of course she can. Most of her job is reading people and he's never been much of a challenge to her. As they make the last turn towards their graves, Stratt tucks her phone into her pocket. Coming from her, it's a momentous offering.
"You didn't come often?" It's hardly a question.
Grace does everything he can to not take it as an accusation. She's trying to connect and she won't disrespect him with small talk. He swallows his initial reaction and just shrugs. "I hope you're not taking this as some sort of lesson on Jewish mourning. I'm not exactly a shining example."
"You have an almost religious devotion to your breakfast of eggs and bacon," Stratt reminds him. She even almost laughs. "I promise I wasn't under the assumption you were planning on joining the rabbinate after the project is over."
Grace snorts. He can see his parent's grave at the end of the row. It doesn't feel as heavy as he expected. Not with the company. "Hey, I'm allergic to shellfish. That's got to count for something, right? But to answer your question, no, I don't come often. It just... I don't know. I don't like to think about it."
"You didn't have to come today. Our meeting could have been moved up."
"And look your gift horse in the mouth? No way. Besides..." Grace comes to a stop in front of the gravestones. There's an unpleasant pang in his chest, an ache in his stomach, but it doesn't threaten to topple him over like the last time he visited. "I probably should come more often."
Stratt doesn't say anything. She doesn't offer any words of comfort. She just stands there in quiet support. It's better this way. Grace doesn't feel the need to keep talking or to fill the silence with stories he doesn't really want to share. He wants to keep his parents to himself, far away from astrophage and the end of the world.
He doesn't know how long they stand there. It could be a few minutes, could be a few hours. Not long enough to miss their meeting, obviously. He doesn't know what's long enough. Grace suspects most people would just know when it feels right. Whatever that means. Grace decides to call it when his back starts to ache.
He digs in his pockets for the pair of stones he'd picked up on the walk over here. They're not particularly remarkable, both small enough to fit in his palm and a perfectly standard shade of gray. But he hadn't wanted to lose himself in searching, not when he knew he wouldn't find anything that could do his parents' justice.
"We, uh, we put stones on graves," Grace explains as he does it. He doesn't know why. Stratt probably doesn't care. He continues, anyway. "Instead of flowers. Because they last longer. That's what my dad always told me, anyway."
"I see." Stratt looks around. Along the walking path, she finds a pair of pebbles. Smaller, even, than the ones Grace had found. But it's the thought that counts. And the thought is making tears burn in Grace's eyes. "They'd be very proud."
"Ah, well. I dunno about that." Grace clears his throat to rid himself of the lump in his chest. He keeps going, before they can talk any more about whether his parents would be proud or not. "Honestly, this isn't even the important thing to do on a yahrzeit. That's what the anniversary's called. You're supposed to light candles and say Kaddish."
"Would you like to do those things?" she asks. "I can arrange it."
Grace shakes his head. He wipes a stray tear. "No, no. I don't even know the Kaddish, to be honest with you. And this is good. This is enough. Thanks."
"Very well. Then, if you're ready, we're needed in Palo Alto."
She turns and leads the way back to the car. Grace gives the headstones one last pat and follows after her. Maybe next year he'll do it properly.
***
Grace wakes with a clarity he's been searching for since waking on the Hail Mary. It's not everything. He still has a whole list of questions and gaps he might never fill in. But this, at least, helps a lot of his previous doubts slide into place. He's Jewish. That's why he remembered holidays he couldn't place, why he'd found a pair of Shabbat candles in his belongings, why his memories of prayer were in an ancient language. He might not be religious, but he's Jewish.
It wasn't a major thing in his life, mostly just childhood memories and a reason to feel guilty twice a year, but it was always there in the background. As quiet an influence as his being left handed.
He turns to check on Rocky. Still sleeping, of course. Just sleeping. He refuses to consider the alternative. He always wishes Rocky were awake, but especially now. The realization has made a whole slew of memories return, as casually as if they'd always been there. He remembers lighting Hanukkah candles with his parents, helping his grandmother braid challah in the kitchen, falling asleep hours into a lengthy Passover seder, stumbling through his bar mitzvah portion. He wishes he could tell Rocky. He wishes Rocky were here to tease him for all the food related memories he's just resurfaced.
Grace has a thought. He struggles to his feet and, though he hates to leave Rocky, he stumbles his way back to the dormitory. He digs up the storage cubes again, now only half full with the things he never uses, but didn't have the heart to jettison with Yao and Ilyukhina's bodies. He finds the candlesticks again and recognizes the shawl as a tallit. Grace is certain Stratt had picked these out for him. He hasn't owned a tallit since his bar mitzvah. He doesn't even remember the prayer for putting them on.
And the Shabbat candles... Well, he remembers those, but only because he did it with his parents every Friday night for eighteen years. He probably hasn't lit them since they died. It'll forever be a mystery whether Stratt thought he was secretly more religious than he'd revealed or just suspected staring death down would make him seek old comforts.
He keeps the tallit tucked away, more careful with the fold this time, but the electric candles stay out. It's never bad to have more ways of telling the passage of time around here.
Grace keeps digging until he finds the stone that had confused him so much the first time around. He juggles it between his palms and doesn't know how to feel. He sort of wants to throw up. Sort of wants to cry. Sort of feels loved. She'd been sending him to his grave in the best way she knew how. Eventually, Grace will have to work through that. For now, he shoves it as far back in storage as he can.
He won't need it. No one is going to die. Not on his watch.
***
There's a leak. The Taumoeba had evolved to get through xenonite. Grace feels like the universe's biggest failure when he realizes what he's done. He'd been the scientist aboard. He should have known better. He should have accounted for this. And now Rocky is floating through space, stranded with no hope of getting home.
Every time Grace thinks about it, he's overcome with a panic that feels more like dying than anything he experienced on Adrian. His whole body trembles, his vision blurs with angry tears, his lungs refuse to fill with air, his stomach tries desperately to empty itself. He can't even start trying to fix the problem if he can't function.
Grace lays down in the middle of the lab, alternating between dry heaving and hyperventilating. He knows he needs to get to Rocky. There's no other choice. The thought of dying doesn't even scare him any more. But how? How to find his way back when there's already weeks of travel between them? The thought of it sends another vicious tremble down Grace's body.
The longer he lays here, useless and panicked, the further Rocky drifts. Grace is well aware of that. Obviously, that's not a helpful thought. If he'd been able to stomach any food in the last two days, it would be all over the lab by now. He needs to calm down. He needs a clear head so he can tackle this problem like he's tackled everything else.
Grace manages to flip onto his belly. Another round of effort gets him onto his hands and knees. He gasps for air. All that runs through his mind is visions of Rocky's ship, dead in the water. He needs to replace that with solutions. He needs to breathe.
He's been anxious his whole life, he knows. It's an undercurrent of most memories he's regained. Sometimes it was better, sometimes it was worse, but it's always been there. Grace is no stranger to a panic attack. He should know how to calm himself back down.
He has a vague recollection of having a difficult time adjusting to school as a child. He thinks he cried and shook like this most mornings before getting dropped off. It's fuzzy, but Grace remembers his father's hands, strong and calloused, patting his hair down and covering his eyes, whispering the Shema to him. They'd done it together whenever the panic threatened to overwhelm him.
Grace clings to the grates of the ship, hard enough to hurt, and forces air into his lungs. He mumbles the words of the prayer. Mumbles them again. Again. Again. He repeats it to himself until they start to blend together and lose any sense of meaning. By the end, his breathing has steadied, his body is still enough to stand, he doesn't feel like throwing up as he approaches his whiteboard and gets to work.
He'll say it again when the math feels impossible. He'll whisper it to himself when the trip to Rocky gets too daunting, when the thoughts that he'll fail start to drown out everything else. On the way to Erid, as starvation looms ever closer, he'll even teach it to Rocky and they'll say it together on the days Grace just wants to give up. When he thinks he's going to die, he whispers it to himself as he falls asleep, just in case.
Maybe it's sacrilegious, relying on those six words when he still doesn't even believe in God. But he's always believed in Earth and he certainly believes in his people.
***
"You're sure you don't want to return to Earth?" Rocky asks one morning.
Grace should have known this was coming. Rocky's been awfully quiet since they'd had that conversation. Not just quiet, but clinging to his side in the silence, even when Grace did his disgusting human things like eating and drinking. He figured Rocky would share eventually, but he wouldn't have guessed it had to do with this.
Grace wraps an arm around Rocky's carapace and squeezes him tighter against his side. They're out on his patio, watching the fake sunset over his beach. It's not the same, but Grace still enjoys it. "I'm positive, buddy. I already told you I want to stay. You don't believe me?"
"No humans on Erid. No human culture or human company." Rocky trills. "Is sad. Don't want you to feel lonely."
Grace considers that for a moment. It's true that he feels painfully different here sometimes. He wants to be a part of Erid, as much as he can with his biology, and he's been learning more everyday, but there's no denying he'll never be truly Eridian. At best, he'll be some sort of amalgamation of Earth and Erid, something strange and new and yet to be discovered.
It reminds him of diasporas. Of all the things he'd grown up with that were only possible because his great grandparents had traveled to California so many years ago, which they'd only done because of all the time their ancestors had spent traveling and surviving. Grace knows a thing or two about survival these days. About adapting.
He does miss Earth sometimes. He misses real food, especially around the holidays. He misses company that doesn't need to suit up and go through an airlock. He misses city skylines. He misses the small talk with coworkers and commuters he used to hate. He misses humans.
But this life he's made on Erid? He thinks he'd miss that more.
Grace leans his head against Rocky. He has a sudden recollection of a spring holiday. Going with his father to shul and watching him study all night long. Grace had been too preoccupied with the cheesecake and his physics textbooks to care much about Torah, but some of it had stuck.
"There's this story I used to hear growing up. It's about two women. Well, it's about more than that, but really, it's about two women. Ruth and Naomi. And something awful happens to them, their mates die and they're alone. Naomi tells Ruth to leave, so she can try to rebuild her old life. And you know what she says? She says no. She won't, because wherever you go, I go. Wherever you live, I live. Your people, my people. That's how I feel, Rocky. You're my home more than Earth ever was. And if Erid is your home, then it's mine, too."
Rocky almost knocks Grace over from how happily he hums and vibrates. He does jazz hands with three of his limbs. Grace just laughs and joins in. He's gotten better at all the Eridian mannerisms. He's sure the rest will come with more time, just like he's sure Rocky and the rest of his friends here on Erid will get better at all his little human mannerisms. They'll create this strange new culture together.
"Grace is home on Erid! Happy happy happy!" Rocky exclaims, thoroughly convinced now that Grace won't change his mind any time soon.
"Grace is home with Rocky," he corrects. Grace kisses two of his fingers and presses them to the top of Rocky's carapace. "But yeah, buddy. I'm home."