Chapter Text
Grace’s head dips forward, eyes briefly drifting shut only for him to jerk back up with a start just mere moments later. He blinks rapidly, squinting up at the bright screens overhead as he tries to fight back the edges of unconsciousness.
Grace was starting to regret leaning against Rocky’s ball as the two were watching some mid-2000’s western melodrama in the Don’t Go Crazy room (Or, well, listening in the Eridian’s case). Even half an hour in, Grace couldn’t tell you a single plot point of the film as all of his focus and willpower have been going towards his feeble attempts at staying awake – and reclining against Rocky was making that fight for consciousness more and more one-sided.
He foggily remembers thinking it would be a fun movie for the two to watch when showing Rocky the Western genre for the first time, Grace having only heard about it in passing himself when he was still on Earth. It was a rather famous movie he recalls… something about two cowboys … who …
…
…
“♬♩♩ ♪♪♪♫♫?”
The human startles at the sudden noise, head shooting up for the nth time from where it had started to rest on the protrusions of his collarbones. Grace hadn’t even realized his eyes had shut again and likely would have drifted fully asleep if Rocky hadn’t broken his silence. It took a few moments of looking at his friend out of the corner of bleary eyes for Grace to realize that Rocky’s words had been accompanied by questioning stomps and that the Eridian was now focused on him expectedly.
“Sorry, Rocky... Didn’t quite catch that,” Grace mumbles apologetically.
“Grace okay, question? Grace head keep making weird back and forth movement,” his chirps are quiet and worried as the movie is forgotten in favor of his friend, “Grace make movement in past but only sometimes, and now Grace make movement many times. Normal for humans, question?”
Grace hums in acknowledgment, pressing the palm of his hand to his eyes to try to wipe the sleep away, “It’s sometimes normal; it happens when a human is really, really sleepy. If we’re tired enough and stay still for long enough, our bodies try to make us go to sleep even if we’re not lying down. My head rocking forward is just my muscles relaxing as my body tries to put itself to sleep – only for me to wake back up.”
“But Grace wake from sleep three hours and eighteen minutes ago.“
“I know, bud. I know. I’m just still a little tired,” He sighs, reluctantly dragging his body out of his reclined position against Rocky’s ball. With a deep inhale and a pat against the ball’s xenonite exterior, Grace draws himself to his feet, “How’s this? I’m going to take a quick walk to wake myself up – convince my body that it isn’t quite nap-time yet. You continue watching the movie and then tell me everything that I missed when I come back in about five minutes or so. Deal?”
Rocky sways back and forth in contemplation, likely deciding if he wants to leave Grace alone or not.
“Hmmm… Deal. Grace come back more awake, and Rocky tell Grace about Jack and Ennis mating ritual when Grace come back.”
Jack and Ennis’ what?
Grace spares a glance to the screens and – Yep. That’s definitely the beginning of a ‘mating ritual.’
Suddenly Grace is very glad he won’t be there for that part because he doesn’t think he and Rocky are quite at that stage in their friendship where they could watch sex scenes together unphased. And likely wouldn’t be at any stage of their friendship if Grace was being honest.
“You know what?” Grace makes a scrunched face as he adverts his gaze from the screen, slightly more awake than before, “I… think I’m good, Rock. Perfectly a-okay without you telling me about this part.”
“Grace embarrassed, question?” Rocky tentatively teases, a quiet chittering of laughter following after, “Grace use sleep as excuse. Grace run away because Grace embarrassed, embarrassed, embarrassed.”
The joke feels a bit forced even to Grace, but he appreciates Rocky trying to lighten the mood and keep their minds off of Grace’s situation as of late.
“Ah, you’ve found out my secret: I, Ryland Grace, am embarrassed to watch a mating ritual in the movie with my best friend.” Grace plays along, making his way to the doorway with tired limbs, “And now I, Ryland Grace, will be making a tactical retreat to save my dignity. See you in a few minutes, Rocky.”
With that, Grace slips out of the room and down the systems corridor, his aching legs aiming for the universe's tiniest bathroom in the dormitory/medbay.
He’s tired.
He’s so, so tired.
Even after his rationing, he ran out of normal food ages ago and the remains of the coma slurry have since expired.
(Thank you, Stratt, for not putting expiration dates on our food. What a welcomed surprise that was.
Either no one was supposed to live long enough to see the slurry’s expiration, or it should have run out long beforehand if all three astronauts survived their comas. Either way, Grace did not enjoy finding out the hard way that his most vital resource had gone bad.)
Now all Grace has is the Taumoeba; a hasty improvisation to his diet that he and Rocky had thought up on the fly after their reunion. The sludge worked in slowing starvation but the ratio of calories-to-biomass isn’t ideal. And that doesn’t even touch on just how few micro- and macronutrients Taumoeba contains.
But Grace has no choice but to deal with how heavy his body feels as he takes one foot at a time into the dorm’s small bathroom. No choice but to deal with how little control he has of his form slowly wasting away.
Tears of hopeless frustration prickle in the corners of his eyes. He hates how fatigued he is. He hates the brain fog. He hates how pained his joints are; how easily he’s bruising now; how cold he’s been feeling; how thin he’s becoming. He just hates the situation as a whole.
There’s been several times these past few weeks where Grace would turn his head a little too fast and he would black out for a few seconds. Other times, Grace would feel his heart stutter an irregular beat for a moment before returning to normal.
It honestly scares the shit out of him.
Grace makes the mistake of looking into the bathroom mirror, not only observing how it’s getting to the point that his bones are starting to gain definition beneath his skin but also the eye-bags slowly becoming prominent against his pallor. While the quality of his sleep is getting worse, he’s also been sleeping more frequently and longer in general.
And he knows that scares Rocky even more.
Just a little under a month, Grace thinks, taking a steading breath as he tries to rub a little more life into his face, Twenty-eight more days until we finally reach Erid. I just have to last until then.
–*--*--*–
Grace won’t lie, the next passing weeks are rough. A few of those days, he only barely manages to will himself out of bed as either the exhaustion or the pain in his muscles immobilizes him longer than he would like. But he still pushes onwards, if only because he refuses to worry Rocky any more than he already is.
It helps that the two have been trying to keep things light as the days progress. What better way to distract oneself from his less-than-stellar food situation than binging pirated movies, burying themselves in work, and getting decimated in chess by an alien space rock? It also helps that the growing hope of Erid takes the heaviest load off their shoulders as Hail Mary gets closer by the day.
Five days out from Erid, Grace chose the ‘bury himself in work’ approach for the day and sat in the lab with a few samples of Taumoeba that he had been pushing though his mental haze work on. A day prior, Grace had ran the Taumoeba through a mass spectrometer and a nuclear magnetic resonance spectrometer and discovered that while the little amoeba weren’t actively producing vitamin B6, they did seem to produce 4-phosphohydroxy-L-threonine much to Grace’s delight. He just needs a way to modify a substrate within the Taumoeba to mimic a DXP-dependent pathway – or better yet, see if he could introduce existing genes from an outside source. Maybe if he could just identify the gene responsible for E. coli’s biosynthesis of deoxyxylulose 5-phosphate and then figure out how to later amplify vitamin B6 production, he could have the very beginnings of his own version of coma slurry and give Eridian scientists one less step to worry about in keeping Grace alive.
Grace closes the door on the incubator, five LB broth tubes of newly reconstituted E. coli held in his hands. The Hail Mary should have a genetic sequence database onboard some–
One moment he was standing, going through a series of mental ramblings on how he was going to genetically modify the Taumoeba. The next, an intense sense of vertigo overcomes Grace as he turns too quickly and his world washes black. Before he knew it, Grace was laying facedown on the laboratory floor as he slowly came to.
Thankfully, he seemed to have missed smashing his nose into the floor so he counts his lucky stars where he can. However, with a huff to roll himself onto his back, Grace groans when he feels LB broth from the now smashed cultures seep into his t-shirt alongside the stings of several small cuts on his chest from the broken glass tubes.
Dang it. He really liked the ‘I had potential’ shirt too.
Good news: the E. coli sent aboard Hail Mary is attenuated and Stratt made sure this specific strain was neutered to kingdom come. So even someone currently as malnourished and immunocompromised as Grace had no risk of getting sick from working with it. The last thing Stratt would want is any of her precious little astronauts dying from even the most improbable of infections before they could save Sol. So in other words, safe.
And for that, Grace sighs in relief and resigns himself to lay on the floor for a few minutes to contemplate his life choices.
…
…
…
That relief lasts all of five seconds before a thought flashes through his mind and in an adrenaline-filled rush, Grace scrambles to his feet in panic as a sharp “Oh chrud!” escapes his lips. He only barely keeps himself from passing out again at the rapid position change and bolts for the medical bay.
Bad news: Human bodies in general are absolutely covered in bacteria. Many of which are, in fact, known to create some pretty nasty infections if they are given the chance.
“Oh no. No no no no no,” Grace throws himself into a sharp right turn at the t-junction connecting the lab to the main ship, hissing when he roughly strips his shirt off and dislodges some of the few glass shards still clinging to the cuts. But he doesn’t care because he needs to clean the wound as quickly as possible; He can’t risk getting sick now, not when they’re so close.
Grace hears scuttling overhead as Rocky scrambles to catch up to Grace in one of his xenonite tunnels, chirping a high and frantic song as he says “Grace okay, question? Rocky hear loud noise and hear Grace on floor. Bad, bad, bad! Rocky come to Grace quickly. Grace hurt, question?”
“Just a little scratched up, Rock,” Grace tries to reassure through his gasping breaths as he enters the medical bay, a little winded. He drops to the floor in a way his knees will hate him for later and starts rummaging through the lower cabinets for any sort of disinfectant. Armando hovers in circles around him, trying to process the situation “But my immune system isn’t as strong as it used to be and I have to clean these as soon as possible so I don’t get sick.”
Rubbing alcohol was tucked right in beside a basic first-aid kit, both sealed in air-tight containers. The side of the alcohol container says that it expired a year before Grace even woke up but he just has to make do with it and some distilled water from the sponge station in the bathroom.
(Grace is beginning to regret not saving Ilyukhina’s vodka for disinfecting purposes.)
“Mary, what antibiotics are stored in the ship?” Grace calls out as a precaution once retrieving a sponge from the bathroom. Rocky hovers around Grace the best that he can in his tunnels, carapace making small circular motions as he tries to focus on Grace. The human gets to work plucking the remaining few shards of glass out of his chest with tweezers.
“The Hail Mary has several antibiotics in storage. This includes: benzylpenicillin, phenoxymethylpenicillin, ampicillin, diclox–”
“Ampicillin,” He nearly dry-heaves as he works the last, particularly stubborn piece out. Rocky releases a few coo-chirps to try and soothe Grace, “Prepare a precautionary oral dose for me, please.”
“Affirmative. Armando will administer a course of 250 milligrams of ampicillin every six hours for the next three days. The first dose will be given in five minutes.”
“Thank you, Mary”
“You’re welcome, Grace.”
In the end, all twelve cuts and tiny punctures in his skin were cleaned and bandaged – only three of which needed a stitch or two. Grace collapses back onto his bed with a groan as his adrenaline very abruptly crashes, saying goodbye to his allotted energy reserves for today. And at only one o’clock in the afternoon no less after all that running around.
Man, his lab is going to smell foul once he returns tomorrow to clean up what was essentially E. coli soup.
Overhead, Rocky crawls into his cubby above Grace, protectively hovering over his friend with a worried croon, “Grace sleep again, question?”
“Mmhm,” Grace hums in affirmation, “I have a one-way ticket straight to Snoozetown after all of that excitement. Population: One very, very tired Grace.”
“What does phrase mean, question? Rocky does not understand meaning.” The Eridian shifts so that his legs tuck themselves underneath his body, hunkering down for however long it will be until Grace wakes up this time.
“Human-thing. It means it doesn’t matter how much I want it or not, I’m going to sleep no matter what” Grace mumbles, eyes already trying to drag themselves shut without his permission. He brings his hands to fold onto his chest in his normal sleeping position, but the hiss he emits immediately after tells of his regret when he accidentally grazes a few of the cuts.
Rocky sits in contemplation for a moment, quiet for long enough that Grace was on the verge of tipping into sleep before he speaks again, “Grace will be okay, question? Grace say cleaning injuries help, but also say Grace immune system bad. Grace not get sick, question?”
A tired, comforting smile works its way onto Grace's face, “Grace not get sick, statement.”
Sluggishly, Grace brings his hand above him and taps a few times against the xenonite of Rocky’s cubby, eliciting a few taps in return from the Eridian, “And even if I did, we only have five days until we get to Erid. I’m sure your scientist buddies could fix something up real quick if the worse-case scenario happens.”
“Don’t worry, I’ll be fine”
–*--*--*–
Grace was, decidedly, not fine.
It took less than a day for him to go from his daily baseline of ‘bad’ and crashland straight into a whole new category of ‘worst he’s ever felt.’
Going into the evening and through the night, the sting from the cuts turns into a deep-seated throb as the wounds themselves become puffy and inflamed. With it came an ever-creeping heat that began in his chest, steadily spreading outwards with a great, searing intensity until he felt hot and sweaty all over. And when he wakes early the morning following the lab accident, he barely has any time to rush to a nearby trashcan before his body expels its meager stomach contents.
His stomach convulses, dry-heaving nothing more than bile and stomach acid into the plastic lining of the bin. Chills wrack his body, a miserable whine escaping Grace’s throat as he rests his head against the lip of the trashcan.
He felt bad. Really, really bad.
If he thought the brain fog and muscle pain before was horrible, then past Grace would hate to feel what it’s like now. Current Grace hates to feel what it’s like now.
The putrid stench of his own vomit burning his nose is what’s able to bring him out of his feverful haze enough to register a thoroughly freaked out Rocky crashing through his tunnels, scrambling to get to his airlock and into his ball. Rocky is screeching something, but Grace's fever-addled brain can only barely translate the repetition of his own name.
Grace forgot that Rocky has never seen a human puke before.
Worried that Rocky was about to forgo his ball all together and just burst out of his airlock without it, Grace weakly calls out “Rocky,” causing his friend to pause just long enough for Grace to give a shaky thumbs up.
Please don’t pull another Tau Ceti Incident. I really don’t think either of us could survive a round two.
“No! Grace ♪♫♪♫! Grace say not ♪♫♪♫. Grace ♩♫ Rocky! ♩♩ ♬♪♫ ♩♩♫ ♪♫! Bad, bad, bad!” Grace is only able to translate a few words as Rocky goes back to frantically trying to enter his ball. On the fourth attempt he succeeds, rushing over to Grace’s side. “How Rocky fix Grace, question? Rocky not want Grace ♪♫♫ ♩♩♪♩♫ ♫♩…!”
“Just… Help me get back into bed.” Limbs feeling like lead, Grace places a shaky hand onto the xenonite ball. With Rocky’s help, he’s able to take himself – and his newly commandeered puke bucket – back to the other side of the room where his bed is stored. “I’ll have Armando give me some Tylenol and up the antibiotic dosage. Ampicillin is a broad-spectrum antibiotic so it should work on most things”
Unless it’s viral or antibiotic resistant. Please don’t let it be antibiotic resistant.
His whole body hurts – his chest most of all – so the second Grace collapses into bed, he curls in on himself with another pathetic whine. Tears prickle in the corner of his eyes as Rocky lets out crooning warble of worry, but all he can do from here onwards is ride out the chills that wrack his body and let Armando take the reins from here.
–*--*--*–
Only three more Earth days.
They’re so close to Erid, to his home, and yet it feels like they’re a thousand of light years away again.
How did things get so bad so quickly?
Rocky’s limbs lock up as fear and anxiety crashes over him, hearing the soundwaves bouncing back off Armando as it cleans away the strange liquid oozing from Grace’s injuries. Everything about Grace right now is wrong, wrong, wrong.
His heart is too fast; his breathing sounds weird and rattly; and Grace has these small, weird tremors that Rocky has only ever seen him do when cold even though Rocky’s temperature sensors said Grace’s core temperatures were high for a human. And the pained keening – the keening – causes Rocky’s own core to tighten in grief for both the past and the present. He sounds too much like them; sounds too much like his crew’s own cries of pain when radiation had slowly killed them all from within.
He doesn’t want Grace to die, too.
After Armando finishes rebandaging the wound and giving Grace another dose of antibiotics, the human reaches out a claw towards his ball and rasps out, “Rocky.”
Rocky wastes no time in rushing towards his friend, nearly crashing his ball into Grace’s claws. He pushes his carapace upwards and towards Grace's claws like when they would initiate hugs, trying to provide even the bare minimum of comfort that the xenonite would allow. Rocky warbles a melody that has no words, a song that exists only to soothe and comfort.
Who it’s for, Rocky isn’t sure.
Grace’s breath hitches, his other claw coming to cover his photoreceptors and Rocky can sense the liquid streaming out of them in abundance. With another hitch and sob, Grace admits,“I’m scared, Rocky.”
Rocky’s hearts clench in his core and he releases another warble, attempting to push further into Grace’s claw. Rock chooses his words carefully, rewording them for Grace's language structure so that the translation machine could work properly. Rocky had to retrieve it after Grace’s sickness made it harder for him to understand Rocky without it.
“Armando fix Grace,” Rocky assures, “And if Armando not fix Grace, then Eridian scientists fix Grace! Grace and Rocky save stars, and now Armando and Eridian scientists save Grace. Only three more days.”
“But what if it’s not enough?” Grace’s breath hitches again, the area around his feeding hole screwing up in pain. The claw over Rocky’s ball twitches, like he wants to hold onto Rocky but the barrier is in the way, “I don’t wanna die, Rock. I never wanted to die.”
Rocky longs to be closer to Grace, to shield him from his pain. He wants to stand protectively above his friend but his Watch-Grace-Sleep chamber is too high up. He wants to curl against Grace’s side and provide his warmth but Grace’s nest is too tall to get his ball into.
It’s just like before. Rocky can hear the pain of his own crew overlaying Graces, can feel the hopeless guilt all over again as Rocky couldn’t do anything to help.
“Grace wanted to meet Adrian, question?” Rocky stomps, but doesn’t wait for an answer, “Grace meet Adrian, statement! Means Grace get better. No other option…”
There has to be no other option. Rocky doesn’t know what he would do otherwise.
Rocky listens to Grace cry himself out while all he can do is try to soothe his friend with warbles. When the human no longer has the energy anymore to even do that, sickness and malnutrition taking its toll, Grace instead falls into slumber once more.
When Grace’s voice falls silent, Rocky latches onto the alien lub-dub of Grace’s still too-fast heart – grounding himself with the reassurance that Grace was still alive. That he only had three more days until help and then Grace would be alright and well again.
Lub-dub
Lub-dub
Lub-dub
Rocky listens, and listens, and listens for the next four hours as Grace sleeps.
Lub-dub
Lub-dub
Lub-
Lub-dub
Rocky freezes when Grace’s heart skips a beat. He has to tell himself three times over that Grace was fine. That his heart had done that several times in the past two months and he was fine then just as he was fine now.
Lub-dub
.
.
.
Lub-dub
Lub-
Lub-dub
He’s fine. He’s fine. He’s fine, fine, fine.
Lub-
.
.
.
Lub-dub
.
.
.
Lub-
Lub-
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
Grace takes one last, final breath and the world around Rocky falls silent.
–*--*--*–
Ryland Grace, age 46, dies aboard the ship Hail Mary – Just three days before arrival at the planet of Erid.
He had no family, not even a dog, but he will be grieved by one.