Chapter Text
In the end, it's miraculous that everything lasted as long as it did. Stratt really planned for everything. Well, everything except Grace surviving.
Retrospectively, under normal circumstances, giving someone like himself access to the sheer quantity of medication she did would be a terrible, terrible decision. But this wasn't normal circumstances, and maybe she figured that Yao and Ilyukhina would keep him in line enough for him not to go off the deep end and swallow the whole supply the moment things got tough.
And things did. Get tough.
Reluctantly, he sees reason in and respects the memory loss drug, darn the French and Stratt for it. It did save him from losing it and hunting down Yao's handgun the moment he woke up alone, in space, with the fate of all humanity resting on his shoulders. Had he been in his right mind—or well, not right but his usual mind—he wouldn't have managed to do anything at all. He would have lain in the Don't Go Crazy room with something, anything, blasting and dulling his senses until he felt numb enough to actually go through with what he so often thought about and languished over on Earth.
But he didn't remember, and wasn't in his usual state of mind, so he didn't do any of those things. Instead, he was brave; he persevered. Something he didn't think himself capable of.
"You're remarkably resilient," his therapist had once said, "You're strong."
He didn't think that; he thought he was lazy, a coward.
He was a coward, Stratt had proven as much.
No, that was unfair. He had proven it to Stratt, to the world, that he was a coward. He had proven it to himself in a pivotal moment, a moment that determined how one looked back on their life, a moment that was forever cemented as The Moment everything changed. A moment and a choice he couldn't even remember for weeks. He went through it all, thinking he was brave, that he volunteered for this, wanted this, just for it all to be a ruse. Every moment of triumph and success, however brief, was fake.
Ryland Grace was a coward.
He was a weak, scared, and pathetic man who had to be forced onto a spacecraft to save Earth because the moment he was confronted with the perfect opportunity to do what he had wanted for over half his life, he was too scared to die.
"You're murdering me!" He had wailed. "I don't want to die! Don't send me off to die! Please!"
Never in his life did he ever think he would say those words. But he had, because when it came down to it, he would always be too scared to die. He would just trudge on through life as miserable as ever and wishing with everything that some higher power would take him out in a vague, nebulous way that didn't require a hand on his part and also wasn't the looming inevitability of a suicide mission.
So yes, he was a coward.
A coward who has run out of antidepressants.
He didn't even know that was what they were for a long time. He just took them every day with his other vitamins and general supplements that Mary and Armando doled out for him with his morning meal.
He knows now it wasn't wise not to identify the pills first. He had learned his lesson in college about taking mysterious pills from strangers. But in his state of amnesia, he just figured they were some specially formulated supplement for space travel. Maybe one that mitigated the fluid migration and facial swelling he heard about astronauts getting from the 0 g's. It's not like he could test that theory, no mirrors on the Hail Mary, only the occasional reflective surface and the playback of the video log screens. But he didn't quite remember what he looked like before, so there was nothing to compare it to.
Regardless, he took mysterious pills given to him by a robot because he figured the robot had more medical training than him, you know, with the whole taking care of him while he was in a coma for three years.
It wasn't until they started their journey to Erid and he started to ration his food and vitamin intake so that he wouldn't starve to death before they got to Erid that he thought maybe they weren't nutritional supplements at all.
It starts with the brain fog, the drowsiness upon waking up after skipping a day or two of medication from Armando. He lies there in his bunk, feeling like he's been drugged and unable to open his eyes more than a crack, even while Mary chimes "eye movement detected" from the ceiling. He lies there, head spinning like he'd been out drinking the night before (though he's long consumed all of Ilyukhina's vodka) and groans into the measly pillow, wondering what could possibly be making him feel like this. He chalks it up to decreased food intake, maybe dehydration. 'Starting a new diet is never easy,' he thinks to himself.
He drags himself out of bed before too long, as even without Mary's declaration of his consciousness, Rocky can always tell when he's awoken and is adamant about Grace getting up to start his day. Gosh, he's such a mother hen sometimes. It makes Grace feel like a teenager begging his mom for 'five more minutes,' all while the school bus is sitting outside waiting for him. Not that ever happened to him, his mom would have had his tail if he did that, but it was a frequent occurrence with his students.
The gogginess subsides slightly throughout the day, but not enough to make much of a difference in his performance in the lab. He fumbles with pipettes, dropping them even when full of precious, precious Taumoeba.
Rocky yells at him, "Grace clumsy, Grace stupid! Why not smart after sleep, question? Need to eat?"
He does need to eat, but he can't; he has to ration his food. He also isn't hungry, even though he knows he should be, which raises concern in the back of his mind; he'll have to keep an eye on that. He waves Rocky's worry off with meaningless placations and blinks multiple times into the blurry microscope, as if that will solve his eyes' inability to focus.
But it was fine, he can manage a few days of lethargy so long as he doesn't look too long at the fact that they're rapidly increasing in their frequency.
The nausea, though, is less easy to ignore.
He's retching into the waste disposal system because this thing cannot be called a toilet, not with all its suction tubes and vacuum-sealed waste bags, while Rocky hovers in the background chittering anxiously and making his disgust very known.
"Ew. What wrong with Grace, question? Disgust. Why is digestion organ inverting? Gross leaky thing." His fingers clack together anxiously, and against the wall of his xenonite ball to get a better look at what's happening, because, for all his repulsion, he's still deeply interested in Grace's biology.
Grace spits into the "bowl" of the "toilet." What's in there looks remarkably similar to what it looked like going down. He's trying to preserve his solid food rations and has moved on to mixing coma slurry and the paste tubes from when he first woke up—and the extra supplies from when Yao and Ilyukhina didn't wake up—into a lovely goop. He has to eat it quickly every time so that he doesn't get grossed out by the texture, which definitely doesn't help the nausea.
He swallows with a wince, his throat burning. His teeth squeak against each other, surface enamel that usually makes them smooth and glossy eroded away by his stomach acid. "Guh," he so eloquently says, sagging against the wall and turning his clammy face towards Rocky, who rolls a little closer in his ball now that Grace isn't jettisoning his stomach contents.
"Why Grace," Rocky pauses, swaying back and forth a little as he thinks, searching his learned vocabulary for the right word. When he doesn't find it, he directs the front "face" of his carapace towards Grace. "Hmm, need word. To expel half-digested nutritional content for no reason."
Grace is too exhausted to roll his eyes. "To throw up, vomit, puke, yak, pull trig, if you're in college, whatever you want to choose." His voice catches in his raw throat, and he clears it as gently as he can without causing more pain. Rocky's right to be curious; this isn't something an Eridian would ever do. Something would have to be catastrophically wrong for them to suddenly and uncontrollably expel their half-digested food, since they have to crack their carapace open into an open wound to eat in the first place. Grace can imagine they evolved past the ability to vomit, given its state of high vulnerability. Like horses or rodents. Not that that turned out particularly favorable in either of those animals' biology if something did go wrong. Grace would have to ask about it later, y'know, after he's done with the whole throwing up thing.
"And I didn't do it for no reason. It's…something the human body does when it's nauseous. Sometimes it's to expel what the body deems a harmful substance, like with food poisoning, or when you drink too much. But most of the time, it's a result of being sick-,"
Rocky interjects before he can finish. "Grace is sick? Food poisoned him? Grace is sick and going to die?!" Rocky properly sqwaks, his usually musical notes coming out like the honking of an enraged goose. It takes everything in Grace not to snort at the sound, because his friend is genuinely concerned for him, and also throwing up for some undetermined reason while trapped in a tin can hurtling through space is no laughing matter.
"I'm not going to die," He soothes, wiping at his mouth and rubbing the wetness he finds there off on his thigh. Yuck.
"Then why Grace pull trig, question?"
"Ok, actually don't use that one, please. You sound like a frat boy. Pick a different one."
"Picky picky picky. Why Grace throw up?" Rocky expels a puff of air from his vents in his equivalent of a huff, his front left limb tapping three times in succession with his words to drive home that he is serious about his enquiry and expects a thorough explanation.
Grace sighs, placing his head in his hand. "I don't know, Rock. I've been nauseous…having a hard time working myself up to eat. Guess coma slurry and tube goop isn't as appetizing as it used to be." He tries to put some levity in his voice, pitching up the last sentence to read like a joke and not a desperate attempt to explain away what is becoming an increasingly worrying downward trend.
Rocky stamps his foot in frustration. "Not good enough answer. Find out why throw up, why nauseous." He turns and abruptly leaves the room. Well, guess he's done with this conversation.
Grace doesn't blame him; he wants to be done with this conversation and the whole ordeal as well. He sighs again, rubbing at his forehead and willing down the rising second round of nausea. He needs to examine these symptoms more closely.
Grogginess, nausea. So far, it just seems like textbook side effects of a caloric deficit. But it shouldn't be this extreme this quickly. He's been tapering off his food at a rate the various medical journals he consulted said was a healthy rate. Well, as healthy as tapering off your food until you're just barely not dying can be.
He hasn't had an appetite either, though, which is strange. If he's in a caloric deficit, he should be at least a little hungry. Heck, he expects himself to be very hungry, even if his goop meals are unappealing visually and texturally.
Grogginess, nausea, decreased appetite.
Perhaps he's fighting a virus? A bacterial infection? He hasn't had a fever or any other symptoms of an activated immune system. And what would even be making him sick? The Hail Mary is a sealed environment. But there are space-dwelling extremophiles out there. Maybe one of them got in from the airlock while he was on a space walk and infected him. That would be kind of cool, infected with a space bacteria, or virus.
Except no, it wouldn't be cool, it had a high likelihood of killing him if it were an unknown foreign cell (or capsid, in the case of a virus), unstudied by man and probably unaffected by antibiotics or antivirals. Were there even any antibiotics or antivirals aboard Mary? Stratt's penchant for preparedness argues there would be, but maybe not. Maybe he was infected with some space thing and was going to die from something never before studied by man, and be a total medical anomaly all alone in space.
Might as well, he was the first to do a lot of things in space.
He cleans himself up in the sink, washing his face, swishing water through his mouth to clear out the lingering taste of vomit, and trying not to think about how he might be dying.
The irritability starts not long after that. It's small, at first, trivial things. So little that Grace doesn't even take note of it. Who cares if he gets frustrated in his own head? If his footfalls are a bit heavier in annoyance, or if he huffs more than he regularly breathes? It's nothing! No cause for concern at all. It's probably just space-induced stir-craziness or his reduced food intake that's making him cranky.
You're not you when you're hungry.
But then, it starts to become external. His frustration makes itself known in more visible ways, groans and grunts in response to anything Rocky says. He works himself up to frustrated, watery eyes a few times when something doesn't go his way in the lab. He raises his voice more than he ever has in his whole life, and then devolves into a puddle of mopeiness a moment later. Still, he's mostly frustrated with himself or a situation he thought he had control over, not Rocky. Never Rocky.
But then that changes, too. The two of them start to get into little arguments. Well, not arguments per se, more like Grace is already worked up, Rocky says something innocent, harmless, and Grace lashes out. But he's selfishly calling them arguments in his head so that he absolves himself of some responsibility.
The first time, after waking up with vertigo and that familiar drugged feeling, he decides he'll treat himself to his dwindling coffee supply, only to have Mary decline his request because he's programmed her to only supply the coffee every two weeks. He knows he looks stupid, arguing with the ceiling and begging a disembodied voice for a source of caffeine, but sue him. He feels like crap; his head feels like it weighs a hundred pounds and will fall off his shoulders any second, and he can't look directly at any lights, lest he get a stabbing pain behind his eye.
The light thing is becoming troublesome; the Hail Mary is full of lights, and using a microscope is literally looking directly into a light. And he needs to use a microscope to check on their Taumobea farms.
(Reluctantly, Rocky agreed that maybe they didn't have to check the farms as often. Once a week was the consensus they had come to.
"The more they're left alone, the less likely I am to mess things up! You're always saying how clumsy I am; this will be a good thing."
"Is true, Grace clumsy. Rocky is ok with this new plan.")
Grace can handle one day of stabbing eye pain a week, easy peasy.
What he can't handle is being denied coffee.
"Mary," he says in his stern teacher voice that he hasn't used in oh so long. "I programmed you into this protocol, and I can program you out of it. Now, give me the coffee."
"I'm sorry, Dr. Grace, but I cannot do that. The next coffee dispensation is not for 5 days, 22 hours, and 11 minutes. Would you like some water instead?" He groans in frustration, resists the urge to stamp his foot, and takes a deep breath instead. Rocky, who has been sitting silently in the alcove above Grace's bunk, speaks up.
"Grace?"
"What?" He responds maybe a tad too quickly and aggressively. Ok, that's a lie, he knows he snipped like a little dog who didn't want to be picked up by an owner who just sees him as an accessory.
"Why argue with ship? Grace programmed to give coffee once every 1,209,600 seconds. Not understand." Rocky isn't trying to be a smart aleck; he's just been pointing out the obvious in that matter-of-fact way he approaches everything. Still, it grates on Grace's nerves like nails on a chalkboard. He feels belittled and embarrassed, like he's stupid and doesn't know that he programmed Mary to withhold his caffeine access, or that he's somehow forgotten how to tell time.
Tears well up in his eyes—'leaky space blob' echoes Rocky's voice in his head—as he takes a "calming breath" that does not work, and opens his mouth to let his grievances flow out.
"Because I just want my fudging coffee!" The words lash out of his mouth like the cracking of a whip, and he throws his arms out in a burst of movement that's unlike himself these days of lethargy. Emotions well up in him: anger, frustration, hopelessness. He's so tired. He wants to wake without feeling like he's been dragged to the bottom of a bay by two cinderblocks. He wants to work in the lab without feeling like he's suffering from a biblical punishment. He wants to eat something that isn't identical going down as it is eventually coming up when he can't manage his nausea with deep breaths and mouthfuls of room-temperature water. He wants, so badly, to feel normal again.
Rocky twitches with his sudden movement.
All his woe drains out of him in an instant. His heart sinks with regret, and he drops his arms back down to his side and looks at Rocky with a little frown. "Sorry, Rock, I….I guess I'm just in a bad mood today. Woke up on the wrong side of the bed."
"Only two sides to bed, what side wrong side?" Rocky asks, dismissing Grace's apology in favor of his intrigue about a new human idiom.
"Human saying, don't worry about it." Grace waves off, not having it in him to explain the history of the Roman belief that getting out of bed on the left side was considered ill-fate because then he'd have to explain what the Roman Empire was, and he really can't do that right now. He pinches the bridge of his nose to try to stem the building headache.
"Earth sayings weird," Rocky complains, subtly raising and lowering his carapace in a circle like he's rolling his eyes. That gets a little smirk out of Grace, brightening his mood slightly as he abandons the idea of getting coffee anytime soon.
"You know it, bud."
The second time, the two of them are in the lab checking on the Taumoeba farms, where Grace is desperately trying to ignore the stabbing pain he's getting from looking into the microscope. Rocky's working on something in the background; the tinkling clicks of his tools are usually soothing and something Grace has learned to tune out. But not today.
Today, every moment of contact that produces a sound is like an ice pick to his brain. The grating of xenonite on metal—or whatever it was that he was working with, Grace didn't really care; it was painful either way—feels like razor-sharp claws raking over the skin of his back. The ripping pain trails up the back of his neck and burrows its way into his brain like a parasitic worm. He grits his teeth, neck muscles straining and jumping out in harsh lines against his skin, highlighting his thinning neck.
Clink. Clink. Clink.
Breathe, it's fine. Look at the microscope. He can do this; he's a scientist. He's good at looking through microscopes. He's like a pro at looking through microscopes, the best there ever was. The best in this solar system for sure.
Taumoeba squirm and dance on the slide, their shifting creating a kaleidoscope of colors and movement in the ocular lens. It's calming, soothing. Grace feels his heart rate slow, his blood pressure lower, and the stabbing pain behind his eye feels like a distant ailment. He can do this.
Rocky drops one of his tools, and the loud clank ricochets through the lab like a stray bullet, striking Grace in a killing blow to the head.
"Oops," Rocky says quietly to himself, dragging the tool against the xenonite tunnel until it's back into his range, and picks it up.
Grace's teeth grind again, and he clamps a bit of his tongue in the process. Sharpy, tinny iron washes over his taste buds, mixing with the flood of saliva that rushes to soothe his little wound. His eyes water from the pain and the sheer irritation that's been building with every passing second.
Rocky makes a loud clanking sound as he switches out tools, letting the one he isn't using anymore drop into his bandolier and bang against the others that hang there.
In reality, it's not that loud, but to Grace's oversensitized ears and nerves, it's an explosion that rivals the Baikonur Cosmodrome.
He snaps.
"Do you think you could be any louder?" His words are dripping with disdain as he turns to level a pathetic, pained glare in Rocky's direction. Turning his head sends a burning pain to tug at the back of his eyes, and he winces, blinking hard with a furrowed brow.
There's a blessed pause where Grace thinks, thank goodness, it's over, but Rocky pipes up.
"Operating at 48 dB, can be much louder. Example." He breaks into a boisterous song that shakes with a heavy bass that reverberates through Grace's rib cage like he's stood too close to the speaker at a concert. The higher notes screech like nails on a chalkboard, sending waves of goosebumps down his neck and arms. Grace claps his hands over his ears, fingers tangling in the short hairs there and pulling.
"Rocky!" He shouts, the bass of his voice competing with Rocky's and fighting not to be drowned out completely. Rocky doesn't hear him, or is deliberately ignoring him, which could very likely be the case. Grace pulls one hand away from his ears and slams it down on the table. It rattles from the impact, the items sitting on it giving a little jolt and shifting across the surface from the force of Grace's strike.
The sudden noise cuts Rocky's song off in an abrupt squawk. The two stare at each other, Grace still glaring and with one hand over his ear, hair sticking out from his curled fingers. Rocky's legs slowly curl up under his carapace in a small show of remorse as his carapace sags, shrinking himself under the weight of Grace's glare.
"Thank you," Grace grits out, without a hint of actual appreciation. He sighs, releasing his hair and sliding his hand to rub at his eyes and the growing pain behind them. "Can you take your…whatever you're doing somewhere else? I can't focus with all the noise you're making. It's grating."
Rocky's vents flare, his limbs going ram-rod straight as he picks himself up from his crouched state. He makes a couple of whistling notes, like he's starting words but not finishing them in incredulation. Rocky takes a moment where he seems to take a deep breath to calm himself down before he speaks. "Fine. Grace Earth saying, 'be like that'." He gathers up his tools and project without another word, and clammers down to the dormitory in a manner that Grace can tell is deliberately louder than it needs to be.
Once he's gone and out of Grace's earshot, Grace lets out a little groan, sagging until his forehead rests against the lab table. The cooling metal does wonders for his aching head and shot nerves, so he relaxes more so that the whole right side of his face is pressed to the table, and his cheek is squishing his lips out into a pucker.
He should feel bad about what just happened; he wants to feel bad, but he just doesn't have it in him. It niggles in the back of his brain that he should be more upset over this. He just yelled at his best friend over nothing, over making a minuscule amount of noise, all because he's in a mood.
In a mood. He's been in a lot of moods lately. Whiplashing moods where he feels out of control, like his emotions, shifting like the tides, control him, rather than him having a solid grip on his emotions. It's exhausting, he's miserable. Something has to give.
He rolls his head until just his forehead is resting on the table, lifting it slightly and letting it bang against the surface three times in succession. He allows himself 15 more seconds of wallowing before he picks his head up and pulls the microscope towards him—time to get back to work.
It continues like this, little bickerings here and there, when Grace finds himself at the end of his rope (which is getting shorter and shorter every day). They increase in their frequency until they're happening practically every day, and Grace is in a bad mood from the moment he opens his eyes each wake cycle until he crawls into his worn-in cot to try and get a pathetic excuse for sleep.
Then it all blows up in his face like he lit a cigarette while wearing an oxygen mask.
It starts as most days do. Grace wakes up feeling like death warmed over, lays in bed bemoaning his life and how he got here, and freaks out a bit on how things are just getting worse and worse with no reasonable explanation. He's taken to recording his temperature throughout the day to make sure he isn't getting secret low-grade fevers that are passing under the radar and would be a clue to bigger issues like an infection.
So far, nothing.
After his morning temperature check, he takes stock of any new aches and pains; none today, which is good. The day he woke up with full-body muscle aches like he had the flu had been the scariest day so far. He really thought the space plague had finally struck, and he was about to succumb to the growing symptoms that had been adding up over the weeks.
Actually, he feared something worse. Worse than a mysterious space virus or bacteria. Radiation sickness.
The symptoms lined up. The nausea, vomiting, the loss of appetite. It was likely too; he went on space walks, he was out there, exposed to radiation that Mary couldn't protect him from. Unprotected, like Rocky's crewmates.
He thought about the slow decline his body would experience, like Rocky's crewmates had. His cells breaking down, his DNA unraveling. The way his hair would fall out, the way his skin would slough off like a silk tablecloth on a polished wood table.
He spent the entire day on the verge of tears, and even let some fall when Rocky wasn't around to see. But the aching, feverish feelings were gone the next day and had yet to return. Still, he checks every day for continuing signs of decline.
He finishes his morning checklist by running up to the cockpit to make sure the auto-navigation is still set and running smoothly. So far, so good.
Now, navigating interacting with Rocky. That was a trickier task.
It shouldn't be. He loves Rocky. Rocky is his best friend, his light at the end of the tunnel, the saviour of his universe, as well as their greater existence. Rocky is…everything. Rocky is.
Nagging him about the mess he made in the lab.
"Grace need to learn to clean up after self. Child bearer raise you like this, question?" Rocky is in his ball, trailing after Grace as he picks up after himself because no, his mother did not raise him this way, and he's a tiny bit ashamed of how messy he's let the lab get. It's not as in bad a state as it was the first time Rocky saw it, but it's a close thing.
Sue him; he's been, as his kids would say, "going through it."
"Leave my mom out of this," Grace grumbles, bending to pick up a shirt that he's actually been looking for and was confused as to how he could have lost inside a ship that has fewer than five rooms.
Rocky giggles at him, actually giggles at him. The little chirpy thing he does that Grace usually finds very cute and endearing, but right now, it raises his blood pressure so quickly he's surprised his head doesn't explode. He skips mild irritation and jumps right to screaming mad. If he were a cartoon, steam would be coming out of his ears.
He snaps up from his bent-over position, whipping his head around to where Rocky's carapace is still shaking slightly as his giggles trail off.
"Shut up, Rocky," he snaps, not caring one bit what comes out of his mouth and how much of an overreaction it is.
Rocky jolts, leaning back on his legs in a stiff motion that Grace knows signifies shock. Grace turns away and stomps off to the other side of the lab, throwing down his handful of items on the table. He can hear the indignant noises Rocky is making, which signal how much Grace has pissed him off this time.
Might as well add to it. "You never know when to stop, do you? It always has to be The Rocky Show. You think being mean to me is so funny. Why can't you ever just shut up and let me exist!" His hands are clenched at his sides, and he knows his face is flushed; he can feel the burning in his cheeks.
Rocky makes a series of screeching noises and scrambles around in the ball, waving his limbs in outrage. "Grace being ♬¤♪𝄫♫!" His vents are pumping out air at an alarming rate, and he stomps his feet hard enough that, if Grace weren't so angry, he would be concerned about the xenonite cracking.
"Yeah, well, so are you, buddy," Grace snipes back, crossing his arms in a way that is totally age-appropriate for a man of his age and not reminiscent of a child who hasn't gotten their way, thank you very much.
Rocky points an accusatory arm towards him, "Grace not even know what ♬¤♪𝄫♫ means, Rocky never said it before." His tone is smug in a way that drives Grace up the wall. Gosh, Rocky can be such an….UGH!
"Context clues! I know when someone is calling me a fucking asshole!" The words explode out of his mouth before he can think about what he's saying or stop them. They both pause. Grace never swears, not even in his own head.
The tension in the room is stifling, the blanket of silence so heavy that Grace can hear the mechanical hum of Mary droning in his ears, louder than it's ever been before.
He's really done it this time.
Crap.
His heart twists in his chest, a writhing, painful thing that tugs, made of stone, sinking to the bottom of his chest cavity. Why did he do that? Rocky didn't even do anything; all he did was make a joke and laugh at Grace. He was probably just trying to lighten the mood; he knows how much Grace hates cleaning and how he's been having a tough time lately. Why did Grace have to have such a major overreaction?
Endless thoughts of things he could do and words he could say to fix this tumble in his brain like rocks down a hill, wearing down until they're so minuscule they disappear.
He always does this, lets his arrogance and temper get the best of him. You'd think he would have come to his senses and corrected course after UNESCO conference, and he did, for a while. Being ostracized from the scientific community has a certain sting that can affect one's behavior. But he always did sit a little too high on his horse—his head too far up in the clouds, as Linda said. He always has to have the last word; he always has to be right.
"Look, there is nothing magical about hydrogen and oxygen. Water is required for life on Earth, sure. But a completely different planet might have completely different conditions. I don't know why that makes me such a nut."
In the long pause, Rocky's vents have relaxed; they're shifting in a ripple instead of slamming down like piano hammers. He's inched ever so slightly closer, the clinking of his ball on the floor completely escaping Grace's attention while he was lost in his own self-flagellation. The tension has shifted from anger to nervousness, contrition.
Grace wants to break the silence so badly, but the gap between him and Rocky seems uncrossable; he's unreachable, across the great divide.
Rocky, like always, fixes things for him.
"Rocky…scared. Grace not himself for many weeks and is getting worse. Grace mood change, gets sick when eating, lowered cognitive and motor functions. Not like Grace to do these things. Grace is smart smart smart. Now not so much. Is like when cremates get sick from radiation. They stumble and slur their song, they can't do their jobs. They sleep long time, they don't eat. They get weak. They die." Grace's breath hitches, his chest constricts into a tight ball. Rocky's limbs tremble with emotion, his song warbles like a dying bird. "Grace is like crewmates. I do not want Grace to be like crewmates."
Grace lets out a pathetic little sound, one that glides across the space between them. A small, dying thing that lands on the floor with a splat. Something they can observe and dissect, evidence that Grace feels something. Regret, remorse, pain, suffering, something. He is something other than his anger and his pride, small as it may be. His face grows hot for a different reason, his throat tightens, and tears spring up along his lash line.
He's scared. He's sorry.
"Rocky," his words are as choked up as Rocky's, the deep breath he tries to take devolves into a sob.
"I'm sorry," he hiccups. "I don't- I don't want to be like your crewmates either." He sniffs, crouching down to be on Rocky's level. He wants to reach out, to touch, but it feels too delicate, too soon.
He does his best to do it with his words instead. "I could never do that to you. I'd never, ever leave you. I couldn't do it before, and I won't do it now." He swallows down his emotions as best as he can, but they choke him still as tears spill down. They find the lines of his face like a well-worn path, the side of his nose, the outer crease of his eyes. They are as familiar as the sun rising each day, over 11.9 light-years away.
"I'm scared," he whispers, the confidence as heavy as confessing a cardinal sin in an incense-stifled cathedral. "I'm so scared, Rocky. I don't want to die, I want the chance to live out the rest of my days on Erid, with you."
Rocky rolls forward in his ball until it taps gently against Grace's knees. The heat seeps through Grace's flight suit, into his bones, into his soul. "Rocky want that too. Grace will not die, we will fix. Big science." Rocky says, and it's as easy as that.
Grace wipes his face, smiling. "Yeah," he says around a chuckle that edges on a sob. "We will fix."
"Hug now, question?" Rocky's front limbs come up, doing gentle little jazz hands.
Grace loves him so much.
He nods. "Hug now, statement."