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The first few months on Erid were fine.
That was the honest answer, if anyone had asked — and nobody asked, because everyone was very busy and Grace was very good at fine.
The Eridian scientists ran tests. Grace cooperated with the tests. They figured out how to feed him, which was a genuinely impressive piece of biochemical engineering that Grace appreciated both professionally and personally, given that he had been slowly starving.
He got stronger. He walked on the beach. He watched the amber sky and thought about his life in space, cautiously, like someone who had survived something.
Rocky was everywhere in those months. Translating, explaining, checking on Grace between meetings, settling beside him on the beach in the evenings with the comfortable familiarity of someone who had been doing exactly this for years. Which he had. Which was normal. Which was what Grace had.
Then the meetings got longer. Then Rocky started coming to the beach less. Then there were days Grace didn’t see him at all, just received a brief communication through the translator system — Rocky is in conference, will check on Grace later — and later became the next morning, and the morning after that.
Grace told himself this was fine.
Rocky had a planet to help save. Rocky had a mate he hadn’t seen in years. Rocky had an entire civilization that needed him in ways Grace couldn’t fully imagine and wouldn’t have wanted to interrupt even if he could.
Grace told himself this was fine until he believed it, which took a while, and then he told himself it was fine some more just to be sure.
-
The Eridian scientists assigned to Grace’s care were, collectively, the most meticulous beings he had ever encountered.
There were four of them he had interacted with most.
Vera — Grace’s name for them, derived from the particular precise chord they used as their identifier, which he’d eventually shortened because his vocal range simply wasn’t up to the full version — was the lead biochemist. They had solved the feeding problem, and they approached Grace’s biology with the focused intensity of someone who had found the most interesting research subject of their career and intended to make the most of it.
They were also, Grace had noticed, constitutionally incapable of leaving a question unanswered, which meant their sessions ran long and covered territory Grace hadn’t expected, like the time Vera spent forty minutes asking him to describe the sensation of tasting things.
Patch was younger — Grace estimated, based on their size and the way the others sometimes spoke to them with the particular tone adults use with someone still learning, that they were roughly the Eridian equivalent of a graduate student.
They were enthusiastic in the specific way of someone who hadn’t yet learned to manage their own excitement, which Grace found enormously endearing. They asked the most questions. Many of them were very good. Some of them were wonderfully strange. Once they asked Grace to confirm whether humans really had only two eyes and seemed personally affronted by the answer.
Brill was the quietest of the four — compact and precise, a structural engineer by training who had been pulled into xenobiology because of their work on Grace’s habitat. They didn’t talk much, but when they did it was usually to say something that stopped the whole conversation cold with its accuracy.
They had designed the drainage system for Grace’s beach. He had thanked them for this and they had said it was an interesting fluid dynamics problem and moved on, but he noticed they sometimes came to look at the beach when they thought he wasn’t watching, with the expression of someone checking that a thing they made was being used correctly.
And then there was Fig — the oldest of the group, a doctor of some kind, whose specialty Grace hadn’t fully parsed but who seemed to cover everything the others didn’t. Fig watched. That was primarily what Fig did. Asked occasional questions, listened carefully to the answers, and watched with the patient attention of someone assembling a picture from very small pieces.
Grace liked all of them. He was glad they were there.
He just missed Rocky.
It crept up on him the way these things do, which is to say slowly and then all at once.
The panic attacks started in the third week. Small ones at first — a tightening in his chest when he woke up and he wasn’t on the ship, when he reached for his friend that wasn’t there, when the amber sky pressed down on him in the particular way it sometimes did when he’d been inside too long and came out and remembered all over again that he was the only human on the planet.
The only human on the planet.
He said it to himself sometimes, in the dark, the way you say things you’re trying to make smaller by saying them out loud. It didn’t work. The words just sat there, specific and immovable.
He learned to manage the panic attacks the way he’d learned to manage most things — imperfectly, and with a lot of redirection.
He’d breathe through them. Make coffee. Walk on the beach until his nervous system remembered that the ground was solid and he was standing on it and everything was, technically, okay.
He didn’t tell anyone.
The depression was quieter. It arrived without announcement and arranged itself into his daily routine with the efficiency of something that had been waiting for an opening.
He still did his work — sat with Vera for the biochemistry sessions, answered Patch’s questions, reviewed the habitat schematics with Brill. He still ate. He still walked on the beach.
He just felt, underneath all of it, like a signal with the volume turned down. Like himself, but at a remove. Like he was watching his own days from slightly further away than usual.
He was fine. He was handling it. He just needed time to adjust.
He told himself this the way he’d told himself a lot of things over the years — convincingly, and with practice, and past the point where it stopped being entirely true.
-
Rocky, meanwhile, was not as fine as he appeared.
He would not have said this out loud. He was busy — genuinely, legitimately busy, with meetings and briefings and the enormous logistical machinery of what came after saving a star system — and he had Adrian, who was warm and present and had been waiting for him for years, and he had work that mattered, and he had a life on Erid that he’d left behind and was now carefully reassembling.
He was fine.
Except that he checked the habitat systems three times a day. Except that he found himself, in the middle of meetings, calculating how many hours it had been since he’d spoken to Grace. Except that he sometimes turned, in the evening, expecting to find a xenonite wall and a human on the other side of it, and found only the familiar rooms of his own home, which were good rooms that he loved and which were missing something he didn’t know how to name.
Adrian noticed within the first week.
They didn’t say anything immediately. That wasn’t Adrian’s way — they observed first, assembled the picture, waited for the right moment. But Rocky knew they’d noticed, the way you know things about the person you’ve been with for years, and he felt the awareness of being seen with the slight discomfort of someone who had been managing something and would prefer to keep managing it quietly.
The moment came on a quiet evening, three weeks in, when Rocky came home late from a conference and sat down and did not say anything, and Adrian sat beside him and also did not say anything, and the silence went on for slightly too long in the way that silences do when both people are waiting for the same thing.
“Rocky is thinking about Grace,” Adrian said finally.
Not an accusation. Just a fact, delivered with the precision Adrian brought to everything.
“Rocky is thinking about many things,” Rocky said.
“Yes,” Adrian agreed. “And Grace is one of them. Rocky checks the habitat systems.”
Rocky made the sound that meant I know you know.
“Grace is adjusting,” Rocky said. “Systems are fine.”
“Rocky has not been to the beach in four days,” Adrian said. “Rocky counted.”
Rocky was quiet.
“Rocky misses Grace,” Adrian said. Still not an accusation. If anything, gentler than before. “This is okay. Rocky can miss Grace. Rocky and Grace were — together for a long time. In a very small space. This makes a mark.”
“Rocky has Adrian,” Rocky said. “Rocky does not need—”
“Rocky can have both,” Adrian said simply. “Rocky having Grace does not take from Rocky having Adrian. Adrian knows this. Adrian has always known this.” A pause, quiet and certain. “Adrian designed Grace’s sea. Adrian wanted Grace to be okay before Adrian even knew Grace. Because Grace mattered to Rocky, and Rocky matters to Adrian. This is how it works.”
Rocky didn’t know what to say.
“Adrian is not worried about Grace taking something from this,” Adrian continued. “Adrian is worried about Rocky pretending he does not need what he needs. Rocky does this sometimes. Rocky thinks needing things is a problem.” Another pause. “It is not a problem. It is just true.”
Rocky thought about a xenonite wall. About a human on the other side of it, talking too much and asking too many questions and slowly, over months, becoming the thing Rocky oriented around without fully realizing it was happening. About the particular calibration of having someone who needed you and whom you needed in return, equally and without embarrassment, the way Rocky and Grace had always been with each other.
“Rocky will go to the beach tomorrow,” Rocky said.
“Yes,” Adrian said. “Rocky will go to the beach tomorrow.”
They sat together in the quiet of their home, and Adrian pressed close in the familiar way, and Rocky held the dual weight of what he had and what he missed and found, slowly, that they were not in conflict with each other after all.
-
Vera noticed first, among the scientists.
They didn’t say anything immediately — they were a scientist, and scientists collected data before drawing conclusions — but Grace observed them observing him with the specific attention that meant they’d clocked something and were running it against their existing models.
The session where they asked about sleep was the tell.
“Grace sleeps approximately seven hours in each cycle,” Vera said, in the careful way they phrased things they already mostly knew and were confirming. “This is consistent with human biology. Rocky’s notes indicate this.”
“Yeah, roughly.”
“Grace has been sleeping approximately four hours,” Vera said. “For the past eleven days. Rocky’s notes indicate seven is necessary for full function.”
Grace looked at them. “You’ve been monitoring my sleep.”
“Habitat systems monitor many things,” Vera said, without apology. “This is how we know when Grace needs things. Grace knows this.”
Grace did know this. He’d known it and hadn’t thought about it, which was its own kind of answer.
“I’ve been having trouble sleeping,” he said carefully. “It’s an adjustment. New environment.”
“Grace has been in this environment for four months and ten days,” Vera said. “Adjustment period for humans, question.”
“It varies.”
“Grace’s appetite has also decreased. Fourteen percent below calculated baseline for the past eight days.”
“I’m not very hungry.”
“Grace was not very hungry on the Hail Mary either,” Vera said, and the specific weight they put on it told Grace that Rocky had been thorough in his notes. Very thorough. “This concerned Rocky greatly.”
Grace looked at his hands.
“I’m fine,” he said.
Vera made a sound he didn’t have a translation for. Something in the register of that is not what the data suggests but delivered without judgment.
They moved on to the next item on their checklist, and Grace answered everything they asked, and when he left he felt the particular exhaustion of someone who has been performing fine for long enough that the performance has started to cost more than it used to.
-
Patch found him on the beach three days later.
This was unusual — the scientists typically kept to the lab and habitat spaces, and the beach was Grace’s, in the way that the Eridians had understood without being told that some spaces needed to belong to him. Patch stood at the edge of the sand with the awkward energy of someone who had decided to do something and was now committed.
“Grace,” they said.
“Hey, Patch.”
Patch settled beside him — not as close as Rocky would have, maintaining a careful distance that Grace understood was consideration. “Grace is on the beach.”
“I am,” Grace agreed.
“Grace is on the beach a lot,” Patch said. “More than before.”
“I like the beach.”
“Yes.” Patch was quiet for a moment. “Rocky also liked to be near Grace. Rocky said Grace was more — settled, when Rocky was nearby. Rocky used a word that translates to something like anchored.” They paused. “Grace seems less anchored lately.”
Grace looked at the waves.
“Rocky’s busy,” he said. “That’s okay.”
“Rocky said to tell Grace—” Patch stopped. Seemed to be consulting something from memory. “Rocky said: if Grace seems unanchored, tell Grace that Rocky thinks about Grace every day. Rocky is just very busy and Grace should not think Rocky has forgotten.”
Grace closed his eyes briefly.
“Rocky told you to say that.”
“Rocky told all of us to say that,” Patch said, with the honest transparency of someone who hadn’t thought to omit this detail. “Rocky said Grace might need reminding.”
Grace laughed, small and slightly uneven. “Yeah. Rocky knows me pretty well.”
Patch made the sound that meant yes and sat with them for a while, which Grace hadn’t expected and was grateful for. Patch asked, eventually, whether Grace thought the wave pattern was realistic, and Grace said it was pretty close, and Patch seemed genuinely pleased by this, and for twenty minutes Grace felt almost like himself.
Almost.
-
The bad night came in the fifth week.
He’d been fine — managing, functional, performing fine with increasing effort — and then he woke up at midnight from a dream he couldn’t remember and reached, in the dark, for the xenonite wall that wasn’t there.
His hand found empty air.
He lay still for a moment. Then he sat up. Then his breathing did something he recognized as the beginning of a panic attack, which he tried to head off the way he usually did — breathe, orient, name five things you can see — but it was dark and the amber sky wasn’t visible and he couldn’t make his breathing cooperate and the thought he’d been managing for five weeks came in all at once, loudly, the way suppressed things eventually do.
You are the only human on this planet. There are no others. There will not be others. The one who knew you best is busy and everyone else here is trying very hard but they are not human and they do not fully understand what you are and you are completely, absolutely, structurally alone in a way that no human being has ever been alone before and you have been pretending this was fine for five weeks and it is not fine.
He ended up on the floor. He didn’t quite remember getting there. He sat with his back against the wall and his knees pulled up and shook for a while, which he hadn’t let himself do in a long time, and cried, which he also hadn’t let himself do, and generally fell apart in the specific quiet way of someone who has been holding something for too long and finally put it down.
He didn’t notice Fig until the sound came.
Low. Steady. Not quite a word — something below language, something that was just presence, just I am here, just the Eridian version of a hand on a shoulder.
He looked up. Fig was in the doorway of the habitat — how they had known to come, Grace had no idea, would ask later — settled in the careful way that meant I’m not coming closer unless you want me to, but I’m not leaving.
Grace stared at them.
“Fig,” he said. His voice came out wrecked.
“Grace,” Fig said.
“I’m—” Grace stopped. Thought about saying fine. Thought about how many times he’d said fine. Thought about Rocky saying Grace should not carry things alone when Rocky is right here.
Rocky wasn’t here right now. But Fig was.
“I’m not fine,” Grace said. “I haven’t been fine for a while.”
Fig made the sound again. Present. Steady. I know. I’ve been watching. It’s okay that you’re saying it now.
“Rocky is very busy,” Grace said. “And that’s — I know that’s right, I know he has things to do, I know he has a whole planet and a mate and everything he left behind for years. I’m not — I’m not asking him to—” He stopped. “I just. I don’t know how to be this alone. I was alone on the ship for a while before Rocky, and that was bad, and then Rocky was there and it was — it was the opposite of alone, it was the most not-alone I’ve ever been, and now I’m on a planet full of people who are trying so hard to help me and I’m grateful, I’m genuinely grateful, but I’m—”
He pressed his hands to his face.
“Rocky was my whole world for a long time,” he said. “And now the world is bigger again and I don’t know what to do with that.”
Fig was quiet for a long moment.
Then: “Fig will contact Rocky.”
“You don’t have to—”
“Fig will contact Rocky,” Fig said again. Simply. Not up for debate. “This is what Fig will do. Grace will drink water. Grace will not be alone tonight. Fig will stay.”
Grace looked at them. At the careful, steady presence of an alien doctor who had been watching him for five weeks, assembling a picture from small pieces, and had come in the dark when Grace finally fell apart.
“Okay,” Grace said. “Okay.”
Armando extended from the wall with a water pouch. Grace took it. Fig settled in the doorway and stayed, making the low steady sound occasionally, and Grace sat on the floor and drank his water and let himself be not fine for a while.
It was, he discovered, a significant relief.
-
Rocky arrived the next morning.
He had woken at his usual time, as always — and found Adrian settled nearby, watching. Fig’s message had come through while Rocky slept. Adrian had read it, and sat with it, and thought about the past several weeks, and when Rocky woke Adrian was there waiting.
“Fig sent a message while Rocky slept,” Adrian said. “Grace is not well.”
Rocky was already moving.
“Rocky can be here and also be there,” Adrian said, behind him. “Adrian will be here when Rocky returns.”
Rocky went straight to the habitat, straight to Grace’s door, and knocked on the door repeatedly.
When Grace came to the door he looked exactly like what he was: someone who had spent the night falling apart and hadn’t slept after. Rocky took this in without saying anything. Then he made the sound that meant I’m here and settled in the space just outside the doorway, close, in the way that said I’m not leaving.
Grace sat down in the doorway.
They stayed like that for a long time without saying anything.
Then Grace said: “Fig told you.”
“Yes,” Rocky said. “Adrian was on watch. Fig’s message came while Rocky slept. Adrian told Rocky when Rocky woke.” A pause. “Rocky came immediately.”
“You didn’t have to—”
“Rocky came immediately,” Rocky said again.
“Yeah,” Grace said. “I can see that.”
“Grace did not tell Rocky,” Rocky said. Not accusatory. Just present with it.
“No.”
“Grace was not fine for five weeks and did not tell Rocky.”
Grace looked at his hands. “You were busy. You had things—”
“Grace is more important than meetings,” Rocky said.“Rocky has said this. Rocky will keep saying this until Grace remembers it.”
Grace was quiet for a moment.
“Rocky misses Grace too,” Rocky said. “Rocky did not say this either. Rocky was also trying to not need things.” A pause. “Adrian said Rocky and Grace are the same about this. Adrian is correct.”
Grace laughed, small and tired and genuine. “We’re both idiots.”
“Yes,” Rocky agreed. “But Grace is Rocky’s idiot. This means Rocky’s problem to help with.”
Grace pressed his fingers to his eyes.
“It’s hard,” he said. “Being alone. I knew it would be hard, I just — didn’t know what the shape of it would be.”
“Rocky understands,” Rocky said. “Rocky was the only one on Blip-A too. For a long time. Before Grace.”
Grace looked at him.
“Yeah,” he said softly. “Yeah, you were.”
“Rocky found Grace,” Rocky said. “Grace will find way. Rocky will help.” A pause. “Rocky will come to beach every evening. This is a promise.”
“You don’t have to—”
“Rocky wants to,” Rocky said. “Rocky likes the beach. Rocky likes Grace. These are compatible things.”
Grace pressed his fingers briefly to his eyes.
“Rocky,” he whispered, still worried. “Does Adrian mind?”
“No,” Rocky said, without hesitation. “Adrian designed the sea. Adrian wanted Grace to be okay before Adrian knew Grace. Because Grace mattered to Rocky.” A pause. “Adrian said: Rocky can have both. Rocky having Grace does not take from Rocky having Adrian. This is how it works.”
Grace’s expression softened as he considered that.
“Adrian’s pretty great,” he said.
“Yes,” Rocky agreed. “Adrian is very smart. Rocky is lucky.” Another pause, warmer. “Rocky is also lucky to have Grace. These are not the same kind of lucky. Both are real.”
-
The change was slow, the way real changes are.
Fig came back the next day, and the day after that — not for medical checks but just to sit, which Grace slowly understood was Fig’s version of the low steady sound. I’m here. You’re not alone.
Vera started ending their sessions differently. Instead of moving immediately to the next item, they would pause and ask one question that had nothing to do with biochemistry — what did Grace’s parents’ kitchen smell like, what was his favorite thing about teaching, what was a memory from Earth he wanted to keep.
They wrote the answers down carefully, with the focused attention they brought to everything, and Grace understood that they were building something. A picture. A context. Him.
Patch arrived at the beach one afternoon with what appeared to be a construction project — a small device, geometric and precise, that turned out, after twenty minutes of enthusiastic explanation, to be an attempt to replicate the sound of Earth birds. It was not accurate. It was genuinely terrible. It was the most touching thing Grace had seen in weeks, and he helped Patch adjust the frequencies for an hour and a half and felt, briefly and fully, like himself.
Brill said nothing about any of it. But one morning Grace woke up to find that the wave pattern on the beach had been subtly adjusted — the rhythm slightly faster, slightly more irregular, closer to actual ocean waves than the careful approximation it had been. They’d recalibrated it in the night without being asked.
He found them in the lab and said thank you.
They said it was a fluid dynamics problem that had been bothering them for some time.
He said: “The beach is really good, Brill. It’s really, really good.”
They made a sound he didn’t have a translation for. But they held very still in the particular way that meant something had landed.
Rocky came to the beach every evening.
Sometimes they talked. Sometimes they sat in the comfortable silence that had always been available to them, the kind that two people develop when they’ve spent enough time together that silence has stopped needing to be filled. Sometimes Rocky described what he’d been doing during the day with the detailed enthusiasm of someone who had been saving things up to tell, and Grace listened and asked questions and felt the world slowly becoming less enormous around him.
One evening Adrian came too.
They didn’t stay long — just settled near Rocky for a while, quiet and precise, and watched the waves with the focused attention they brought to everything. Grace had expected it to feel strange. It didn’t. It felt like what it was: Rocky’s people, plural, on a beach that belonged to all of them.
“Adrian,” Grace said, after a while.
“Grace,” they said.
“Thank you. For the sea. And for — telling Rocky to come.”
Adrian was quiet for a moment. “It was an interesting fluid dynamics problem,” they said. The same thing Brill always said. But underneath it, something warmer. “And Rocky was not right without Grace nearby. This was easy to see.”
“Rocky was not right without you either,” Grace said. “When he was on the ship.”
“Rocky told me,” Adrian said. “Rocky tells me many things.” They tilted slightly. “Grace was kind to Rocky. For a long time, very far away. Adrian is grateful for this.”
Grace didn’t know what to say to that.
So he just nodded, and they all three sat on the beach — Rocky folded into his comfortable configuration, Adrian precise and still, Grace in his chair — and watched the adjusted waves move in their almost-right rhythm, and didn’t say anything else for a while.
It was enough.
-
Fig found him on the beach a few days later, alone.
“Grace,” they said.
“Hey, Fig.”
Fig settled beside them. “Grace is better.”
“Getting there,” Grace said. “Slowly.”
“Fig has been studying human psychology,” Fig said. “Since the bad night. Fig wanted to understand.”
“What did you find.”
“Humans are not designed for the kind of alone Grace experienced,” Fig said carefully. “Human biology requires others. Proximity. Shared experience. This is not weakness. This is just what humans are.” A pause. “Eridians also have this. Different shape. Same need.”
“Yeah,” Grace said. “I know.”
“Fig also found,” Fig continued, “that humans sometimes do not ask for help because they do not want to be a problem. They carry things alone until carrying becomes too hard.” Fig was quiet for a moment. “Grace does this.”
“Grace does this,” Grace agreed.
“Grace should not do this,” Fig said. “Grace is not a problem. Grace is interesting and strange and very difficult to understand biologically, and Fig has found the last several weeks to be among the most scientifically significant of Fig’s career.” A pause that Grace suspected was as close as Fig got to warmth. “Also Fig would like Grace to stay for a long time. Erid would like Grace to stay. Rocky would like Grace to stay. This is the consensus.”
Grace looked at the waves.
“I’d like to stay too,” he said.
“Good,” Fig said. “Then Grace will tell someone next time. Before the bad night. This is the arrangement.”
“Yeah,” Grace said. “Okay. That’s the arrangement.”
Fig made the low steady sound. Present. Decided.
The waves moved in their adjusted rhythm, a little more like home than they used to be.
The amber sky stretched out above them, enormous and familiar.
Grace sat on the beach that was almost right and not quite, on a planet that was completely alien and slowly, incrementally, becoming his, and felt the loneliness still there — smaller now, surrounded by other things — and thought about Rocky coming to the beach every evening, and Adrian sitting with them quietly, and Vera asking about his mother’s kitchen, and Patch’s terrible bird sounds, and Brill recalibrating the waves in the night without being asked, and Fig arriving in the dark when Grace finally fell apart.
He was still the only human on Erid.
He was not, it turned out, alone.