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When Grace had been younger, he'd hated how easily he cried. It wasn't a trait of his that he stopped disliking, in fact, until he began training to be a teacher. By the time he has a class of his own, he has learned enough to be able to reassure a student that another had dubbed a 'crybaby', and mean it.
It isn't a bad thing to cry easily, he tells them. People express themselves in different ways, and it isn't a bad thing to share that vulnerability with the world – it's a brave thing.
When he explains this aspect of himself to Rocky, it's just another point on the list of traits that make him a 'leaky space blob'. It doesn't feel like teasing, not like it might have done coming from a human. It's just another fact. It doesn't come up again, except when Rocky occasionally decides to prod him about his 'gross human tendencies' when Grace gets a bit too emotional over a move. Or over a hug. Or over one of many random meaningful moments that make up their lives on the way to Erid.
This means that it takes Grace longer than usual to consider what the equivalent of crying might be for an eridian, if they have any such direct equivalent at all. In fact, Grace doesn't think about it at all until he starts his work on constructing a better translator device for communicating with future eridians.
The device picks up on a larger range of frequencies than the last one had. The software is updated and tweaked until it meets Rocky's standards, which are, as usual, pretty high. Grace makes a point of using it whenever they're working together on something in an effort to spot errors in real-time, and since they're almost almost working together, he never really bothers to turn it off.
One 'morning', Grace wakes up well before he usually does. He had been struggling with restless sleep before that point, the morbid topic of their talk the night before looping through his thoughts at every opportunity, so he isn't surprised to find his sleep disturbed once more.
Rocky shifts a little, clicking as he notices Grace waking up. He had claimed that he was unaffected by the necessary discussion surrounding the impact of starvation on the human body, but had insisted on watching Grace even more closely than usual when he slept, so Grace has his doubts.
"Grace need more sleep," Rocky chimes gently. Grace doesn't need the translator to tell him that, he's heard it enough times (and in enough tones) by now to know the phrase by heart, but he finds his eyes drawn to the screen regardless.
The device is picking up on another frequency, something lower than his human hearing can pick up. It doesn't seem like Rocky is attempting to talk with him, given his prompting for Grace to go back to sleep, so even in his state of sleepiness Grace finds himself feeling a little curious.
When Grace points it out, expecting it to be the result of a bug, Rocky stiffens. "Apology," he whistles quietly. "Rocky is being rude rude rude. Not mean to upset Grace."
"I'm not upset," Grace says automatically, then blinks. "Should I be upset? Is there a reason I should be upset?" He feels like he's missing something. He's still too tired for this.
By the time Rocky explains the sound – a frequency too low for any human to pick up on, but one that any eridian would recognise as something mournful, something sad – Grace is wide awake. Apparently, to an eridian, grief can be a contagious thing. It takes the form of a song that can spread and spread, passed on by other eridians until it reaches someone who can return to the source of it and do something about it.
Well, there isn't much more that Grace can do about the prospect of him slowly starving to death, and he doesn't think that the sound has been stimulating any sort of distress response in himself, but that isn't going to stop him from trying to do something about it.
Grace isn't sure how to tackle things from the perspective of an eridian, but he's comforted enough crying children by this point to know what might help regardless of the species barrier.
"Hey," he says, pulling himself closer to Rocky. "It's okay. It's going to be okay."
Rocky doesn't respond, choosing to wordlessly lean into the touch, but Grace can see the silent spike in what the translator picks up.
They stay like that for a while. Eventually, Grace slips back into his own thoughts.
For decades, there hasn't been any eridians around to answer Rocky's cries for help. There hasn't even been anyone around to recognise the sound for what it is. Today, Grace silently promises to himself, that's going to change.