Chapter Text
Erid was different than Rocky remembered.
After he’d landed—and hadn’t that been novel, landing in a ship that was not his own with an alien who’d been his only company for years—he was ushered through corridors and taken for a physical wellness check before he finally regained his bearings and stopped in the middle of a bridge connecting the building adjacent to Grace’s rocket and the large corporate building full of scientists.
Despite having walked this hall what must have been thousands of times before the mission, it all felt foreign. Alien. Like boarding Grace’s ship for the first time, unsure and excited and anxious. He knew some of the those around him, but others are completely foreign. He recognized neither cadence nor carapace, but they must be connected with the mission in some ways. New hires, he supposed.
He shouldn’t be surprised. Change was bound to occur in the fifty-odd years he’d been in space. He wondered how much had changed. How much he’d changed.
How much he’d forgotten.
“Where is everyone else?” someone asked.
“What happened?” another said.
“What ship is that? What is inside?” said one more.
Rocky didn’t answer. He felt unsteady. He felt lost. He hadn’t seen another Eridian—alive, that is—in years. In decades. Fourty-three years isn’t that long for an Eridian, at least compared to humans, but the isolation Rocky experienced was rare and relatively unstudied. Such instances were told with stiff hesitation, a story of a bygone nation that punished its citizens with isolation. Punishments like that haven’t been commonplace since before Rocky hatched, but he may as well have experienced the equivalent of it on this mission.
That, coupled with witnessing the slow deaths of the crew—well, who knows what effects it could’ve had on his psyche. According to Grace, they were—Grace.
Yes. Rocky hadn’t forgotten to mention his friend, no, he was just overwhelmed, and it slipped his mind with the way he was being ushered away. He felt sick for a moment, like it was his first time on the gyroscope all over again. It was a heavy weight, settled into his carapace, knotted and ugly and vile. He never used to feel like this. He didn’t remember a time on Erid he’d ever felt like this.
“Grace,” he said dumbly, and floundered for a moment. He backtracked, trying to hear and listenthrough all the talk around him. “Wait. Crew is… dead. Radiation poisoning, it’s an invisible, new thing. Alien Grace told me. Grace is on new ship, from planet by star Sol, called Earth. We worked together to find solution to star-eaters.”
He wished he could shut off his hearing like Grace could close his eyes to avoid the sudden silence and oppressiveness in the hall. He knew the bridge was made of solid xenonite, but it felt like the entire thing was melting beneath his claws.
He knew this was coming. He had known it was coming, the inevitable explanation as to why the little engineer that stayed cooped up all day was the sole survivor out of a crew totaling twenty-four. Why he couldn’t have done something.
He wondered if he’d be ostracized for it. If they’d cast him out for not saving anyone, even though he knew that’s an impossible thought. An absurd one. What was wrong with him, believing the very worst would happen?
Right now, all he wanted to do was check on Grace. He needed to see him again, to explain to him everything about Erid, to be with the man who’d been so willing to sacrifice himself utterly and completely for his world.
He wanted to be with him more than he wanted to reunite with Adrian, and that scared him. He never had feelings like this before he left, not even for Adrian. He shouldn’t be terrified of leaving someone’s side, much less to the point of preferring an alien’s company to his mate’s, the mate that he hasn’t seen in decades.
A dreadful part of him thought, Adrian had waited many years. He can wait a few more.
He wanted very badly to see Adrian, but he couldn’t just leave Grace alone. He couldn’t be sure the man would be alright without him, especially if Grace needed to sleep. Rocky’s been the one watching him all this time, just as Grace has been watching him in return, and imagining anyone else do it made ugly, vile feelings boil inside him.
Grace would have a word for what he felt, surely. While psychology seemed severely misunderstood and understudied in both Eridian and human cultures, Rocky got the impression that humans were further along in the diagnosis and treatment of mental ailments than his people were.
Grace had, after all, talked extensively about the possibilities as to how his own crew died, which led to more discussion on why they were put in an induced coma in the first place, to which Grace finally regaled to Rocky the impact of staying isolated in a small space with only two other people to see daily, and how that sort of thing just really ought not to happen naturally and would cause irreparable psychological harm that could’ve led to a premature end of the mission, and—
Well, that’s all a very long-winded way of saying that Rocky decided that as humans weren’t nearly as social creatures as Eridians were. They were more akin to some animal species on Erid that lived and roamed in packs but still held solitary hunts and such.
With Eridians, every aspect of their life was built upon having someone else there. Someone to sleep with, someone to speak with, someone to watch, someone to watch you. That all said, they could be apart and solitary; there were many instances of Eridians, young and old, living in relative solitude out of fear or anxiety or past trauma, especially in Erid’s largest cities.
It’s no different than that, Rocky thought. Perfectly treatable. Just a few days, some time with Adrian, and making sure Grace is okay, and—
Rocky didn’t realize he’d been frozen in place, silent with the onslaught of cadences crowding around him until he was being gently led back to the ship where Grace was. Eridians were neat like that, at least compared to Rocky’s and Grace’s relationship. Both of them had to often guess what the other meant, what they were thinking, what they wanted, and that all required further, explicit communication. It was easier when it was just Rocky and an Eridian scientist.
“Grace,” Rocky repeated uselessly. His walk was slow and stiff, like his body thought he was still in space. He felt heavy. He didn’t quite realize what all was happening until his arms gave out, and he settled onto the ground less-than-comfortably before the ship. He could hear Grace through the walls trying to speak with the new Eridians around him from his little pressurized corner of the ship that still held his air, and Rocky could tell by his inflection that Grace must be feeling the same excited-anxious-lost that he felt, too.
It was comforting and sickening to be someone’s support. It was doubly terrible to feel that way about someone else. Rocky and Grace needed each other surely, just by nature of being familiar aliens.
Rocky wondered if Grace ever felt this alone on Earth, surrounded by everyone and in the center of everything, with all the noise flying right over him. If Grace had returned home, Rocky wondered if he would have reacted the same.
Contrary to his fantasies about coming home, Rocky didn’t feel elated. How could he, when he still had so much to explain and do before he slept, so much he had to be with Grace for?
He just felt terribly sad.