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When Grace wakes up, something is off.
Nothing seemed too different when he went to bed last night, but as he’s woken up by the ship’s artificial day and night cycle, he feels like he’s aged several years. His body hurts in ways it definitely shouldn’t, he has a killer headache, and it feels like every movement takes twice as much energy as it’s supposed to.
There’s something strange about the room, too. Last he checked, there wasn’t supposed to be this much glass everywhere. Maybe it’s not glass, it seems too thick and it refracts light a bit oddly, but what else could it be? The placement of it is odd, like it’s meant to create a layer of separation between himself and something else. Grace does not remember building this kind of addition to the ship, nor does he know what it would even be for. Surely the Hail Mary isn’t designed to make random architectural changes to itself mid-mission, right?
“Grace awake, question?”
Grace startles so hard he falls off the bed. Whose voice was that?! That did not sound like the Mary’s voice, nor did it sound like another living person. It was some kind of TTS voice with… music underneath it? He would assume he left a movie on or something, but the words were obviously directed at him personally, so that can’t be it. Has someone invaded his ship? And what would they even want? “Who are you? Who’s there?” He tries to yell commandingly, but it comes out as more of a weak yelp.
“Is Rocky. Did Grace have another nightmare, question?” The voice starts to sound sympathetic and concerned. Something crawls towards him, looking down at him from his bed. Was it there with him the whole night? What was it doing? How does it know his name? It looks like if a boulder and a spider had a baby, and it’s covered in the same glass that seems to have generated onto the Mary from nowhere.
Even though it’s not trying to hurt him right now, Grace is disoriented and confused, and he doesn’t know if this thing has other intentions that it’s not sharing yet. He scrambles away from the bed and ends up hitting his back against the wall. “Please don’t come any closer! I don’t know what you want but you don’t have to hurt me! Just - stay over there and we can talk about it, okay? Please?”
The thing, the alien, listens to Grace’s request and stops moving, even though it seems a little hesitant to do so. “Hurt you, question? Grace acting strange. Rocky not want anything from Grace except not to hurt self.” It waves a limb in a way that looks weirdly similar to how a human would make a ‘calm down’ gesture.
Grace feels tears burning behind his eyes. Alongside the confusion and fear, the headache he'd woken up with is worsening, tension building underneath his skull and hurting more every moment. “Why are you here then? I don't understand, how did you even get onto this ship?” The alien sways back and forth, like it wants to respect Grace's wishes and stay back but also wants to come help him, and it freezes when Grace flinches so hard that he accidentally slams his head into the wall behind him.
“Grace not remember, question?” it asks, then twitches its limbs again, answering itself only a moment later in a low mumble. “Memory problem… like when woke up at Tau Ceti… you not say this could happen. New symptom…” It softens its voice significantly, though underneath it Grace can still hear panic, or at least, music-like tones that he thinks he can identify as panicked without being sure of how he knows that. “Grace is okay, safe. Rocky will not hurt you or come close without permission. Lapse is… most likely temporary… unsure how or why, but Grace has recovered memory before, should come back this time also.”
“Memory problem…?” He winces as a new spike of pain shoots through his head. The alien - Rocky, it said its name was Rocky - lets out some trilling sounds that don't get converted to words. It's true that Grace doesn't remember parts of his life, but he hasn't experienced lapses in memory while aboard the ship… at least, not to his knowledge. Would he even remember them if he had? “So… everything's so different here because I don't remember it changing? You could be lying to me.”
Rocky shows no signs of frustration with Grace's confusion, though its patience seems a little forced, disguising what seems to be worry and fear. It’s hard to explain why, but despite his own assertion, Grace doesn’t actually believe it’s lying to him. Just as it promised, it doesn't move closer again. “No lying. I promise. What is last thing Grace remembers, question?”
“Um…” The question forces him to think about it, and he very nearly cries out when the headache starts to throb again. He can feel himself shaking hard against the floor, the stress and pain blurring his surroundings. “Tau Ceti… I came to study the Petrova Line here, didn't I?” He doesn't know who he's asking.
“Yes, but Grace left Tau Ceti long time ago. Mission is done. Grace and Rocky saved stars together. Now we are… returning home.”
Grace tries very hard to process this, but it slips away from him like grains of sand through his fingers. Some part of him trusts what Rocky is saying, but he doesn't know why or how Rocky earned that trust. “Home? Earth? That doesn't make sense… if… if we're both going home, then why are we together? Your home can't be the same as mine…”
Rocky lets out a low chirp that Grace's brain translates as sounding sad. “Not Earth. Is long story. Unexpected problem destroyed fuel supply. Only enough to go to one place. Grace… chose to bring Rocky home.”
“I… I did?” Grace sucks a breath in through his teeth as the pain continues to flare up in angry bursts. What Rocky's saying makes perfect sense and yet it makes no sense at all, and it's all just too much to process. He's starting to feel like he's outside of time, jumbled up between past, present, and future. The things Rocky's telling him and the things he thinks he knows seem to collide in a blur, collapsing, and the memories he can't quite access bang at the walls.
“Grace come back to bed. Rest. Everything will be okay.”
“Are you - are you going to stay there?” Grace honestly doesn't know how he wants Rocky to answer that question. He knows so little about Rocky right now, and fears the knowledge he doesn't have, but at the same time, an instinct urges him to trust it. No, ‘it’ doesn’t feel right anymore - trust him.
Rocky hesitates again. “Will go where Grace wants Rocky to go. Not want to make you more afraid. I would like…” He pauses, clicking his fingers together in what appears to be a nervous fidgeting motion. “Would like to help Grace get back up. Worried about head damage, makes human unstable, and so does fear. But Rocky will not do anything if Grace still… not trusting. Will not do anything without your permission.”
Over and over again, Rocky keeps emphasizing ‘permission’. He seems very bothered by the idea of doing anything Grace doesn't explicitly approve of. Is it some cultural thing among its alien species, or an accommodation he makes for Grace's sake?
Rocky being up on the bed already when Grace fell off of it implies that they were sleeping in the same bed. If Rocky's consistent about his approach to consent, then… there must be a version of Grace that agreed to that arrangement. And why would he do that unless this alien was completely trustworthy?
“Okay… you can help.” Grace carefully comes away from the wall, shifting forward as Rocky finally comes down from the bed. The instinctual fear that he’d initially felt has almost completely faded under the constant reassurance of Rocky’s good intentions. Amnesia does seem like a credible explanation - the more he thinks about it, the more he realizes that he’s missing memories he knows he should have.
God, his head hurts. Each one of Rocky’s steps closer hits the ground heavily and makes his ears ring. By the time Rocky finally stops in front of him, he’s gripping his head in shaking hands and mentally begging for the pain to stop.
“... Can I hug, question?”
“Yes…?”
Within moments, Rocky’s limbs are carefully wrapping around Grace’s body, seeming to know exactly what places to avoid and what position is the most comfortable. The feeling of it is instantly dizzying, tugging at the memories that Grace’s mind is keeping hidden. He knows this embrace, he’s sure he does. He slumps forward tiredly, thinking about how even though everything else feels wrong, at least this one thing feels right.
“I don’t think I can get back up there right now.”
“Grace can stay here. Though you will complain later about hurting from sitting on floor. Squishy human muscles apparently not strong enough to rest long on hard places.”
The teasing brings another burst of familiarity, strong enough to bring a hesitant smile to his face. Rocky must’ve heard that exact complaint many times before. Grace and Rocky must be quite close. “If you and I are friends, then you must be worried about me. I mean, I don’t really remember, but… I’m sorry, anyway, for causing trouble.”
“No worry about that. Rocky is used to Grace being fragile and having weird human problems. As long as Grace remembers soon, Rocky will be fine.”
That might not be as reassuring as Rocky had intended it to be, but Grace will take it. It’s not like he’s in any state to argue, anyway - he’ll save that discussion for when he recovers his memory. When, not if. He can’t afford to think of it in any other terms. He has to overcome this; if not for his own sake, then for Rocky’s, who is definitely worrying about him and refusing to be straight about it.
Grace tries to mumble out some kind of apology, but he doesn’t get very far with it before his eyes start to close, fatigue taking over. Some part of him wonders if it’s important for him to stay awake, but most of him is exhausted and wrung-out from this whole ordeal, and the way Rocky holds him is far too comfortable for him to put up too much of a fight.
It’s hard to tell if he actually sleeps - the headache makes everything feel hazy, so he thinks he might just be dozing - but at some point, the pain starts to clear away, and he finds it much easier to think. Things come back to him in waves, making him feel more than a little bit disoriented, but it helps that Rocky is still hugging him tightly. The sensation of being held, of slightly warm xenonite against his skin, gives him something to focus on.
From meeting Rocky, to their disaster of a fishing trip on Adrian, to parting ways with bittersweet goodbyes, to turning back to save Rocky and begin their journey to Erid. Everything comes back as though it never left, and though Grace can never be certain of his memory's stability due to the amnesia he first woke up with, he begins to believe more and more that this was, as Rocky said earlier, only a temporary lapse.
Eventually, he’s as confident as he can be that all the memories he had before this morning are returned to their proper places. Aside from some residual anxiety and a lingering tremor, Grace thinks the episode has pretty much passed.
“Rocky, I’m sorry,” he says, finally returning the embrace in full force. “I really must have scared you. I didn’t even think to warn you that something like that could happen… I didn’t know.”
“Grace remember, question?” Rocky’s tone is hesitant. He was so patient that whole time, trying not to scare Grace or make him feel uncomfortable. For some reason, that’s the part that makes Grace start to tear up.
“Yeah, I remember. I’m sorry.”
Rocky taps a free limb on the ground, mildly agitated. “No apology, not your fault. Rocky support Grace like always. Things happen and we figure them out. Rocky and Grace both okay.”
Grace sighs heavily, trying to banish the leftover fear with a few good deep breaths. “That sucked. But I think you handled it just as well as you could have. If it happens again - which I really hope it doesn’t, but if it does - at least you’ll know what to do.” He’s about to thank Rocky for being so gentle, but holds that one back for now, knowing that Rocky’s just going to wave it off and say something like ‘don’t thank me, of course I’d be nice, you’re being stupid’.
“... Rocky will search on thinking machine, find cause of lapse and how to prevent.” As expected, Rocky jumps right into the fixer mentality.
“We’ll do that together. There might not be an easy way to prevent it in the future, but it’s a good idea to know why it happens.” Grace has a couple of ideas regarding the cause of this, and if he’s right, there’s probably no way to easily solve it while they’re still onboard. It might even be something chronic, something permanent, which Grace can’t think about right now or he’ll fall apart. But if there are any mitigation strategies they can use, it would be good to know them. “Are we going to do that now, or…?”
Rocky doesn’t move. “No. Hug is not done.”
Grace hugs him a little tighter. “I know you don't want me to apologize,” he says, “but I am sorry that I keep scaring you. I know I give you a lot to worry about, and even though it's not really my fault, I just… I wish I wasn't stressing you out so much. And it's gonna get worse before it can get better.” He hesitates, then adds, “Sometimes I feel like it's not fair that I'm the one that needs your help all the time. Feels like I don't do anything for you.”
“Before we left for home first time, Grace gave Rocky human thinking machine, and even though I had no gift to return gesture, Grace said ‘you gave me everything’. Grace gave Rocky everything too. Would do anything to help you or make you happy and still would not be enough to repay you. Grace needs more care, is okay. Cause stress, is okay. As long as Rocky and Grace can stay together, will accept any burden.”
Grace knows, intellectually, what type of love that is. He can't remember the last time he experienced it, though. He doesn't think he has any memory of anyone treating him this way, as if it was so easy to promise such devotion. “Unconditional love,” he whispers. “It’s the same for me…”
“No conditions, yes.” Rocky does eventually pull back from the hug, but he doesn’t go far. “So Rocky will help and Grace will accept. Even with no memory, Grace seem to trust Rocky to help, so should trust easily when have memory.”
He did, didn’t he? Once again, Rocky’s logic is flawless. “Okay, you’ve got me there. But the same goes for you, you know? It goes both ways. So if you ever need anything, just tell me and I’ll do it.”
“Of course. Grace can be helpful when not tripping over own feet and slamming self into wall.”
Grace chuckles and takes the hint, allowing the conversation to move on. They take some time to chat about random things, each knowing that the other isn’t quite ready to move away yet.
Things will continue to happen to them both that they can’t control, and many of those things will be painful. They’ll suffer, they’ll worry for the other, they’ll fall and pick each other back up. The most important thing is that as long as they stay together, none of that will need to be dealt with alone. They may have started out by themselves, grasping at the dark and hoping for a miracle, but the struggles they face have become a little less scary now that they have a friend.