Chapter Text
I was asleep when it happened. Rocky, the alien(!!), kept telling me I needed to sleep in the tunnel so he could watch. Which was weird as heck, but I was dealing with an alien here, so there was bound to be some wild culture shock. And for the record, I was doing great at the “sharing cultures” thing. I’d slept in the tunnel once to appease the strange guy, but sleeping on the strangely lukewarm, jagged Xenonite wrecked my back.
So, I’d lied and said there were some ‘very important tests I needed to watch over for the next few hours’. I’m not proud of it, but a guy’s gotta sleep.
I had started a few chemical and radiometric assays to try to see what could possibly be harming the astrophage. Nothing had seemed to affect the little buggers, but I kept trying different things. Currently my samples were shoved some in various acids that were on board… which I vaguely remember maybe doing before I got here. Maybe. Possibly.
Things were still incredibly fuzzy and my memory had more holes than a swiss cheese.
I’d also shoved all the data into the computer and clicked every possible statistical test for it to run with the data Mary had gathered the last month or so since I’d made contact with Rocky.
Figuring out how to communicate has taken a lot of my focus lately. Sue me. And crunching the numbers of the Tau Ceti’s funky Petrova again felt redundant. I hadn’t figured it out since I arrived, and from what I’d been seeing, it was staying pretty steady numbers wise. Consistency was nice, I just wish I could figure out why the numbers were the way that they are. There might be something I’m missing in the data, so I wasn’t going to just not have the computer crunch the numbers just ‘cause I found a new alien(!!) to attempt to communicate with and befriend. Outright ignoring data was basically a science sin.
Almost as bad as forgetting to balance a centrifuge.
Once everything was set up in the lab, I stumbled through the ship, eyelids half closed. Hopping through the narrow tunnel between the lab and my bedroom, I yanked my boots off and threw them to the side. Trying to make a mental note to not trip over wherever they’d landed when I woke up. I untied the orange jump suit from around my waist and stepped out of one leg smoothly, but with my other leg I had to do a little kick move that made me feel a bit like a dog.
Sitting on the edge of the thin mattress, I stared over the thin metal frame of my glasses at the grey lump of fabric bundled up in the far corner of his room. The sweatpants had been Yao’s, and were distressingly comfy, however they were too far. And maybe ‘Doctor Ryland Grace’ was a ‘sleep in boxers and a t-shirt’ kind of guy. That didn’t feel right considering how much I loved being swaddled in both those sweats and the quilt, but what the hey, I might as well try it and see.
That was the laziness speaking. I just really didn’t want to get up, so I didn’t.
The next thing I knew, a piercing screaking alarm that woke me. Adrenaline rushed through my system as I bolted upright and out of the small personal space. Mary’s alarm blared between the words:
“MOVEMENT DETECTED IN MED BAY. BIOHAZARD IN MED MAY. UNKNOWN INDIVIDUAL IN MED MAY.”
I… had no idea what to do with that, but I’d be at the Med Bay in less than five second so I’d—
Oh, oh g-d. That was a lot of blood.
And in the center of it was a person curled up under half coagulated chunks.
I covered my mouth and nose holding back a gag. Acid burned the back of my throat, but I held it together. For the first time, being a bit of a mess worked in my favor, and the open box of gloves were on the floor near the doorway and I snapped them on. I grimaced as I stepped forward, my bare feet slippery in the too-warm blood. Maybe the gloves were pointless, but I… tried.
I crouched next to the person, planning to gently flip them over to get a better look at their face, but the moment I made physical contact a voice filled my body. It shook me to my core and vibrated all of my bones. My vision blinked out as the eerie layered voice spoke.
“My pet wished to see the stars. He proved himself to be worthy of this gift. Care for him, Ryland Grace.”
As fast as it had started, it ended. I gasped, mind aching, body now trembling. I looked down and the blood was all gone.
Or well not all of it, but most of it was.
“What the heck was that?” I mumble to myself, still panting.
I’d likely never know. I hated not knowing, but there were bigger priorities like getting Mary to chill the alarm, and making sure this person was alright. And the over-arching ‘save two worlds by figuring out how to stop the stars from dying.’ No pressure, or anything.
Finally turning them over, I felt my heart squeeze.
It was a kid. He would’ve fit in perfectly in my middle school classroom, If I ignored the blood splatter on his clothes and mats in hair. The clump of untangled black hair was in that length that was either ‘I’m growing it out as a statement’ or ‘I’m having a crisis’. A few awkward hairs poked out from his chin and under his lip. There was a soft curve to his cheeks of stubborn baby fat. There were dark circles under the kid’s eyes, and he looked tired while still being unconscious. His limbs were just a little longer than the ratty patched clothes, giving him that classic gangly pre-teen look. There was also a concerning amount of knives on this kid, strapped to the strange harness-vest thing. One even looked like a bone saw?
Yikes.
“Mary, cut the alarm.” I wheeze out, feeling completely out of my depth. At least it was quiet now.
I fumbled with the buckles and straps and let the whole thing clatter to the side. It.. wasn’t the right order to check for health but seeing a child under the disappearing blood and having some freaky supernatural totally explainable interaction with a demon unknown entity, had thrown me off my game.
Not like I had game from the few memories of me losing it under a lab table on the Vat or in the dark closet in my tiny apartment. The fact I hadn’t had a total breakdown in front of Rocky was a miracle. Or maybe something about volunteering for a suicide mission really messed with my sliding scale for my anxiety.
I was getting off topic, the kid was more important. I check the kid’s pulse, steady– if a bit fast. His breathing sounded fine, no bubbling from his recent blood drowning experience. I pull up one of his eyelids to check for a pupil reaction.
And oh boy did I get a reaction.
The kid gasped and bolted upright. His skull had to be made of freaking titanium as it clashed with mine. Wowza, that hurt. I rubbed the side of my head and the kid scrambled back and gripped his shirt by his shoulder, a panicked whine was aborted as his dark eyes locked onto the knife vest thing. He lunged for the vest and I caught him.
He was pretty scrawny, but wriggled in my grip. I wrestled him away from the knives, I really didn’t want to be stabbed today. Holding onto my arm by my wrist, he twisted his hands in opposite directions hard. I felt my skin scream as it started to split. I let go for the tiniest moment and he slipped out. I was able to grab his ankle before he totally escaped and he slammed back into the floor with a yelp. I dragged him back, his fingers squeaking against the smooth floor as he tried to find purchase. He growled like a wild animal.
I was too tired for all of this, so I just collapsed over him. Pinning the kid’s arms under his torso and my body weight. He started to kick and I just wrapped one of my legs around his and hooked my ankle around my calf, locking his legs in place as well. He kept fighting and howling like a banshee, but the false gravity of the spin-drive was doing most of the hard work for me so I just laid there.
This was what people get for interrupting my nap.
He did turn his head just enough to bite my upper arm, but wasn’t at an angle good enough to do more than get a mouth full of my sleeve and slobber everywhere. It was gross, but no worse than the time my student, Linda had projectile vomited on me.
I blinked. I would’ve been totally fine if that memory stayed missing. Nasty.
The kid slumped, all the fight leaving him.
“You finished?” I mumbled, my mouth was too close to his ear, and I didn’t want to blast out his eardrum like he’d done to me.
The kid didn’t react. Ah, shoot. I craned my neck down to get a better view. My glasses had fallen off my nose, as they are one to do, and he was too close to be clear without them. But the kid looked Asian. English is a common language, but it wasn’t the most common. I had… no idea where this kid was from.
At least if I figured out the language I had the fancy translators Stratt had installed on the laptops. It’d be better than his past month or so with Rocky.
“Where are you from, kiddo?”
That got a reaction. “I’m not a kid.”
Nice, English. I could definitely work with that. “Sorry, from my view you look, what, eleven? Twelve?”
“I’ve been apprenticed for seven years.” The kid spat out. “My age is irrelevant.”
“Ooooooookay.” I had no idea what that had to do with… anything. But being a teacher made me good at rolling with the punches. I think. Or maybe I just was like that naturally. But this did feel more like a teacher skill. “What were you apprenticed for?”
He looked up from the corner of his eye like I was the dumbest man on Earth, before using his head to point in the direction of the knife covered vest. “Butcher.”
“Huh, okay.” Max this kid was fourteen, a small fourteen. Which meant he started carving up animals at seven? Maybe even four or five? Insane. “Where are you from? Or better yet how did you get here?”
The kid stiffened. “Where are you from?”
“I asked first, kid.”
“Not a kid.”
“Agree to disagree.” The ping that was set to let me know when the assay needed the next step chimed. Dang, bad timing. They might just will get an additional amount of time to sit in the acid. That was fine, not the best science but there was a child who had somehow teleported(??) onto the Hail Mary from who knows where, I needed to sort this out. Or figure out if I was completely losing my mind. This all being a wild hallucination might actually make more sense than the alternatives of wormholes or space demons. “Alright, let’s start over, what’s your name?”
“Let me go.” He growled, wiggling under my body once again. I was suddenly confronted with the fact I was laying on top of a child in nothing but a T-shirt and some boxers. Oh dear. I really wanted to let go, this was completely inappropriate. But I also really didn’t want to be stabbed.
“Do you promise to stop fighting me?”
The kid settled for a moment and nodded.
“No stabbing?”
“No stabbing.” The kid whispered.
I let go, and shuffled off. The kid rolled towards his knife vest and immediately slipped it back on. I hadn’t noticed in my panic to get it off the kid, but there was a small resin coin with sting looped through a hole and then around one of the knife straps. I couldn’t quite see what was in the clear coin as the kid’s thumb was in the way. He tucked in into the edge of one of the sheathes over the smaller carving knife that sat at his shoulder. The tension in him popped the moment the coin was safely tucked away. His shoulders slumped with a satisfied sigh as his fingerless gloved hands stroked down the various sharp implements.
I tried to mentally do the time dilation math in my mind wondering if I’d screwed up somewhere. But came out with the same assumption. It’s been fourteen years since I left, max… excluding the huge question mark of how this kid jumped solar systems away in a seeming blink of an eye, could Earth have gotten this bad? That a child used what looked like a mix of old-timey surgeon tools and hunting knives like an emotional support stuffie?
I shuddered. It could, and likely did. While I believed that people could be incredibly good and heroic like Yao and Ilyukhina. It also could be cold and pragmatic, like Stratt. Humanity was never great at wide scale resource management. Sharing was hard for a lot of folks and even with nuking Antarctica the outlooks hadn’t been great for there to be enough to go around. The world governments signed papers saying this wouldn’t lead to violence. But clearly in some areas it had. I really needed to figure out what was going on with Tau Ceti ASAP.
And where the heck this kid came from.
“Alright, introductions. I’m Grace.” I smile at the boy. He shuffled back to the far corner, his back pressed deeply into some of the cabinets. His eyes wide and he looked like he was on the brink of tears.
“I’m sorry.” For a brief moment I think this kid's name is sorry. But then a quiet tear rolled down his cheek. He rubbed his grimy fingerless glove against his cheek, wiping the tear away, but leaving a reddish brown streak. “I’m sorry.”
“What for?” I kept my voice low and soothing. I stay put, kneeling in the middle of the med bay. But I desperately want to comfort the boy.
“Your arm.” He pointed to my weeping abrasion. “And, I, uh, bit you?”
“It’s….” I sigh, “not fine, but also it is fine, ya know?”
The kid looked at me like I had grown two heads, which at this point I was tempted to check as my life had totally gone off the rails. Why not grow a second head! Maybe I’ll wake up body swapped with Rocky! Or get tunneled back in time to before the sun was dying! Might as well expect the unexpected at this point. It almost felt like I was on Star Trek, if the writers decided to feel a bit sadistic for his series.
“What…” His voice cracked horribly, and I failed at holding back a small grin. “What is my punishment, sir?”
I frown at that. “No punishment. This is all super… weird. And overwhelming I’m sure. And I’m not going to fault you for being scared. Also, drop the sir, I’m just Grace.” I rotate my hand in a small circle prompting him to respond with his name.
The kid just stared blankly. Or… not totally blank, there was a small spark of apprehension. I sigh, I’m getting nowhere fast.
“I… I need to be punished. I broke the commandments. I’ve harmed an Elder. I’ve sinned.”
Ah, that’s some religious stuff. I don’t feel like poking at that hornets nest right now. Also, ouch, I’m thirty-six (sort-of). To this pre-teen I might seem ancient, but the term ‘Elder’ seems a bit much.
“Alright, what do you think would be a reasonable punishment?”
“You… want me to choose? My punishment?” The apprehension dripped off the kid’s words.
“I want you to let me know what you think I should do. As clearly ‘nothing’ wasn’t good enough.” This was something I’d done for students from time to time. It usually gave me an unfortunate glimpse into their home lives, but I needed to see what level of hell this kid emerged from. My guess was at least around level four or five.
“Ten lashes, and halved rations for a month.”
Horror dripped over me and pooled in my gut like the mysterious disappearing blood from earlier. The kid misinterpreted my shock and shrunk back.
“No, sorry, not harsh enough.” The kid’s eyes darted around, scared. “Fifteen lashes and quarter rations for two months.”
“Oh, kiddo, no. No, no, no.” I started to crawl forward, only to freeze when the kid startled back and slammed his head back into the thankfully smooth part of the cabinet drawers.
“I… I can’t do twenty again. I… I’d die.” The tears are back in full swing this time. He was hyperventilating hard enough to make some of the knives clink against each other.
We’re going to be needing scientific notation for the level of hell this kid was dragged from. I feel like I’m going to be sick.
“I’m not going to hit you.” The kid didn’t seem to hear me.
“I’m– I’m useful. I can read. Good with knives. Really good with knives. Know anatomy. Medic training, too. Promise, I can– I can do– I– I–”
“Breath, kiddo. Breath. In and out.” I coach the kid through some deep breaths, shoving my own panic to the side. After more time than I wished, and another chime from Mary– my other assay is ready– the kid slumps over, looking half asleep.
I was floundering and totally out of my depth. “Do… you want water? Food? The beds are just in the other room, if you want to take a nap.”
“Water… would be nice.” His voice was timid. It was such an odd change from the thrashing and screaming and violence from earlier.
“One water, coming right up.” I say with a smile before standing. I stumbled dramatically as I’d been sitting on my feet long enough they’d gone numb. I had caught myself on the edge of the medical cot, feeling like an idiot. But out of the corner of my eye I saw the smallest uptick on the kid’s lips.
Glad my clumsiness had some unexpected perks.
I get a water pouch and very slowly make my way to the kid, crouching as far as I can while still being able to pass it over. He was slow to wrap his trembling fingers around it, but once it was in his grip, he snapped it back like a viper. I watched as he ripped it open and downed half the pouch in a few gulps.
“We have more.”
“What?”
“If you want more water, we have more. Same goes for food.” Technically at some point we would run out, but even with two of us, we had quite a bit before there would be concerns.
The kid perked up at the mention of food. Very normal kid behavior. It was a sure fire way to gain a kid's trust. It didn’t last long as he shrunk back down and shook his head, instead he sucked on the pouch through a slight pout. The kid’s stomach growled, and I smiled, ignoring how red the kid’s ears now were.
“Well, I for one am hungry. I know we got some chicken ramen, I can heat you up some if you want.”
“What’s… ramen?” He shifted forward, eyes wary but curiosity sparked in them.
I gaped at the kid before breaking out in a wide smile. “Oh, kid, I’m so excited to blow your freaking mind. Ramen is fantastic, it’s noodles in broth and it’s definitely more salt than a person needs in a day, but it’s totally worth the health risks. Promise.”
The kid just stared at me and I realized I should probably just… get to making the food.
“Alright I’ll be right back,” I jumped up and the kid flinched. I felt bad, but made sure to keep what I hoped was a disarming smile on my face. “Oh, you got food allergies I gotta look out for?”
“I wouldn’t have survived long if I reacted to food.” The kid sneered. “Allergies make one weak, and the weak die. As an Elder you should know this.”
I… don’t even know where to begin to unpack that one. Instead of going on a teaching tirade I shrug. “Allergies are just allergies, and we can definitely work around them. So if you realize there is a food you react to, or even one you just don’t like, going forward, let me know, alright?”
“You’re…” The kid trailed off. A strange pinched expression on his face. “What?”
“Iiiiiiiiii’m Grace!” I said in a horribly Tony the Tiger impression while doing jazz hands. Simon, once more looked at me like I had grown a second head. I felt my face start to burn with embarrassment. I had gotten in the habit of doing stupid over the top things as Rocky and I learned to communicate. I was about to run off to deal with the social anxiety that came with totally bombing a conversation with a child, when I heard a very quiet murmur.
“Simon.” The kid’s eyes darted around before finally settling on me. “I’m Simon.”
I grin. “Nice to meet ya, Simon. I’ll be right back with the ramen.”
As I ran, tasks popped up in my brain like popcorn kernels heating up in a pot of oil. I needed to finish the assays. I needed to talk to Rocky about our next steps. I needed to ask the kid–Simon– about a billion and one questions. I needed to run tests on the kid. I needed to research how to help the kid deal with whatever trauma he obviously had. I needed to get pants on.
My thoughts stopped as I tripped over one of my discarded boots from earlier. I kicked them both to the side with a huff. I needed to clean up after myself.
But most importantly, I needed to make some ramen.