Archive of Our Own

The part of having an alien roommate that no one warns you about is how hard it’s going to be to find a TV show to watch together before bed.

Rocky and I figure out about three months into our journey to Erid that we’re going to need a routine. Turns out those are pretty important when you’re on a three-year stint in an unchanging spaceship in the void of space, time literally stretching around you. And by this point, the 24-hour day has lost all meaning due to my insomnia. “Sleep when you’re tired and/or when you have the time and/or when Rocky bullies you into it” was my standard operating procedure for the duration of the Tau Ceti mission. But without the constant adrenaline crashes and exhaustion from back-breaking spacewalks, it’s really hard to fall asleep when I should. And it’s actually going to drive me crazy. 

So three months in, after I accidentally stay up for 31 hours straight, I program Mary to keep the cabin lights to a strict 24-hour day-night cycle and not listen to my protests unless I use our “it’s an emergency I swear” safeword. And to get my brain in the swing of things, I try to set some pre-bedtime routines with Rocky.

Rocky, who says he wants to learn about Earth culture but hates all of my suggestions for TV shows.

“Seizing with eating-orifice causes turning into blood siphoning monster, question?” 

I sigh. “Yeah, Rock.” Eridian doesn’t have words for bite or mouth, and definitely not for vampire, so Rocky has been calling them by his language’s best approximation. 

“For what reason, question?” 

It’s about now that I realize my mistake. I pause season 1, episode 1 of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. “I reproduce, I guess? That’s how it spreads. It’s like a disease.”

“But disease is not real.”

“No, vampirism isn’t real.” 

Rocky’s carapace chitters. “Good good good. Blood siphon monster not good.”

“Oh, I mean… Well. Some animals on Earth do suck blood. There’s mosquitoes, these little bugs that fly around and land on you. And leeches. And there’s vampire bats. I think that’s kind of where humans got the idea for vampires. But humans don’t do this, that’s made up.”

“Fake stories and fake animals,” Rocky warbles. “Stupid stupid stupid.”

“Hey! This is a good show! Or, well… Kind of. The guy that wrote it is so known for screwing things up that his name has become a verb meaning to screw up.” 

Rocky bristles. “Why Grace show Rocky screwed up show, question?”

(Whatever he says there is significantly more profane than screwed up. The root chord of the word is the same as vomit which means it’s probably one of the strongest curse words Eridians have.) 

“Because I like it. I never said I had taste. Sorry, bud, this was a bad idea.” 

“Earth has entertainment that is not fake,” Rocky insists. I hear a modal modifier in there that means this statement must be true. 

He wants more realism, apparently. I could just show him Planet Earth and call it a day, but I think I might break down if I have to watch that, and then I’ll have to put up with Rocky’s fussing over my leaking, which is his language’s best approximation of the word crying. I’d probably sleep better once I’d cried myself out, but at what cost? 

“There are shows that are less made up,” I concede. I’ll rewatch Buffy on my own time, God knows I’ve got plenty of it. 

But then he doesn’t understand any of the humor in Friends. He’s bored to tears (metaphorically) by Sex in the City, plus I end up having to explain gender roles and heterosexual sex to a guy whose species doesn’t do either.

Then, two days later, I make my big mistake: I show him Grey’s Anatomy. The pilot episode features a whole parade of mysteriously sick humans the doctors don’t know how to treat. They get sicker and sicker. A woman has a seizure. A man goes under the knife and dies.

Rocky’s lidar detector slips out of his hand and falls to the floor. I shut the computer on my lap, lean close against the side of Rocky’s xenonite ball, and apologize.

“Bad bad bad.”

“I know. I’m sorry.”

“Why do humans tell fake stories that are bad bad bad, question?” 

“I don’t know. Because it’s made up, I guess? All this bad stuff happens and we’re scared of it and it’s safer to explore it in stories.”

Rocky hums, a low sound I can barely hear, which means it’s around 20 Hertz. The sound waves rattle the xenonite and tickle my cheek. This close, my skin is semi-transparent to him, like stained glass. He can probably hear my digestive tract doing peristalsis. He can probably hear my heart.

He says nothing for a long time. The vents at the top of his carapace hiss, ejecting extra waste heat that ripples the light above him like pavement on a hot summer day. Does he know I can see it? 

He’s the temperature of an oven in there, but xenonite is such a good insulator that I can hardly feel it. I wish I could. I press my cheek closer.

“You know, there are shows that are just fun. Pure entertainment, no nutritional value, nothing real or serious.” 

Rocky taps his fingers together repeatedly. “Fine. Show me fun, stupid, fake human entertainment.” 

. . .

So, I accidentally got my alien roommate hooked on Glee. 

I regretted it immediately. Rocky had already started harmonizing along by the end of the first episode, and while I love hearing him sing—he took to human music quickly, enjoying how it blended our two modes of expression—I didn’t love that he had started imprinting on important musical touchstones through Glee covers. He loved Don’t Stop Believing, but when I tried to play him the original version after the episode ended, he waved it off. No Journey. It was Rachel and Finn or nothing.

Maybe one day, eons from now, humans and Eridians will meet up and draft intragalactic peace treaties and form an intragalactic criminal court. Then I could be tried for my crimes against human- and Eridian-kind. But as it is, I’m probably going to get away with it.

Or, well, maybe not. I’m going to have to watch Glee every night because Rocky won’t listen to any of my protests; he pulls up episodes on his own life-supported laptop if I refuse to do it on mine. It’s a fitting punishment. 

“What is he— oh my gosh,” I groan as Mr. Shuester commits yet another egregious workplace infraction. “This man needs to be arrested. Teachers should not do this, Rocky, you gotta believe me.”

“Grace did not lead singing-dancing club as human adolescent teacher, question?”

“No, and I didn’t blackmail my students! Or walk in on them in the showers! Or dance suggestively with them! Oh my gosh, I can’t watch.”

“I ain’t sayin’ she’s a gold digger, but she ain’t messing with no broke, broke,” Rocky intones wordlessly along with Mr. Shue. “Why is it bad to dig for elemental gold, question? Gold is very useful.” 

I bury my face in my hands and groan. 

Though the particulars of our routine leave something to be desired, the pre-bedtime-TV habit does help with the insomnia. Some nights are better than others, but I can usually get to sleep in an hour once the cabin lights shut off. I don’t sleep in the dormitory anymore; I’ve moved my bedroll to the lab so Rocky can get some work done while I’m out. He’s even more insistent on watching me sleep now than he was back at Tau Ceti. He’s been developing an articulated xenonite suit to replace his ball, and most parts of that process are pretty noisy, but there’s some research and planning that he can do quietly without waking me. 

Lately, he’s been spending a lot of that quiet time on his life-supported laptop. The light from the screen fills the cabin with a soft glow that usually makes it a bit easier to fall asleep, like a flickering TV keeping me company in the living room. Tonight, though, sleep won’t come. My legs ache like growing pains and my skin prickles all over, but itching just makes it worse. With my ear against the pillow I can hear the constant whir of the spin drives. I can hear the tap-tap-tap of Rocky’s rocky fingers on the keyboard. 

We’re in the void of space, but it’s never silent here. I never liked silence—I lived in the city for a reason—so I don’t know why I’m craving it now. I don’t know why I can’t stop thinking about when I moved in with my grandma in the boonies outside of Sacramento and slept like the dead for a week.

At some point, my tossing and turning must get old. Rocky chitters. “If Grace will not sleep then say. I want to work on xenonite suit.” 

“I’m trying, leave me alone.”

“Human sleep is fickle.” 

“Oh, is it? I had no idea.”

“You are grumpy.”

“I am tired.” 

“Then sleep.”

“Oh my god.” I bury my face in my pillow and groaned, “I’m just restless.”

“What?”

I lift my face. “I. Am. Restless.”

“New word, but meaning is obvious.” 

“Oh, uh, it’s not literally ‘rest-less.’ It’s a feeling, where my body feels like it just won’t get quiet, it just wants to move. It happens sometimes, especially being all cooped up like this. I’m not as active as I should be lately.” 

Rocky taps his fingers as he thinks. “I do not have word like this. I will use without-rest,” he says. My brain stores it as restless anyway. I’ll plug it into the translation software later. 

“Cool.” I lay my head back down on the pillow and close my eyes, prepared to mind-over-matter myself to sleep. Rocky’s fingers resume tapping on the keyboard again. Just when I’m nearly out, he says:

“I fix.” 

I blink groggily. “Huh?”

“Body wants to move. Ship is small but can still exercise. I build running machine.” The light from the computer gets brighter as Rocky pivots the screen towards me. Through the xenonite barrier I can just make out the image of a hamster wheel. 

“Wha… That’s for animals.”

“It is for running in small spaces. Perfect for Grace.”

“Look up ‘treadmill.’ Build me one of those.”

A few clicks later, Rocky makes a very excited series of sounds. “Perfect perfect perfect!” 

“In the morning,” I remind him.

“Yes. I will design now and build later.”

I had a treadmill in my apartment in San Francisco and I kind of hated the damn thing. I only ever used it when I had to—aka when it was raining outside and I couldn’t do my usual jog through the neighborhood before work. I was always a little worried that I’d fall on my face, and without any visual markers of distance, every mile seemed to drag on and on. 

Now, I want nothing more. I want the burn in my legs and my lungs, I want to run until I collapse and sleep comes easily. I will never run in a wide open space again but if I can have this, at the very least, I will be grateful.

. . .

I’m surrounded by the sky and the tall, tan grasses. Above and below, they form the world in two endless slices. 

I tear through the field as fast as my legs will carry me. The sky does not blink; the waving grasses beat back against me. The wind carves wet, icy tracks down my face. My eyes burn, my legs, and my lungs. They’ll give out before I get out. The horizon does not come any closer, and neither does the fence. I have no plan for scaling it without cutting myself open on the barbed wire. 

I run and I run and I run and I run. I don’t look behind me but I know that as soon as I fall they’ll have me, and I will never see the sky again. Did you know that it’s blue because of a phenomenon called Rayleigh scattering? White light, such as sunlight, actually contains all of the color spectrum within it. It’s got the whole whopping range of frequencies that our eyes can detect. When sunlight hits the gas particles of the atmosphere, it scatters, but shorter frequencies (which look like blue to our eyes) are more easily scattered, so they’re what we see when we look up. It’s also why sunsets look orange or red. When the sun is sinking below the horizon, the light has to travel through more of Earth’s atmosphere before it hits your eyes; by then, the blue light has scattered away, but the longer wavelengths persist.

There’s a rainbow arcing over me, sunlight filtered into its infinite colors. I blink up at it. I won’t make it to the fence, and if I somehow do, I won’t make it over. They tackle me to the grass and I beg until my vocal chords stop listening to my brain and start flapping against each other desperately like a flag in the wind. 

I claw at the dirt to cake it underneath my fingernails. It smells like fresh rain and the earthworms that have enriched it with life, aerating the soil and fertilizing it with their poop. The kids loved learning about that. 

Please, I want to live, I tell my voice to say, but it comes out as a pathetic wheeze. 

When Rocky wakes me, there’s no soil beneath my fingernails. I’m the only life from Earth on this ship, me and my own hardy microbiome. I press the clean pads of my fingers to my cheeks to make sure I’m not crying. 

“Yeah, yeah, I’m up,” I groan as Rocky rams his buckyball-shaped-ball against my thighs for the third time.

“Grace distressed while sleeping.” 

I grab for my glasses. “Just a stress dream. You ever—? No, right, you don’t dream.”

“Resting heart rate is 40 beats per minute faster than normal. Increased leaking from outer pores.”

“Yeah, Rock, like I said, just a bad dream. My brain processes stuff while I sleep, and sometimes it sucks.”

Rocky’s body whistles as he pulls air inward. “Suck suck suck.”

Should I have warned him that that particular term is a euphemism for a vulgar sex act? I had honestly forgotten that until he said it three times over. Oh well. He’s being exposed to much worse from Glee. I feel like a mom on her third kid: whatever, he’ll turn out fine. 

Rocky cycles his weight between different configurations of his five arms. There’s a particular posture to his carapace that I recognize as observing me intently. “Heart rate falling.”

“Exactly. See? I’m okay.”

“Good. Grace drink coffee and get un-stupid, then review walk-wheel design.” 

For a moment, I’m concerned that he’s actually going ahead with the human-sized hamster wheel, before I realize that he’s just approximating the compound word “treadmill” as close as he can. 

I shake my hands out, stretch my legs, and stand. It’s harder than it would have been on Earth, with the Hail Mary generating 1.5g’s of acceleration. It will be even harder on Erid, subjected to 2g’s in whatever enclosure Rocky’s people manage to make for me. 

I groan and get myself some caffeine. At least I’ll have a gosh-darn treadmill.

. . .

Rocky is the best engineer in the known-to-me universe. His work is in the process of saving not one, but two entire civilizations. He’s about a day’s work from finishing a functional EVA suit that will contain 40 atmospheres of pressure. He’s basically never made a mistake, except for the xenonite breeders, which we can forgive because what the heck was even that.

Rocky rocks. But engineering is all about trial and error, and even he can’t build a working treadmill on the first try. Or the second. 

“Apology apology,” he mewls as the belt disconnects from the running bed for the third time. “Must tweak again.”

The word he uses for tweak has an adorable little diminutive tacked onto the end there. I wish I could echo it back to him with my own vocal chords, because it’s so him. He’s always tweaking and tinkering to create near-impossible things out of xenonite-wholecloth. That’s why I can’t even be impatient about the treadmill. 

I rest my chin in the palm of my hand and sip idly at a pouch of coma slurry. I’ve been alternating real-food days with coma slurry days to stave off the inevitable. The coma slurry tastes like chalky sludge. I try not to think about it. “It’ll come. What happened this time?”

“Insufficient traction calculations,” he says, as if that means anything specific.

“Wanna troubleshoot?”

“Grace thinks his wet squishy brain can help, question?” 

“Hey, be nice to my wet squishy brain. It thinks you’re great.”

“I can hear it thinking hard hard hard.” 

“What? Really?”

“No. Silly. I hear blood vessels increasing brain blood flow, but not electrical signals.”

“Huh. Like an fMRI.”

“New word?”

I set about explaining functional magnetic resonance imaging, which uses blood flow as an imperfect proxy for neural activity, to Rocky as he continues tweaking his design. 

It’s a good day, despite how it started and despite how it ends: with episode 4 of Glee. I start questioning all of my life choices as soon as the football team breaks out dancing to Single Ladies during the middle of a game. And then, on top of it all, a kid comes out to his dad and I have to explain—

“New word, question?”

“Gay,” I say with the world’s most patient tone, “means someone who is sexually or romantically attracted to people of the same gender.”

I guess after Sex in the City we’ve graduated to Gender Studies 102. Rocky ends up picking an obscure synonym for happy in Eridian to stand in for the word gay in our weird little interstellar pidgin language. 

“Why gay-person’s father think dance to ‘Singular Females’ is gay, question?” 

“Becuase sometimes gay men are more stereotypically feminine, and the Single Ladies song and dance are by a woman,” I explain. It’s a terrible explanation but it’ll have to do.

“Grace do ‘Singular Females’ dance.”

“Uh. Is that a question?”

“No. Imperative.”

“You’re telling me to do the Single Ladies dance. Question.”

Rocky hops twice on two of his limbs. “Yes.”

“Why?”

“For Rocky entertainment.”

“What, is that all I am to you? A dancing monkey?”

“Dance dance dance. Teach me.”

“You want to learn the Single Ladies dance.”

“Grace Rocky learn together!” 

I go to bed late that night, and it’s entirely Rocky’s fault. Maybe also a little bit Beyoncé’s fault. And mine, too, for allowing it to happen. I can’t even blame Rocky’s puppy dog eyes because he doesn’t have a face, but there’s something about the way his body shivers in anticipation when he wants something that I’m helpless to resist. 

So sue me, we learned the Single Ladies dance together, right there in the lab of the Hail Mary some 12-ish light years from Earth. Consider it penance for my previous Glee crimes, maybe. This one wasn’t even a cover, it was the original! And the original choreography, too! 

By the end of the night, I’m physically exhausted and convinced that the choreo’s even better with five limbs than with four. 

As I settle in for bed, Rocky cycles the airlock to leave his ball and re-enter his own side of the room. He settles in close to the xenonite barrier by my bed, closer than he’s watched me sleep in a while. The light from his laptop screen flickers on the back wall and I nestle deeper in my cocoon of blankets. 

“You are restless still, question?”

My heart thuds. I reach one hand out of my blanket cocoon and press my palm to the barrier. “Not tonight, Rock, I’m all tired out. Thanks.”

He fist-bumps by palm and hums, “Good good good.”

. . .

. . .

. . .

I wake alone. Everything is quiet but the roar of the engines.

All of my crewmates are dead. I can feel it in the silence. They would have filled the ship with their sounds, making it hum, turning it into an island of something known. But now empty soundless empty space has swallowed the ship and I’m the only thing left alive on it. 

No, that’s not true, there’s the Astrophage, tanks full of them as they hurtle us—me—faster and faster away from home. I fucking hate them, more than I have ever hated anything, and for a moment I consider ejecting the fuel bays into space. They killed my friends, indirectly. They are killing my planet, and they are killing our star, and people who were supposed to fix it are corpses now.

It’s just me, for some cosmic joke of a reason, in the impenetrable vacuum. I pound my fists and keen so loudly that my cries resonate through the hull of the ship but they die as soon as they hit the void beyond it. 

I cannot do this. I wait to die, but I just don’t. Then I build an airlock to eject the bodies of my 22 friends; I don’t know if their families will forgive me, if I ever return without them, but I will lose what’s left of my sanity if I have to live a day longer in the nest I’ve made of their bodies. 

I arrive at Tau Ceti far too early. I orbit, and I orbit, and I orbit. 

On Earth, 11.9 light years away, a child is born. He screams because that’s what newborns do: an earsplitting sound to demand protection and food and care. He’s healthy and a good eater and he grows fast. He eats dirt sometimes from the garden out back, but it doesn’t kill him. There’s a phase where he starts collecting earthworms, then caterpillars, then beetles.

He likes the beetles a lot because of their vivid differences. Each type of beetle gets a name, classified by the colors of their wings. Once he learns to read, he starts carrying around a book on identifying insect species under his arm when he goes out back. 

His grandmother lives in the countryside. She’s old and has trouble keeping up with him when he visits for the summers, but some nights she lets him sleep in the backyard in a tent. It’s the very first time he sees the Milky Way, that dash of light across the vast sky on a night when the moon is dark. Space is a vacuum but there is so much in it. He names constellations after beetles, shaping their wings out of stars in his mind. 

In a constellation he names The Scarab, I orbit, and I orbit, and I orbit. I map the star system three times over. I exhaust every idea I can think of to solve the problem of the Astrophage at Tau Ceti, and it doesn’t even take that long. In my low moments I curl up in my workshop near the engines and I don’t get up for days. In my lowest moments, I beg out loud into the nothingness for forgiveness for whatever defect let me, of all people, live. 

The boy is an adolescent now, and he suffers a great loss. He moves to live with his grandmother and he struggles making friends in the new, small town, so he joins a sport called cross-country in the fall and an activity called quiz bowl in the spring. There’s a girl on his quiz bowl team with a pretty smile that likes him, or so the other boys on the team say, so he takes their advice and asks her to the dance. They have an awkward first kiss that night and break up before graduation.

I spend most of my time now talking myself out of just going home. The shame would be unbearable but every day the loneliness chips away at my carapace. I carve the names of my crewmates into my body. It gives me a new idea for using some of the lab equipment to test Astrophage, but it doesn’t go anywhere. It generates reams of data, so much fucking data, that tell me nothing new. 

The Astrophage aren’t a good target for my fury. They don’t need forgiveness; they know nothing, they eat and they reproduce and they live happily surrounded by their brethren.

The adolescent is an adult now and he’s got dreams of impossible things. Just because something works one way doesn’t mean it’s the only way it could be done. Bats and birds flap their wings to fly, a product of convergent evolution, but humankind invented flying machines all on their own, which use similar principles to soar through the sky but still look very different. Why would life be any different? Science, he knows, is all about stripping the universe down to its barest principles; then, and instead of filling in the gaps with what he knows exists, imagining what could exist instead. 

Ryland Grace graduates college and starts a doctorate program. His girlfriend moves in with him, then moves out when they discover it’s something neither of them really wanted—he’s at an all-time low, at that point, having exiled himself from a field he couldn’t imagine would welcome him. He discovers a love of teaching.

When Grace is 33 years old, an amateur radio telescope enthusiast aims her instruments at the sky, and he is mine, please, he is mine. A giant ball of fire explodes underneath a flimsy aluminum rocket ship, and he’s strapped himself in, on his way to me.

When I see his ship on my monitors, my joints give out. I keen so hard that my ship sings and I think the waves could travel the distance to him, even with no medium to propagate. 

When he talks, the fundamental frequency of his voice rattles through my body. It causes sympathetic vibration of the tensile components of my ship. I harmonize with it, just outside the range of his hearing. His singular heart beats a beautiful rhythm and I feel myself sync to it. He is mine and he is here, and we will save the stars. 

. . .

. . .

. . .

I have that dream again, of running and clawing at the earth. Except this time the nightmare doesn’t stop. 

I swear that I’ve already woken up. There’s that unmistakable jolt of returning to consciousness, and the wash of relief that none of that was real—and of grief, too, that the last time I’d ever touch grass was already so many years in the past. The engines of the Hail Mary hum beneath me. I open my eyes to look around the low-lit lab.

But they won’t open. I try again, and nothing, not so much as a twitch of my eyelids. 

The relief chills into horror and rolls in fat droplets down my spine. Something sharp pricks the back of my neck and I yell and wrench away from the needle on pure reflex, but even that doesn’t move my leaden body. 

What’s 2+2? a robotic voice echoes in my head. It almost sounds real, but I know it’s not; whatever is actually in this room with me is far more sinister than Armando. I can feel it behind me, digging fleshy fingers into the top of my spine. 

There’s no fighting the sedative. You can always try, you can scream and cry and beg, but it’s just a chemical and your body’s just an animal, and your fellow humans aren’t like chimps or macaques that will reliably come to save a member of their group when they hear their screams. The person with a knee in your back may hear you scream just fine, but they’re evolved enough to weigh the distress of one against the future distress of billions. 

I don’t feel evolved. I’m a wild thing they’ve hunted and restrained. My ears ring so loudly that I can’t make sense of whatever platitudes they’re giving me, and good, I don’t want to hear it. I can hardly even breathe. A weight has settled over my chest, heavy like a stone; I try to push it off roll it off buck it off and nothing, nothing, there’s nothing I can do—

Something physically pries my eyelids open. In trying to resist, the minuscule muscles around my eyes awaken, reminding my brain how to control them. I blink frantically, screaming internally, and find myself face-to-carapace with Rocky in his brand new xenonite suit. 

He’s perched on my chest like my own personal sleep paralysis demon… oh that’s what this is! I bark a high pitched laugh as the knowledge drains the worst of the panic from my nervous system. It finally quiets the ringing in my ears—which is called pulsatile tinnitus, by the way, it’s caused by the blood flow changes that occur to prepare you for fight-or-fight. Now I can finally recognize Rocky’s voice, two octaves higher than the normal speaking register.  

“Grace Grace Grace Grace if hear please respond.” He pokes my face with one hand as he grasps my shoulders with two others, as if he’s prepared to drag me down to the dormitory so Armando can give me medical attention. Thanks to the suit, it wouldn’t even kill him to do it this time. 

Wait. The suit. I try to speak but it comes out as a string of shapeless vowels. 

My inability to breathe was definitely in my head, because he’s barely resting his weight on me at all. That’s obvious, he weighs like half a ton—or a metric ton? It doesn’t even matter—so he must be supporting the rest of his weight on the other two arms that I can’t see. 

“Grace awake! Blink two times imperative.”

I blink twice. Rocky’s body shivers on top of me. 

“Thank thank thank, need arm robot question?” 

“Nnnnnoo,” I manage to say. “Ssssuuu… Sss-ui-t. Suit.” 

“Need suit why, question?”

It’s easier to move my tongue now. I test my fingers and they twitch. “No, your suit, safe?”

Rocky wasn’t supposed to be done with the xenonite suit yet; he kept saying he had more safety testing to do. If anything about it went wrong, it would go really wrong and probably gravely injure us both. But there he was, every one of his limbs separately encased in sleeves of faceted xenonite. The facets are smaller on his hands, like the mesh pane on his ball, which allows him to interact with my environment like he is wearing gloves.

Rocky takes my chin in his tripod fingers, clamping it gently and moving my head this way and that. He becomes abruptly blurry. 

“Grace hurt question Grace leaking question Grace paralyzed question?”

He’s honestly lucky I could understand any of that, the way he compresses the words together in a rapid blur. I blink away the tears and force my arm to move until my hand rests on the top of his carapace, near the joint of one of his arms. One of his five hearts pumps just beneath my palm, but I can’t feel it. Even if I were inside the xenonite suit with him, pressing my bare skin to his mineral exterior, I wouldn’t be able to feel it beat. 

“I can move now. Just temporary.” I stretch my legs as far as they will go and take a deep breath. “Sorry to scare you, bud.” 

“Scare scare scare,” Rocky says angrily. 

“In my defense, you scared the heck out of me, too.”

“Grace heartbeat and breathing go bad and not wake up. What the fuck, question?” 

(I’m inferring on the profanity. It’s that same root chord that means vomit, with even more colorful harmonics this time. That seems like an adequate translation.) 

“It’s called sleep paralysis.” 

“You said humans not paralyzed when sleeping.” 

I scrub at my temples and shimmy out from under Rocky so I can sit up. That leaves him straddling my legs. At least if his balance slips now, he won’t crush my chest. I kind of expect him to move, but he doesn’t budge. 

“I mean, we kinda are, just not like Eridians. When we dream, our brains are still really active, so they send out signals to the voluntary muscles of the body to keep them still, so we don’t act out our dreams. Sometimes that system malfunctions and it either doesn’t paralyze us and we start walking around in our sleep, or it keeps us paralyzed too long, even after we’ve woken up.”

Rocky grumbles. “This is a terrible system, many points of failure.” 

“You’re tellin’ me. I haven’t had that happen to me since I was a kid and I saw Skeletor standing in the corner of my bedroom.” Before he can question it, I clarify, “It was a hallucination. Sleep paralysis often comes with seeing shadowy and scary creatures that aren’t there.” 

“You said hallucination happens when not sleep for long time.”

“Yeah, that too.”

Rocky tips his carapace toward my chest. They rest against each other with a little thunk. “Wet squishy malfunctioning brain.” 

“The wet, squishy, malfunctioning brain is glad you’re here, pal. Thanks for waking me up.” Another human would find this so funny. A redemption for sleep paralysis demons everywhere! On an impulse, I kiss the top of his suit, just above his vocal pipes. He shudders.

“Wet wet wet.” 

“It’s a sign of affection.”

“I know. Many wet affection in human media.” 

Right. I clear my throat. “Well, I’m up. Mary, cabin lights please.” 

“It is currently nighttime aboard the Hail Mary.” 

“Yeah, cabin lights please, bypass code ‘Ryland Grace is a cheater.’” 

“Bypass code accepted,” Mary says and the lights turn on. 

“Alright, Rock. Let’s stress test that suit.” 

The stress test ends up putting a lot more stress on my lab and my nerves than on Rocky’s suit. Because of course, the entire time he’s been half-living in my side of the ship, he’s only been able to interact with things through one limited mesh panel. Otherwise, if he wants to move something, he’s gotta headbutt it gracelessly. For a dextrous, five-limbed creature who loves to tinker, it was a pretty annoying limitation. 

Now that he’s been freed of it, he’s exploring every nook and cranny of my side of the ship—yes, the one with all of the delicate, irreplaceable scientific equipment—and touching everything like a freaking toddler. There’s a reason I decided to teach middle school and not elementary school! Kids have mostly learned to keep their hands to themselves by that point. 

“Underside of lab table contains many levers and wires,” he observes. I follow after him, fretting. 

“Don’t touch those! Man, you’re like a bull in a china shop.”

“A what in what shop, question?”

“It’s a saying, it means stop touching my stuff.” 

“Grace cable management messy messy messy. Rocky fix.”

“No, Rocky not fix! I didn’t do that, okay, it was the engineers that built this place, and I’m sure they had a good reason for everything they did.”

“No good reason for bad cable management. It is hazard.” 

“I’m beggin’ you, bud. C’mon, look at this… uh… analog clock.”

“No. I go to cockpit.” 

“Oh gosh,” I groan. He’s like a kid hopped up on candy that refuses to go down for his nap. Speaking of, when was the last time he slept? Time passes weirdly here but it had to have been like three days ago. We’re coming up on a Rocky-sleep-day tomorrow, probably. He tries to start his sleep cycles in the morning, so that even if he ends up sleeping 12 hours, it won’t cut into my own bedtime. 

Those days are always quiet and peaceful, and therefore a little unsettling. 

Once Rocky exhausts himself in the suit, he retreats to his side of the ship and works on building the treadmill for a bit. Then he spends most of the afternoon and evening on his laptop, probably browsing Wikipedia, his favorite non-engineering pastime. I set up with my own laptop nearby: I’m in the middle of a self-directed refresher course on biochemistry. I doubt I can figure out how to synthesize the micronutrients I need on my own, but I should probably be as prepared as possible to help Rocky’s people do it. I don’t want to embarrass myself in front of the very smart Science Eridians when we land. Oh yeah Vitamin C, ascorbic acid, that’s totally fat soluble, right? Wrong! Mortifying! 

We watch more Glee that night, and at first I’m worried that we’re going to be learning every dance number together, not just the iconic ones ripped from Beyoncé. But Rocky doesn’t seem interested. In fact, his heart (hearts?) don’t seem to be in it at all, which actually worries me more. He’s in his new xenonite suit, which means we can sit even closer together than we had before. Sometimes I catch his lidar detector pointing slightly away from the screen, as if he’s not paying any attention to it at all. What is he listening to if not the Glee club singing Halo, yet another hit by Beyoncé? I’m the only other moving, sound-wave-generating thing in here. 

Come to think of it, his carapace is tilted toward me slightly, in that paying attention posture I’m slowly growing attuned to.

“Bud? You okay?”

Rocky startles like I’d just backfired a truck in his vicinity. “Yes fine.” 

“Tired, huh? Are you sleeping tomorrow? I can wake up early and watch you if you need to start the cycle sooner rather than later.” 

“No no no Grace must sleep all eight hours tonight. No more malfunction.”

I yawn. All this talk of sleep’s really putting me in the mood, which is good. Hopefully the insomnia will spare me tonight, and the sleep paralysis too. “I think last night was a fluke.”

“New word.” 

“A fluke is like an outlier.” 

Rocky hums. “You sleep. I watch.” 

As I get ready for bed, I keep an eye on him, waiting for him to return to his side of the ship. Instead, he keeps skittering about the lab in his xenonite suit, fiddling with things and pretending to be busy. When I curl up on my sleeping mat next to the divider, he plops right down next to me in his suit.

“Uh. Rock?”

“Grace.”

“Whatcha doin’?”

“You sleep I watch.”

“From out here?” 

“Yes.”

“...Alright.” I give him a thumbs up. “Have a good night, bud.”

He thumbs-downs right back. “Good night.” 

I don’t have any nightmares that night, but it’s still a restless sleep. I’ll take it. I should probably start keeping a log if this continues. The overhead lights slowly turn on, revealing Rocky back in his side of the lab, the laptop perched in front of him. Good—that xenonite suit can’t sustain more than a few hours of life support for Rocky, and it honestly looks uncomfortable as heck. 

“Morning, Rock. Ugh, I need coffee. Mary, coffee.”

“Rude,” Rocky chitters.

“Pot meet kettle.”

“What meet what, question?”

I need to stop using idioms, but it’s too fun. About halfway through explaining that one to Rocky, I realize I have no freaking clue where that saying came from. He looks at me like I’m an idiot—I don’t know how I can tell, I just can. His whole body language screams derision. From anyone else it would grind my gears, but when he does it I can’t stop smiling.

Or, well, usually I can’t stop smiling. Today there’s a bit of an edge to it, warning me that Rocky’s still preoccupied. 

“You gonna catch some z’s— I mean, head to sleep soon?” 

“Soon,” Rocky says. It looks like he’s still focused intently on the computer. Huh. “Grace eat food now.”

“Jeez, you’re worse than Armando. And it’s coma slurry day. Yippee.”

Rocky bristles. “Yesterday was also coma slurry day.”

“Yeah. I don’t know, I just wanna… conserve a bit more.” I run my hands through my hair. It’s getting long, though that’s less of a problem now that we’ve got some gravity. 

“Coma slurry makes Grace unhappy.”

“Well, it feels foolish to deplete my reserves of real food on just any ol’ Tuesday.” At least now I know the real food is there. Living on coma slurry once all that’s left for me is more coma slurry and, god forbid, Taumeba sludge… 

Slurry and sludge, I need to pick better words, maybe smoothie and pudding. Mind over matter and all that. 

Anyway, sue me, I’m trying to save some peanut butter tortillas for my sanity.

I suck down the coma slurry, and my revulsion with it. Rocky appears to start ignoring me—I guess the only thing grosser than watching me eat is watching me suck down a liquid diet. So I go about my day: changing my clothes, brushing my teeth, checking the Taumeba farms and the engines, then settling in for some good old remedial chemistry lessons. I’ve got a worksheet of redox reaction problems, and the methodical process of solving them always calms me. 

A few hours later, I realize that Rocky has not asked me to watch him sleep. Sometimes he gets absorbed in his projects and forgets about sleep—don’t we all, dude—but he’s not even tinkering with the treadmill or the suit. He’s exactly where he’s been all morning, glued to his computer. The lidar detector in his hand is so close to the screen it’s practically touching it. 

“Rocky, it’s past your bedtime.”

Rocky startles. “Six more minutes.”

“It’ll be there when you wake up. Come on, bud, you’re exhausted.”

“Am not.”

“Are too.”

“I am busy, Grace.” 

I amble over to the xenonite barrier and press my face against it, trying to see what’s on his screen. “Busy with what?” 

Rocky makes a displeased sound and angles his screen away. Does Wikipedia have porn? Wait, do the Hail Mary servers have porn? I wouldn’t put it past Ilyukhina to demand it. 

“C’mon bud, no secrets, right?”

“No secrets, no lying. But Grace lie.”

I… what?

“I didn’t lie to you about anything, what are you talking about?”

“You say sleep paralysis is normal.”

“Uh.” I blink. “Did I?”

“Sometimes system malfunctions, keep paralyzed after waking up. Normality is implicit.”

His eidetic memory is really obnoxious sometimes. “Well, I mean, it’s kinda normal. It happens to most people at some point in their lives… probably. Rock, what’s going on? Why are you upset about that?”

Rocky pivots his attention toward me. He stands broad and sturdy, almost intimidating, like a cat with its fur puffed out. “I researched sleep paralysis. It is not common occurrence. It happens when sleep deprived, stressed, or after-injury stress disease.” 

“What the– after-injury stress disease? What’s that?”

Rocky grumbles. “You re-translate wrong synonyms. It is disease in book of brain malfunctions.” Then he turns his screen and I see a Wikipedia page for the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. 

Aw, heck. Rocky.

“Post-traumatic stress disorder,” I say blankly. 

“Yes.”

I take my glasses off and rub at my eyes, then lean with my forearm braced against the xenonite. “You shouldn’t be reading that.”

“Why, question? So Grace can keep lying about many many many ways brain can malfunction, question?”

“First of all, I don’t have PTSD, or anything else in that book. I’m fine.”

“Prolonged stress increases risk of almost everything in book.”

“Yeah, it’s a risk factor. A lot of things are risk factors. It’s not deterministic, that’s the whole point.”

“List of symptoms is bad sleep, bad dreams, panic, sadness, over-awareness of threat when no threat present.”

“It’s not a big deal.”

“List of potential outcomes says ♬♫♩♪♬,” he says, his voice pitched high. I recognize a few root chords in there that turn my stomach.

“Uh, new word?”

He turns his screen again and points at it. I put my glasses back on and read Complications: suicide. 

Oh, no. I swallow down my nausea.

“Rock… You don’t have to worry about that.”

“Lie.”

“It’s not a lie! I really really don’t want to die.”

Rocky rams his fists into the floor. “Then why Grace ♬♫♩♪♬ twice, question?” 

My jaw drops. There must be some nuance in that word I’m not understanding. “I’m not understanding you. I’ve never tried to kill myself.”

“You come to Tau Ceti knowing you will die. You return for me knowing you will die. I fix both times, with extra fuel and eating-Taumeba idea. Next time maybe I cannot fix.” 

His voice warbles. The harmonic structure of his words breaks, each note grating against each other horribly. My knees have turned to jello; I slide down the xenonite barrier until I land unceremoniously on my butt.

“Rocky, no,” I say, through tears. How long has he been worried about this? “I’m sorry. Please don’t worry about that. I swear swear swear I will not kill myself.” 

Rocky makes a low, sustained sound, like a braying donkey. “Swear swear swear.”

“Come on, come here. Close the laptop.” He obeys and skitters toward me. The closer he gets, the more frantic his body language becomes. I try to pat the glass to calm him down, but obviously that doesn’t work—as long as I’m crying, he’ll be upset. I swallow back my tears and clear my throat. I’ve held it together in front of an entire class of children after we all learned that the world was ending. I can keep it together now. “I’ve gotta tell you something. You won’t like it, but it might make you feel better in the end.”

“Another lie from Grace, question?”

“Uhhh. Not technically?”

“Great,” he says, the notes sarcastically off-key.

“Shush, listen.”

“I listen.”

“So,” I say with a big heaving sigh, “I didn’t choose to come to Tau Ceti. I didn’t want to go on a suicide mission at all, in fact I actively did not want to, because I love living so much and the idea of death scares the bejeezus out of me. Okay?”

Rocky stands there, still and silent, for a long moment. Then a great whoosh of heat rises from his vents, rippling the air. 

“No,” he says plaintively.

“I know, it’s not exactly heroic.” 

“If you did not want, then how, ques-tion?” he asks, punctuated by his fists hitting the ground.

“Well, I mean… they forced me, bud. It’s not that hard, when you’re this wet and squishy. There’s lots of sedatives that will put you to sleep so you can’t wake up.”

“No.”

He’s not taking this as well as I’d hoped. Can Eridians go into shock? I should have asked him at some point before it became relevant. “I’ve had time to process it. Maybe it’s easy to say now that the whole thing actually worked, but I was their only real chance. I get why she… I get it.”

I don’t so much say the words as I hear them bouncing back off the xenonite in my voice. My face is kind of numb. 

“They make you sleep. Then put you in coma. Then in Hail Mary.” 

“Uh, yep. Basically.”

“They make you eat coma slurry.” 

Not sure why he’s fixating on that, but sure. “Yeah, to keep me alive.”

“How, question?”

“How?” I blink. Wasn’t that obvious? “They put a tube down my throat to feed me.”

The sound he makes… I don’t like it. It sounds like a train whistle. To lighten the mood, I say, “I guess I probably can’t change your mind on the PTSD thing now, huh?”

“No,” he says firmly. “Bad bad bad.”

“I mean, I don’t really remember it.” 

“Even more bad.”

I squeeze my eyes shut tightly for a moment to try to regain feeling in my face. “Maybe.” 

Rocky thumps one of the engravings on his arms. “To Eridian, to force person to sleep or to eat is worst ♩♫♩♪ imaginable.” 

“New word,” I say hesitantly.

“A transgression of a person’s body.”

Oh. I understand. Am I even going to be able to say that out loud? “Violation,” I breathe. “It’s not…” I try to say, but my tongue sags with the memory of begging for my life. 

There’s a commotion on the other side of the barrier, but the world has gone blurry again. I want to wipe my eyes but my arms won’t obey. My fingers tingle like they’ve gone to sleep.

Suddenly, I’m being moved. Rocky in his xenonite suit nudges my legs to make room for himself in the empty space I’d curled up around. I’m half-sitting, half-laying down, propped up against the barrier—now with Rocky’s carapace pressed against my chest. I slump my shoulders and head on top of him and let him take my weight. 

My ear is so close to his vocal pipes that it would blow out my eardrum if he screamed. He knows that, though. When sound starts whistling through them, it comes out soft and pulsing and wordless. My heart pounds in my ears to the same rhythm. 

“I was supposed to be comforting you,” I say miserably.

“You did bad job.” 

I snort a laugh. A glob of fluid lands on the top of Rocky’s suit. Ew. I wipe it away with shaky fingers. “I mean it, though. I don’t want to die.”

“Health will get worse. More sick, more stress.” Lying on top of him, I can feel his voice rumbling through his body. 

“Then I promise to talk to you and we can figure it out together. I swear swear swear. I’m never going to purposefully leave you to deal with something like that alone.”

“Thank,” he says quietly.

“You know, you probably have PTSD too.”

“Shut up.”

“We match! Isn’t that cool?”

“Ugh, Grace.”

“You can’t get mad at me for denying it and then deny it yourself! The pot’s calling the kettle black, here!” 

“Stupid saying.”

“Yeah, agreed.” The novelty of curling up around Rocky hasn’t worn off yet. I kinda want to stay here forever. Could he make a version of this suit that’s even more skin-tight? The scar on my arm throbs, I want it so badly. 

“Rocky change in many ways since leaving Erid,” he says quietly. “Probably Adrian will not recognize.” 

“I’ve got a hard time believing that.”

“Many many many years alone.”  

I can’t even imagine it. Literally, he’s been up here longer than I’ve been alive. For humans, solitary confinement is considered a form of torture because of its unique ability to just ruin a person. For Eridians, a social species that evolved to not even sleep alone… 

I try not to think about it because it makes me want to throw up. I wrap my arms around him even tighter, even though he probably doesn’t even register the pathetically small increase in pressure. “I’m so glad I am here with you, buddy.”

“Forced.”

“I know. But if I’d known, I would have come to you.”

“Grace,” he cries.

“And you have to believe me on that, because I did come to you once I had the chance, and you don’t get to call that a suicide attempt, okay? You wanna know something? All that time we were flying away from each other, I’d sometimes turn off the thrusters and turn on the Petrovascope just to see your engines firing in the distance. When you finally disappeared, it was like…” I clear my throat. “It hurt a lot, like thinking I’d never see Earth again.” 

Rocky squirms beneath me. “I am not a planet. I am not that much.” 

“It’s close enough, buddy.”

The grief I hold for Earth is like a black hole in my chest. It is the densest thing in the universe from which no light can escape. But that loss gave me Rocky, and it’s pretty incredible to think that any singular person can counterbalance the weight of it, even a little.

Plus, it isn’t just Rocky. It’s him and his people and their genius. It’s their giant planet hurtling around their dimming sun and their infinitely fascinating biology and infinitely more fascinating culture. I’d once wished I could spend a lifetime learning about him and about them, and it looks like I got my wish. 

Rocky hums beneath me, a tone with a fundamental frequency so low that I can’t technically hear it. It ripples through his body and the suit. I hum along at the special frequency that resonates through my chest. 

“You need to sleep,” I tell him. “Imperative. I’ll watch.”

“I sleep here with you.”

“In the suit? How long can you stay in that thing?”

“13.44 hours.” 

Eridians’ unpredictable sleep cycles can last a maximum of 12 hours, which seems too close for comfort. “That seems risky. What if you sleep extra long for some reason and I can’t wake you and you suffocate?”

He takes a moment to consider this. “Grace is right. Rare moment of human reason.”

“Shush. I wish I wasn’t right.”

“I will improve suit,” Rocky says.

“Yeah, and get working on my treadmill, too.”

“Yes, almost done with next prototype. Medical journals say exercise helps after-injury stress disease.”

“Oh really? So are you gonna build yourself one too?”

Rocky pauses. “Not bad idea.”

“I’m full of ‘em. You should really give me more credit.”

When Rocky re-enters his side of the ship, he doesn’t go very far. He sidles up to the xenonite barrier, turns in a circle three times like a cat, and plops down as close to me as he can get. I plan to stay right there for as long as it takes him to rest—I have plenty of o-chem to get through.

“Sleep tight,” I say. “Don’t let the sleep paralysis demons bite.”

Annoyed, he grumbles, “What, question?”

“Nothing, ignore me. Night, Rock.”

. . .

Rocky actually looks a lot like a loafed cat while he sleeps. His legs fold neatly under his body and his carapace tilts downward, making him appear compact and demure. A wandering creature on Erid would be forgiven for thinking he’s literally just a rock. After he dumps all the heat from his hot circulatory system from his vents, there’s no more signs of life that I can see. I alternate between feeling a low-level worry about this (I can’t just forget that week he spent sprawled and unconscious and maybe dead in his enclosure, me helplessly trapped on the other side) and tamping down the urgent need to scritch his auricles. 

Cats sometimes carry a tiny parasite called Toxoplasma gondii. In rats, exposure to this parasite makes them lose their fear of cats, and people have extrapolated from this (without good evidence) to suggest that it can also mind-control humans into thinking cats are the cutest thing in the universe. That’s pretty obviously fake, but I’m starting to wonder if Rocky’s exposed me to any Eridian microbes that have hijacked my brain, because I can’t stop tracing the outline of his body with my eyes. He’s elegant, radially symmetrical, and just the right size for me to hug against my chest and squeeze. 

He’s been asleep for four hours and I can’t even focus on my redox reactions worksheet. I rest my temple against the xenonite barrier, glasses hanging from my chin, and just stare. I want to carry him on my chest like an infant in a papoose. I want him to sprawl on top of me like a weighted blanket so heavy I can’t move. I want to crack open his ventral seam and—

Okay, I’ve definitely been infected with something. Maybe it’s an alien parasite. Or maybe the answer is somewhere in the DSM-5, some turbocharged combo of trauma and loneliness and codependence. 

Or I guess it could just be love. I’ve certainly got enough of it pent up inside me, wiggling like it’s trying to crawl out of my chest and into his, burrowing through the xenonite barrier like taumeba to get there. 

When Rocky is asleep, it’s hard not to think about him all alone on that ship for 46 years. Again, I try not to, because the scale is more than my squishy brain can comprehend. Some quick calculations tell me he would have gone to sleep and awoken all alone more than 6,500 times, which… 

It’s just unforgivable. That’s all I can really think. I don’t know who I’m supposed to be holding accountable for this, because I’ve never really believed in a god, but the sheer brutality of it has me wishing I did just so I’d have someone to blame. It doesn’t matter anyway because the damage has been done, most of it before I was even born. But time is a relative thing when you’re travelling near light speed, surrounded by the million-year-old light of stars that may be long gone. The universe is awash in the light of dead things. If humans on Earth built infinitely powerful telescopes and trained them on Tau Ceti at this very moment, they could theoretically see the Taulight reflecting off of the Blip-A that carried Rocky all alone.

I just refuse to accept that it’s unfixable. But… even if it is, I’ve still got him right here in front of me. He isn’t going to sleep alone again. Even if the Taumeba sludge isn’t enough to last me, we’ll at least make it to Erid first, and he’ll have Adrian and his family to stay with him.

And Adrian better stay with him. I don’t care if he’s changed because he went insane in solitary confinement for half a human century. The decision he made to stay at Tau Ceti saved everything Adrian has ever known. Every agonizing day, he had to choose not to return to his home and save himself, to instead stay for the slim chance he’d be able to rescue his people. 

Oh, what a hypocrite. ♬♫♩♪♬ my butt. Like he hadn’t made the same choice I did, in the end. I’m torn between being touched that he worries about me so much and being deeply concerned. It’s nice to know that he takes my autonomy seriously. If for some reason it was ever me or a planet again, he wouldn’t look at me all blank and resigned as I begged him for my life; he’d move planets to find a solution to the problem that kept me safe. 

But I can’t have him worrying himself sick over me. It’s become pretty clear that a lot of the time he’s been spending on his laptop lately has been devoted to WebMD worry-spirals about my mental health. I don’t know how Eridian bodies handle stress, if they have some equivalent of the HPA axis and the sympathetic nervous system, but it seems like a general property of biology that being under chronic stress is bad for living tissues. It increases entropy, the Big Bad Thing that homeostatic systems are always battling against. 

So: Rocky stress bad. Grace stress make Rocky stress. How to manage?

The answer is a plan, I suppose. I put my glasses back on, turn my laptop back on, and get to work. By the time Rocky wakes up, I’ve got something to show him.

“Hey, bud,” I say when I notice his legs start to twitch; that means that his hearts have restarted and his hot circulatory system has reheated to its normal temperature. I repeat the greeting a few more times until he responds. There’s always a bit of a delay between his first movements and him regaining consciousness, and I want my voice to be the first thing he hears when he becomes aware of himself again.

“Grace,” he pipes. Vibrato warbles the pitch of my name.

I smile. “Welcome back.”

“How long I sleep, question?”

“Uh.” I check the clock on my laptop. “About nine hours. You must have been pretty tired.”

He lets me get away with that anthropomorphism; Eridians don’t really get tired without sleep so much as they get sluggish. Sleep, for them, is about repairing their hot circulatory system, not about clearing waste from the brain. 

“Grace did not move for nine hours,” he observes.

“I mean, I went to the bathroom. And had lunch. But I was busy working on something.” I gesture at the laptop. “Get your suit on and come out here, I wanna show you this.” I could show him through the xenonite barrier, but I just want him next to me. 

He clambers into his suit, his limbs still uncoordinated from sleep, and comes out to sit beside me. He angles his lidar detector at the laptop, where the document’s title reads “Grace Sleep Plan.” Below it are written instructions for how to detect if I may be having a nightmare or sleep paralysis episode and what I want him to do about it. 

“Explain, imperative.” 

“Right, so, I figured we could make a plan for what happens during these sleep disturbances, so you don’t feel like you have to just wing it on your own.”

Rocky pauses to read the screen. It takes a bit longer for him to process than my spoken speech, but he’s getting good at it. 

I’d spent a lot of time digging through journal articles to put this manual together. Alternate title: The Care and Keeping of Your Sleeping and Maybe a Little Traumatized Human. Apparently, it’s not recommended for him to outright wake me when I have a nightmare, but he can do things to make me feel safer, like turning on the lights a little bit (I gave him his own Mary bypass code for that, Rocky rocks, a pun that doesn’t work at all in Eridian but makes me smile), speaking to me calmly, and holding my hand in his xenonite suit. I feel a little embarrassed at asking for that last part, but Rocky won’t think twice about it. 

For sleep paralysis, apparently it helps for him to be a bit more forceful in waking me, with tactile input to bring me back to reality and re-establish my conscious brain’s connection to my body.

As for how to tell when I’m experiencing those states: Sleep paralysis should be decently obvious, with my nervous system running amuck but my body not moving. Dreams are a bit trickier. According to the research I found, I should experience higher respiratory rate and skin conductance when I’m dreaming versus in non-REM sleep; those measures will be higher still during nightmares. This is all stuff that Rocky probably would have picked up on anyway, since he’s uber-sensitive to any change in my body, but I’m hoping that telling him it’s expected will soothe him a little. 

I even include a little note with a link to some studies that suggest that my limbic system should experience increased activity (and therefore blood flow) during a nightmare compared to a dream. It’s theoretically possible that my little fMRI-machine friend could detect that, too, though I’m not sure I want to encourage that kind of vigilance over the inner-workings of my brain. 

Rocky stands taller as he reads. “You want me to watch you sleep, question?” 

“I mean, yes? You already do.” 

“But you allow only because of my culture reasons. Now you say you want,” he says, emphasizing the word with staccato chords.

I swallow. “I do. Watch me sleep, Rocky?”

Heat vents from his radiator. “I wake up and you hit me with feelings. Rude rude rude.”

“Sorry sorry sorry.” 

“Yes. I will watch you sleep.” The chords underlying the words are uncommonly expansive—is he doubling them at the octave? They evoke a sense of grandeur, like what he’s saying carries more weight for him than normal.

“Okay.” I clear my throat. “Well, it’s about dinnertime for me. Wanna watch me eat a disgusting burrito and then watch some Glee?” 

“Not coma slurry, question?”

“Nah. I’m indulging today.”

He does jazz hands at that. I do jazz hands back, then succumb to the now-irresistable urge to scritch him behind one of his shoulder joints at the top of his carapace. He can’t feel it through the xenonite, but whatever. At least I didn’t ask him to eat me. 

. . .

A few days later, Rocky finally gets the treadmill working. It turns out that it works just fine for him in his new suit, too, and we take turns seeing how fast we can run. This turns into absolute nightmare fuel as I watch him top out the treadmill, an alien spider sprinting at cheetah-like speeds. (Or at least, it would be nightmare fuel if I didn’t find his physical prowess extremely riveting.)

“That’s not fair,” I say, panting and heaving after I top out at a measly eight miles per hour at a full-blown sprint. “This is 1.5 times my gravity and 0.75 times yours.” And man, the gravity has made itself known. My knees hurt. I’m going to have to really limit how much time I spend on this treadmill—there’s high-impact activities and then there’s high-impact activities done at 1.5g.

“I carry you on my back and still run faster than you.” 

“No way.”

“Yes, true.”

“Prove it.”

“No.”

“No?”

“No, danger. You are too squishy, get hurt.” 

Hmm. I’ll talk him into it eventually. I gotta know what it’s like to ride on an Eridian. 

Despite the toll it took on my knees, running felt amazing. Endorphins have flooded my body, leaving my mind pleasantly clear and quiet. By the time we sit down to watch Glee, I’m exhausted and find myself slumping against Rocky’s side.

We’re on episode eight. Apparently, this episode contains the worst crime against humanity that the show has perpetrated yet, a rendition of something called the Thong Song sung by, of course, the worst teacher known to man. There’s a solid 30 seconds where I’m horrified that Rocky’s going to imprint on this song, too, but fortunately he has some taste.

“Bad bad bad,” he keens.

“Disgust disgust disgust,” I add. “I can’t do it anymore. Why are we watching this show? Can we please watch something better?”

“What is better, question?”

“Anything. Star Trek. You’re an alien, you’ll like aliens.” 

“Not realistic.”

I gesture wildly at the computer where Mr. Shue is gyrating on an engaged coworker. “Neither is this nonsense! And Star Trek tells you a lot more about humanity than it does about space. You just have to read between the lines.”

Rocky thunks his carapace against my shoulder in defeat. “Fine. We can try alien show.”

“Really?!” 

“Yes. Please make bad teacher stop singing.”

So I turn on the first episode of Star Trek. I quickly realize that it involves the Enterprise crew getting medical exams by a shapeshifting alien that’s probably going to try to kill them—I don’t even consult Rocky before skipping directly to episode two. 

Halfway through episode two, I start drifting off. Rocky eventually wakes me with a quiet piping sound—with my ear pressed against the top of his carapace, I hear it loud and clear. “Sorry,” I mumble. 

“No apology. Come to bed.” 

My bed is more of a bed roll set up near Rocky’s half of the lab. He walks with me, staying close to my legs as if he’s worried I’ll need to use him for balance. When I lay down, he makes a spot for himself to sit in the crook of my arm. 

“I watch,” he says, then lays one arm over my chest. It’s heavy but comforting and moves up and down as I breathe. “Suitable, question?”

I run my hand over the top of his carapace. “Yes. Love you, Rock.”

He hums happily, the vibration tickling my palm. “Love love love.”