Chapter Text
Here’s the thing:
Ryland isn’t touch starved anymore, not like he was at the start of the journey to Erid. He doesn’t feel that awful, nauseous longing when he watches movie characters hug, and his skin doesn’t burn like superheated ammonia under his hands.
He’s not lonely, hasn’t been lonely since he went back for Rocky. Has rarely even been alone since that moment, now he, Rocky and Adrian are living together, now he’s finally teaching again, now he has scientist friends who won’t kick him out of the field for having an unpopular opinion.
By all metrics, Ryland has everything he could ever possibly need. The Eridians have officially mastered the production of food for him, and his dome is beyond perfect; he gets to wake up every morning and smell salty ocean air, gets a seasonal variation of temperature and the length of days, gets unpredictable rainstorms and periods of bright, warm sun cutting through the fog. He gets to teach again, which is more than he could have ever asked for, loves his Eridian students just as dearly as he did his human ones.
But when Ryland goes swimming after lessons, Rocky and Adrian stay on the shore, at risk of falling asleep at the shock of cold water. When they touch him, it’s through a thin layer of xenonite, almost thin enough for him to feel the dips and rough patches in their carapaces, but not quite. When they all cuddle up on the couch at night to watch movies and stupid cat videos, he can’t hear any of their ten hearts between them beating in their carapaces. He hasn’t seen another human face since he watched Yao and Ilyukhina float off out of the airlock, videos just aren’t the same, and his own face is starting to look fundamentally wrong in the mirror.
Rocky and Adrian are the best company in the worlds (plural). It just hurts when Ryland remembers that despite all of the scientific and technological prowess of Earth and Erid combined, there are some things he’ll never be able to do with the two people he loves most, because they are still aliens who live in such a fundamentally different environment to him that they will never be able to actually touch. He’ll never be able to experience direct skin contact ever again.
Ryland sits at his desk, pretending to mock up a lesson plan for the next day (and he yet again thanks the stars that juvenile Eridians sleep on something close to an Earth circadian rhythm), actually watching Rock and Adrian through the clear xenonite wall. They’re in their half of the house (lit up, for his sake), Rocky poking something complicated-looking with a screwdriver and Adrian sorting through their mail, which comes in the form of tapes. Whatever the tapes are saying, it’s too quiet and too high-frequency for Ryland to hear properly.
Whenever Adrian deems a tape not worth keeping, they get up from their seat by the radio and cross the room to dump it in the bin, running an affectionate hand across Rocky’s arm as they pass. Their fingers make a stony tck-tck-tck sound over the etched lines of Rocky’s mission patch.
Real touch, without the barrier of xenonite between them. Ryland’s breath hitches without his permission, and suddenly both Eridians are tilting towards him and tapping at the ground to get a clearer sound.
“Grace?” Rocky asks, already with a barely-there undercut of concern in his voice, “You okay?”
“Yeah, I’m good.” Ryland replies, but his voice is too wet, and he knows they know him better than that by now.
Rocky lets out a quiet curse and he and Adrian both scramble into their xenonite suits without another word. Ryland stays sat at his desk, listening to the jet of cold air cooling the outside of Rocky and Adrian’s suits and the subsequent hiss of the airlock opening, and tries to make himself feel bad for distracting them. It doesn’t work, not when Rocky immediately tugs him down to the floor for a hug and Adrian rests a grounding hand on his shoulder.
But then he starts feeling bad again for a different reason – he can't feel either of them properly, no soft, squishy human skin, no rough, stony carapace, only the tiny flat panels of the xenonite suits. His breath hitches again, and he’s pretty sure they can both hear his blood pressure increasing.
“You’re upset.” Adrian says gently, no double-tap for a question.
Ryland nods anyway. “A little. It’s fine, I’m just getting stuck in my head.”
It’s not actually a big deal. This hug is still going a long way to make his stupid human nervous system feel more regulated, even if it isn’t as close of a contact as he wants. It could be worse, Ryland reminds himself, thinking back to those first days alone after he woke up on the Hail Mary, it could always be worse.
Rocky presses a little further up so his carapace rests against Ryland’s jaw, no doubt to map out his facial expression in more clarity. Ryland just traces over where he can’t quite feel Rocky’s vents.
“What’s wrong?”
Ryland huffs. “It’s not really anything important. I just…” He shuffles, leans further back against Adrian as they begin to rub gently up and down his scarred arm. “I can’t ever touch you guys, properly. Or literally anyone or anything else on this planet. I mean, this,” He gestures to the two Eridians, already cuddling and soothing him like it’s second nature at the slightest hint of his distress, and then a wider sweep of his whole house and habitat, “is all amazing, it’s more than I could ever ask for. I just kinda wish I could touch something that isn’t xenonite.”
He shakes the melancholy off and shrugs. “But, yeah, it’s not that big of a deal. It’s not like you guys could do anything about it anyway.”
It’s half a lie, despite how much Ryland doesn’t want it to be. Yeah, this feeling, this want for soft skin on his own, five fingers intertwined with his, eyes to meet regardless of the inevitable sting in the back of his brain, is only a passing ache now, but it aches in that way that he knows will only get worse over time.
But that’s not important right now. Anyway, like he said, it’s not like Rocky and Adrian could even do anything about it.
Rocky and Adrian who are… not quite silent in the wake of his confession. Ryland can feel a steady rumble in all the points of contact with the Eridians, which means they’re talking – thrumming, he recognises this pattern of soundwaves – in a register too low for him to hear on purpose.
Ryland is torn between feeling a surge of unbridled affection that they’re already trying to think up a way to solve his sort-of-problem, and feeling offended that they are intentionally leaving him out of it.
He dutifully stays silent until their thrumming stops so as to not throw their ideas off with his unitonal voice, and then crosses his arms and levels a stern glare at Rocky, then at Adrian.
“You know I can tell when you guys are talking too low for me to hear, right? You’re hiding nothing.” Well, that isn’t strictly true – they are successfully hiding whatever conclusion they’d reached. But Ryland is pretty good at making imploring faces at them both until one of them caves and tells him what they’re thinking, usually Rocky.
“We’re not trying to hide anything from you, dearest Grace.” Adrian replies neutrally, running their ever-gentle claws through Ryland’s hair and evaporating all his annoyance in an instant. “We simply don’t have anything worth sharing, is all.”
Rocky bobs his carapace up and down in a nod, an endearing quirk he’d picked up from Ryland. “Nothing worth sharing. It’s getting late; you should go and eat, then we’ll watch a movie.”
A suspicious change of subject if Ryland’s ever seen one, but he decides to relent, for now. “Okay. Sure. Any movie in particular?”
Rocky taps his claws together in thought. “How about the one with the person in the wheelchair who goes into the tall alien body?”
Ryland wracks his brain for a movie matching that description. “…Avatar? Why do you want to watch Avatar?”
Sure, they’d watched it before, about a year into their journey to Erid if Ryland’s remembering right, but he can also distinctly remember Rocky complaining about it being unrealistic and too difficult to follow.
Unless…
Oh.
Ryland scrambles upright and jams an accusing finger in Rocky and Adrian’s directions. “You want to Avatar me into an Eridian body!?”
“No, silly Grace.” Adrian replies cooly, with the Eridian tonal equivalent of an eyeroll, “We want to Avatar ourselves into human bodies. We have plenty of contact with other Eridians, you need human contact.”
“But that’s not – how would you even – why would you want – huh?”
Ryland slumps down onto the couch and buries his face in his hands.
“Hear, this is why we don’t tell you things.” Rocky grumbles from somewhere to his right. “You get too worked up before we’ve figured the logistics out. It might not even work, and then you’ll have freaked out for nothing.”
Ryland levels his best Teacher Glare™ at Rocky. “Yeah, nothing, totally. You just told me that you want to temporarily turns yourselves into a completely alien species just so you can hug me. There’s no reason I should be anything but calm right now.”
Despite himself, the thought makes his heart wobble dangerously. Yeah, it probably won’t work, but the fact that Rocky and Adrian have even thought about it, and are evidently going to at least try to science-fiction their way into giving him a real hug – how did he ever get this lucky?
“Your face is leaking, dearest.” Adrian informs him, voice laced with warm humour.
Ryland wipes at his misty eyes. “Yeah, I just – thank you guys, for everything. Even if it doesn’t work, the fact that you’re even thinking about it is genuinely one of the nicest things anyone has ever done for me.”
They both press close to him for a long moment, a three-fingered hand each interlocking with his five-fingered ones. Ryland looks down at the two pentagonal alien rock spiders who have become his best friends in the whole universe, and smiles wider than he has in a long time.
Maybe, soon, he’ll see smiles that aren’t his own.
<><~><>
Eventually, Ryland gives in to Rocky’s pestering to go and eat dinner; tonight, he’s having spaghetti bolognese.
Eridian material science is, as Ryland has noted many times, insane; so he probably should have taken Rocky’s word for it the first time that Eridians with all human knowledge from the laptops, an insane amount of energy to use from their efficient breeding of Astrophage, and practically unlimited resources as the entire planet (more or less) agrees to do whatever it took to keep the leaky space blob alive and happy, would be able to synthesise actual food.
Well, the ingredients for food. Plants and plant-based products are either cloned from the plants aboard the Hail Mary or synthesised tissues altered to have the taste and texture of the real thing – for example, the bowl of Applen’t slices that still sits on Ryland’s desk – so he has fruits, vegetables, flour, sugar, cocoa, spices and seasonings, and (most importantly) coffee. Animal products are kind of like better quality versions of those overpriced vegan substitutes back on Earth, meat very loosely based on Ryland’s own muscle tissue and tinkered with until it had the taste and texture of different animals back on Earth. Well, groups of animals back on Earth. Milk tastes kind of like oat milk, and all the cheese is slightly to the left of parmesan and slightly to the right of cheddar, and the butter is always softened and very yellow, and the eggs come pre-mixed in little tins instead of shells.
It’s perfect.
Ryland already has a jar of spaghetti that he made the week previous, so he snaps it in half, just because he can, drops it into a saucepan with some water, mixes blended-up tomatoes with ground meat that’s kind of beef and kind of lamb, and throws in some little cubes of carrot and onion for good measure. All of his food is perfectly nutritionally balanced, but he can practically hear his grandmother’s voice in his head, scolding him for not eating his five a day, regardless.
Rocky and Adrian are already settled on the couch by the time Ryland finishes eating, with a neat little space between them for him to occupy. He settles into it as he always does, more comfortable than he can ever remember being even though he knows they did this yesterday too, and Rocky starts the movie.
Yep, it’s Avatar. Ryland is pretty sure Rocky and Adrian are both mentally taking notes.
He falls asleep less than an hour in, head propped up on Rocky’s carapace while Adrian reaches over to stroke his hair, and dreams of two humans, faceless but familiar all the same, keeping watch over him while he sleeps.