Chapter Text
The first crackle of radio static sends both occupants of the Hail Mary into a mad scramble for the communications system. Rocky’s steam-whistle excitement rings in Grace’s ears, and he shouts his glee right back. He quickly scans through to the frequencies the Eridians use for long-distance radio chatter. Even after all those lonely decades, it seems they’ve still reserved the same narrow band of channels for the Blip-A. Just in case.
He holds the microphone close to Rocky, who seems to freeze up for a moment, when the first little song of Eridian comes through.
Then, Rocky erupts into the most information-dense stream of Eridian sound that Grace has ever heard him unleash. He’d been prepared for the fact that their slapped-together pidgin was nowhere near what the average Eridian uses in daily life, but it’s still a shock. He sits there in the pilot seat, watching, as Rocky sings into the microphone with a pointed, tense posture.
Grace keeps quiet. They’d planned this in advance. The Eridians don’t know about humans, and while Rocky has assured Grace that there would be a warm welcome once all was understood... there is still going to be the process of making the entire planet understand.
It’s a full ten minutes of back-and-forth between the Hail Mary and whatever ground crew has been waiting for them. Rocky’s speech grows more and more scattered and emphatic, and he even begins gesturing with a pair of claws—and then three claws, opening and closing them, crablike and aflutter. Grace watches as Rocky bounces on two legs, shuddering and chittering. There’s bits of Eridian he can catch, words for “astrophage” and “solution” and “save stars” and “Earth” and “human” and “crew” and “lost” and “alone” and “risk” and “rescue” and “friend.”
Then, just as suddenly as he’d launched into his tirade, Rocky is quiet. There’s a beat of silence. Grace wants to jump in, to say hello, to start explaining himself. But then, his dearest friend starts to make a soft warbling noise he’s only heard a time or two previously.
He’s crying. Rocky is crying.
“Oh, bud...” Grace murmurs, and he reaches out for him.
For the next several minutes, it’s just the two of them, hurtling through space as usual, wrapped up in one another. Rocky had built a more snug-fitting suit a year and a half into their trip to Erid, and Grace had wept when he’d first been presented with it.
But—your xenonite supply! You can’t be wasting it on something like this! he had protested. Rocky had quickly reasoned with, This way, if Grace get hurt, Rocky help. Rocky push button on ship. Rocky do science better. Rocky not knock over things as much.
The hugs were, of course, part of the equation. But they were a happy little variable putzing around within that equation, not the grand focus of it. Still, in this moment, with their many collective arms squeezing one another tightly, and with their shared mission finally, finally at an end... it was all that mattered.
Grace cries in this moment, too. He cries with Rocky, and he drums his fingers on the fine panels of xenonite between them in the way he knows is a comfort to his friend.
“Rocky home. Rocky home.”
“Yeah, bud!” Grace gasps with laughter, hiccuping another wet sob. “We made it! You’re home!!”
“Rocky home! Erid safe!!”
His claws, fitted more tightly than anywhere else on his suit, cling to Grace’s shoulders, back, and the nape of his neck. They squeeze—carefully, mindful of Grace’s far more delicate skin—and then they caress. There’s a claw in his hair, one on his back, one on his cheek, one at his side, one pulling him toward the window... Grace loses track of all the places Rocky is touching, until it’s just the one claw that has him around his wrist.
Rocky shows him the view again, the one Grace knows Rocky can’t fully ‘see.’ They’ve spent days watching Erid grow closer and closer, steadily coming into range of their radio comms. It’s beautiful. Its axis matches that of Uranus, tilted completely on its side, and it has rings that would make a Saturn fan weep. The blue tinge of its atmosphere brings to mind the oceans of Earth.
If something is to be the death of me, Grace thinks, crouched there in the window, I can’t really be upset about it being something so lovely.
“Rocky start preparations! Erid contact again soon.” He starts to clatter his way out of the cockpit and into the lab, where he’s stowed much of what he’ll need for the mess that will be getting back down to his home planet. “Grace start preparations, too.”
“On it! Hey—wait, bud! Your radio!”
Rocky only pauses long enough for Grace to tape the handheld radio to his suit before hurrying away. From there, the two of them busily carry out the checklist of tasks necessary for entering Erid’s orbit.
It is nowhere near as stressful as the business over Adrian.
Grace is still their designated pilot, in spite of Rocky’s upgraded dexterity. He deftly maneuvers them into the right angle, murmuring encouragements to the ship under his breath. Anxiety burbles in his belly, making him nauseous and jumpy. He’s checked and rechecked the math on this part a dozen times over the past year. He’s practiced it mentally, and he’s sat there in the pilot seat with his hands on the controls, his eyes closed, imagining each step so thoroughly that he’s begun to dream about it. Now, he’s finally doing it for real. He breathes in through his nose, out through his mouth.
Erid has a lot of questions. A lot of questions. Grace listens over the comms system as Rocky obliges them. He can’t parse much of what they’re saying—the conversation is breakneck, the tones far too layered, and the vocabulary too broad.
Just as the Mary begins to glide into a stable orbit, Rocky hurries into the cockpit. He points at the radio taped above his vents.
“Grace say ‘hello’ to Erid,” he says.
Grace, hands still on the controls, looks down at the radio. His throat feels dry. He grinds his teeth together for a moment, and then he draws in a deep breath.
“Um—hello, Erid. This is Dr. Ryland Grace of the Hail Mary. Of—of Earth. I hope you’re doing well, down there,” he says, and then he can’t help himself. He laughs a little. “How’s the weather?”
Rocky chirrups, batting at him playfully. He quickly quiets and stills as the radio crackles a response, Eridian tones a little slower and more deliberate in their pattern.
“Hello, Grace of Mary, Grace of Earth. Welcome, welcome, welcome, and thank, thank, thank,” the planet responds. Then, after a moment, “...Weather nominal.”
The two of them, there in the cockpit, do jazz hands at one another. Grace quickly slaps his hands back on Mary’s control when a sensor beeps in annoyance.
“Hey, it was, uhh—no problem at all, really. Couldn’t have done it without my pal Rocky, here. You really sent your best!” Grace goes on.
The response is slow, and Rocky has to help translate a little, but the idea is there: “We will take care of you, friend Grace.”
It makes him well up all over again.
“Please allow approximately 40 days for catch-grab operation. Rocky come down through elevator. Ship stay in orbit, with Grace, where human is safe. Erid build solution for Grace arrive on Erid surface.”
“Just according to plan, hey, bud?” Grace says, grinning down at Rocky through tears. He quickly wipes them away, sniffling. “Geez. We’re really here.”
Rocky reaches out and pats his arm. He’s always so careful to be more gentle with the scarred one. He’s been more and more delicate with him, as he’s had to stretch his rations, his body mass shrinking away. Grace takes hold of that mindful claw, and then another one comes up to join the first, holding Grace’s hand. Their fingers interweave.
---
The catch-grab operation goes about as smoothly as it could have. It took the planet something like a week’s worth of Earth time to modify a robot they could stick to the outside of the space elevator. Their greatest engineers had worked double shifts to accomplish the task. Grace brought the Mary in as close as she could bear without risking her already haggard systems. The window of time in which they had the right angle, the right speed, and the right positioning was a narrow one, but it had hardly been the riskiest thing the two of them had ever done.
Rocky had gotten back into his ball for this part, reasoning that the shape and material construction of it would make both a better insulator against the void, and a simpler catch for the robot. There was just enough room in the ball, after the inclusion of a huge tank of Taumoeba, for his laptop in its safe habitat—they’d both decided that this was critical to bring down to the surface immediately.
Rocky had squeezed Grace with as much might as he dared, before swapping his suit for the ball. The Mary had hummed and buzzed and flickered around them. Her hull had squeaked and rumbled. When Grace had glanced out the window at some sparking hull piece or another, Rocky had patted his head. His claw had lingered in his hair.
“Rocky not want to leave Grace alone.”
“I know, bud. I don’t want to be alone, either.” He’d patted the xenonite suit in turn, and then he’d levelled his face with one particular side of Rocky’s carapace. He’d forced himself to smile, and to make it go all the way to his eyes. “But it won’t be for long. Okay? I know that, you know that. It’s not gonna be for long. It’s gonna be okay. You go down there, you see your people—you give Adrian the biggest hug you can, and then one from me. And then you can start working on getting me down there. Okay? I still have lots of food.”
Rocky had warbled. He’d hesitated, reaching forward to hold Grace’s face, claws cupping his cheeks. The warmth through the xenonite had been so, so soothing. “...Okay,” he’d finally said. “Grace stay safe. Grace get calories. Stay on schedule.”
“I will. I promise.”
---
“♫♪♫♭!”
The decontamination crew is spraying him down with harsh but necessary stripping chemicals. Adrian can hear the rush of the nozzles long before they enter the secure corridor. Rocky, on the other side of the partitions between them, thumps a quick fist against the flooring beneath him. Adrian hears this, too—and then they here Rocky call back.
“♫♩♪♫?”
That’s him. He’s here. Rocky is here and he’s home.
Adrian calls his name again. “♫♪♫♭!”
He lets loose a string of ringing noises that would be undignified and embarrassing in any other situation, and Adrian can’t help but stutter a broken sound themself. The security and science crews around and behind them in the corridor hesitate. A few of them click warily, taking in the scene with nervous echolocation blips.
It’s been an eon. Endless, endless years, out in the void, for their mate. The soundless depths, yawning dreadful and open and vacuous all around him, empty and dead and terrifying. His crewmates, falling asleep one by one, never to wake again. Their corpses would have always been just a trill away. There wouldn’t have been anywhere on the ship to go where Rocky wouldn’t have been able to sense their unmoving forms. Adrian imagines the panic, the powerlessness... they had heard Rocky’s story relayed through the Reception crew.
Tortuous. Terrifying.
There are airlocks between them, and Adrian listens anxiously, shifting from limb to limb. They can hear Rocky has he unsteadily clambers his way through the portals. He all but wrenches those final doors open, shoving himself through while those supervising screech warnings at him.
“♫♩♪♫,” Rocky calls. “♫♩♪♫, ♫♩♪♫, ♫♩♪♫...”
“♫♪♫♭! You are home!” Adrian calls back, and they open one claw before them, reaching. The accompanying security Eridians on either side of them respectfully hang back as the two finally, finally collide.
Both of their carapaces ring as they smash into one another. Adrian is nearly twice Rocky’s size, and possesses the strength to match. Two of their claws wrap around Rocky’s. Then, repeatedly, Rocky bashes himself against Adrian’s body, grinding their faces together. Adrian leans fully into each smash, pulling him along by their locked limbs. The sound is deafening. It’s all Adrian can perceive for a few moments, just the smash of their bodies, and Rocky’s desperate warbling. A small shard of their carapace painlessly chips away between the two of them. Eventually, Rocky’s fervour steadies, and Adrian brings more claws up to tap and knock against his faces and along his limbs. One curious claw glides over his mission crest, and his mate-stone, and then all of his little carved symbols and sigils.
They’re all there. It’s all there.
Rocky can’t hold still. His own claws click over Adrian’s carapace, touching new little dents and grooves. They’ve got one particular new marking on their second limb—closest to their first, the one with their mate-stone on it—that reads a stylistic “Waiting.”
“Not waiting anymore,” Rocky says.
Adrian can’t help but whistle with some flavour of both embarrassment and mourning, and a swelling, burgeoning pride.
“I will get it updated. It will read ‘Returned’ when I fix it,” they tell him.
They know Rocky can see how the sigil could be altered with just two lines to accomplish this. He cries, his tones mismatched and overwhelmed.
“Beloved, what happened to you?” Adrian asks. Rocky has always been fiery and emotive, but... this? This is different. “What happened to you? Oh...”
Their claws touch over the scars. Blackened bits that have been patched over and regrown. Others are permanently different. Burns. Chemical erosion. Blunt damage. Adrian’s mate has been so abused by this mission.
The contact seems to make Rocky shudder. He clicks and clicks and clicks, nervous echolocation streaming from him. It’s as if he can’t believe it’s real. That he’s really here. That he’s home. That Adrian is here. He whines, and his limbs tremble.
“It’s nothing,” Rocky says, but his tones are a high-strung chime. “I’ll—explain.”
“Later. Later, ♫♪♫♭. First, the doctors.”
“The doctors,” Rocky repeats. He’s agreeing, but his voice is so thin.
Transit to the hospital, short as it is, seems to take a massive toll on Rocky. Those first moments back in his native atmosphere, he panics. He stumbles once, and then twice, and then finally relents and allows himself to be carried on a cushioned platform.
Adrian stays with him through it all. They speak, but Rocky doesn’t seem to hear, and so they stop. They tap the ground constantly with a light claw, keeping track of him at all moments. They hum softly, singing in the chords that the two of them had shared so, so many years ago. They reach out and tap his carapace with careful touches, when Rocky begins to cry, as he’s settled into a medical nest.
It takes ages for the doctors to finally leave. Two Eridian days, in fact, until Rocky is hooked up to several monitoring devices and told to rest, please, Savior, rest and regain yourself for a while. Once they’re gone, Adrian shuffles in close, taking up far more of the nest than Rocky himself does. They curl their limbs close around their mate. They sing. They tap, embedding little notes of affection into the patterns.
Rocky weeps. It’s as if he hasn’t cried for the entire 600 years he’s been away. The floodgates open, and the torrent gushes forth.
It’s hours, like this.
Rocky had spent plenty of time answering questions and making plans through radio waves and quarantine walls before he’d landed. He’d talked and talked and talked while the catch-grab robot had been constructed. He’d explained and educated all way down the space elevator. He’d caught up with the past centuries of progress and history all the way through the decontamination process. Infinite hours had already been spent making sure Erid understood what the Hail Mary was, where it had come from, the astrophage cure that it held, the 22 deceased crew left behind at Tau Ceti... and the alien running out of food on its foreign ship. He’d been focused, quick to respond, careful with his word choice, and impressively strategic about choosing the most important information to relay in each moment. He’d been prompt, he’d been smart, and he’d done his job impeccably.
He’d been everything Adrian had remembered him to be, even after all those years waiting for him to come back. It had made Adrian’s hearts swell.
But for now, Rocky cries. Hours, and hours, and hours of quiet, exhausted crying. Like a hatchling. Like he’s woken alone, and his carapace is still soft.
At one point, he claws at nothing, reaching dimly for some unpercievable but needed thing.
Adrian takes his claw. They squeeze. They drag their lower digit across Rocky’s wrist.
“What do you need?”
“It hurts so much,” Rocky squeals, voice high and strained, air bladders quivering. His words make Adrian’s body ache, they’re so pained.
“What hurts?”
“Everything. Everything, all of it. I couldn’t fix them, Adrian,” he cries. “I tried. I couldn’t fix them. I’m—an engineer, not a doctor. I couldn’t fix them. It was the radiation. There are waves of energy. Tiny projectiles, flying out from the stars. That’s why they died. I didn’t know about it. I couldn’t save them, Adrian. They all died, and I couldn’t even bring them home,” he babbles on.
Adrian listens. This is the most he’s said in two days. They tap a few more comforting staccatos against Rocky’s first limb, where their mate-stone sits. “I know. I heard the reports. I am so sorry, beloved. I am so sorry. It was not your fault. You only bring this knowledge home with you now. We could not have known.”
“I—I am not a scientist, I am not—anything, I just fix, I build—and I fix.”
“Yes. And you did fix, beloved. You fixed the entire world.”
“They died!!” Rocky howls, and he breaks down into another fit of terrible, wracking cries.
Adrian squeezes them close. He seems to take that well, being squeezed inward and held. Like a hatchling. “Yes. I am sorry,” Adrian comforts, once Rocky’s wailing subsides. “But their deaths had meaning. Their sacrifices are valued. They knew the risks. We all did—and so did you. You knew the risks. And yet, you went.”
“I’m sorry,” he sobs, his entire form heaving with grief all anew. “I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry. I was gone for so long. And now I’m—this.”
“You came back, my melody. You are here. I am here. Beloved, we are together, now. Your pain is mine. Let me carry it with you, and it will not feel so heavy. For now, rest. You are safe. You are home.”
It takes time, but Rocky does finally rest. Eventually, he goes limp and still. Adrian keeps watch. They sit there, with their mate, in the soft heat of the medical bay, and they watch.
They fret.
Adrian is, and always has been, very good at keeping their worry concealed. It had been an excellent skill to have, over the past 600 years. Others had asked, is it hard? Or, they’d asked, aren’t you lonely? Or, they’d commented, it may be time to move on. So many things could have gone wrong. You might never see Rocky again.
And, each and every time, Adrian had responded with calm, but firm words. It is not so hard as it seems. I am not lonely, I have many friends and family. I will move on when I feel the need to. Rocky is the best engineer I have ever known, and he will be fine.
It had still been hard.
It’s hard, now, with their mate immobilized in their lap. Finally, Rocky is home... but he is changed. Adrian understands the shock, and the trauma. They can only just begin to parse the pain Rocky has endured, and it is insurmountable. They know Rocky will need time to heal, and that he may not ever be himself again. Adrian knows this. It’s still hard to accept.
Adrian wants to make up for lost time immediately. They want to tell Rocky everything.
The hydroponics. The marine restoration project. The new schools. The way they’d harnessed astrophage as a fuel source, with the means to climate control massive areas. The pristine science centre with the pleasantly offset wall-work that will make him so, so annoyed. So playfully, adorably annoyed. An engineer would never! Adrian knows he’ll say, But those bastard architects would!! It’s like they don’t think!
Adrian has been seeing a new potential partner. Not a mate. Not anything near a mate. A partner. Just—a fun thing. Adrian wants to tell Rocky right now now now now now. Get it over with. Tell them immediately. About how the relationship has slowly bloomed into something wonderful and quaint. How it’s still nothing compared to what they had together, but that it’s nice.
That would be so cruel. They know better. Rocky is going to need to lean on Adrian heavily for the next while.
And so, Adrian watches. Adrian waits. This is part of being a mate. They knew that this could be a possibility, when they notched themself with Rocky’s mate-stone, and gave up a piece of their own carapace in exchange. They prepare themself, there in that medical nest, to settle in for the worst of it.
There is anger. There is sadness. There is anxiety. But most importantly, there is relief, deep and sating. Like a held breath finally let loose. Like sleep, after a thousand-thousand years acutely awake and straining against nature.
Doctors come again, while Rocky is still asleep. They poke, and they prod. They take samples, scraping little bits of dust off of Rocky’s carapace. Adrian is gracious, and patient, and does not click defensively when they come close without warning. They remain polite. Cordial, even, in the face of these particular circumstances.
It’s a long, long sleep. The doctors can detect his colony working overtime, repairing and rebuilding. He isn’t malnourished, and he isn’t injured beyond repair. It’s his mind that seems to be the problem, more than anything else. The crystals are all there, but they must’ve built up in strange, twisting pathways.
When Rocky wakes, he pulls all five of his limbs in close to himself.
“Hello, little melody. How do you feel?”
Rocky is quiet. He shuffles a little, and then he bunches himself up against Adrian’s carapace.
They hold him close. They tap a soft, sweet rhythm against Rocky’s first limb, just above his mate-stone. “It is alright. You are safe. You are home.”
“I need to...” Rocky’s notes are unsteady. “...I need to start... working...”
“No. You need to recover.”
“Grace,” Rocky whines. “I have to—so he doesn’t—die as well—”
“♫♪♫♭.” Adrian says Rocky’s name firmly. They feel their mate twitch nervously under their arms. “Please. Allow our scientists to take over. Even just for a little while. Your friend is in very, very capable hands—the most competent in all the world. They are devising plans as we speak.”
“...Are they?” Rocky sounds so skeptical. He’s never been one to trust others to do work he knows he can do better. Even still, this is... different.
Possessive.
Perhaps... and it’s just a shadow of an assumption, one that Adrian dismisses almost as quickly as they make it. But maybe... the conversation about their budding new partnership won’t go as terribly as they had anticipated.
Adrian hesitates. They go back to tapping on Rocky’s limbs with two of their own claws. They tap in rhythm with their speech, adding a layer of familiar affection they’d once been so comfortable in together. “Yes,” they assure. “They are working through the data on the thinking machine, using your translation notes. There is much to be done, but there are many, many claws to do the work. You can rest, now. Please. Will you rest? For me? They tell me you will need another few days, here, in the hospital.”
Rocky fidgets. He makes a low groan of a noise, as if coming to terms for the first time with how exhausted he is. “...I will try.”
“Thank you.”
Adrian drums a warm rhythm, and Rocky stays put beneath it.