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“The tides on Earth change about four times a day - two high tides and two low tides.”
Grace and Rocky were sat side-by-side on the grated bridge inside of the ‘Don’t-Go-Crazy Room’, watching the waves crash below them.
“They’re caused by the proximity to the moon. When the moon is closer to or directly opposite a coastline, the water is basically pulled by the moon’s gravity, meaning that the water rises and goes higher up the shore.”
“And this is important to humans?”
Rocky dangles two of his limbs off the side of the bridge and wiggles them idly, matching Grace’s dangling legs.
He’d finished assembling his ‘Fitted Uniform Climate Kit™’ (Grace regretted teaching him enough written English to browse the endless archive of human media available to them [Grace regretted a lot of things by this point {how could he have known that Rocky had the sense of humor of a 14 year old human child}]) and after some careful testing, he spends most of his time skittering around Grace’s side of things.
They’ve been en route to Erid for some time now, and movies and music can only be so interesting for so long before it gets repetitive, so they’ve had to figure out other ways to stay entertained. Right now it’s “Earth Science with Dr. Capt. Grace”.
“Yeah, very, and for lots of reasons,” Grace stuck his finger through the grate below him, “There’s this theory that even just looking at the color blue can physically calm someone down.”
Rocky let a thoughtful puff of air from his vents, “Earth’s ocean is blue?”
“Oh,” Grace startles and looks to Rocky, “we haven’t gone over colors properly yet, have we?”
“Okay,” he switches gears, “so light is made up of different wavelengths-”
“I know this.”
“Yes, but when light hits an object, that object absorbs some of the wavelengths.“ He removes his finger from the grate and uses both hands to gesture in a way meant to represent the abstract. “Whatever doesn’t get absorbed bounces off of the object and is reflected back away, and special cells in our eyes take that information, send it to our squishy human brains, and it gets interpreted as color!”
Humming to himself, Rocky takes a moment to consider this. He’s still an engineer, not a scientist, but it’s hard to not indulge Grace when he’s talking so animatedly and smiling so widely that Rocky can hear his individual teeth. Disgust.
“… and then there’s chroma,” Oh, he was still talking, “which is the saturation or intensity of the color, and–”
Rocky cuts him off, “Grace.”
“Uh,” Grace stops talking mid-syllable and stops moving mid-gesture, so he’s holding himself like a strange living statue, “Yeah, Rock?”
“Are there more blue things on Earth, than the ocean?”
He lets his arms slip back down to his sides, “Oh yeah, loads of stuff.”
“What stuff?” Rocky tilts his carapace and turns it just a bit to show Grace he’s paying attention.
They’ve picked up a lot of each other’s body language and mannerisms in their time on the Hail Mary. Grace has even been able to pick up quite a bit more Eridian, especially since Rocky banned him from using the translator and started talking more casually to help prepare him for life on Erid. It was a whole Incident, but it worked out in the end.
“Um,” Grace says gracefully, “like… Hmm…”
“It’s okay, you can tell me later,” Rocky lets out a dramatic puff, “Human brains need time to process, I know. Bad, slow memory.”
“Hey!” Grace knocks Rocky with his shoulder, who has to shuffle his appendages to stay in place, “I just haven’t thought about Earth a lot recently, besides the scientific and human biology stuff.”
Rocky, who weighs over double Grace’s weight, bumps him with his approximate shoulder in retaliation, and knocks him onto his back with a grunt.
“Apology.”
“It’s fine, I’ll just live here now,” Grace straightens his glasses and puts his hands under his head as a pillow, “Let me think, blue. Blue. Bluuueee… Well, the Earth is covered in so much water that the whole planet looks blue from space.”
“Amaze!” Rocky chitters excitedly, “Can see color from so far away.”
“Yeah, and the sky looks blue from Earth!”
“You explained ‘sky’ before. Interesting.”
“Some of the flora and fauna of Earth can be blue, though it’s one of the less common colors,” Grace continues with a hum, “Some rocks and minerals are blue.”
“Rock! Is me!” Letting out a few dissonant intervals, Rocky taps two of his claws together. Grace can’t help but join in, laughing.
“Yeah, buddy. You’re not blue, though. Well,” He takes a hand out from under his head to tap a finger against Rocky’s suit (he refuses to call it anything besides suit) near one of his inlaid stones, “these are a mix of blue and green.”
Rocky straightens up, at full attention, “Adrian is blue?”
“Huh, what?” Grace takes his hand back and pulls himself up to rest on his elbows, “No, Adrian was green and orange-ish.”
“Grace stupid stupid stupid,” Rocky chides, “Not planet Adrian, my Adrian.”
“Oh!”
He runs a claw thoughtfully over one of his blue-green spots, “These are from Adrian, so I have them with me always.”
Grace sits up further, entranced as Rocky speaks in a slow, thoughtful melody.
“And Adrian has parts of me, so I am with them.”
“Rock, that’s…” Laying himself back down, Grace uses a now-free hand to wipe at his eyes, “That’s really beautiful.”
“You’re leaking again,” Rocky scuttles a few steps away, “Disgust.”
Grace heaves a sigh and rolls his eyes exaggeratedly to make sure Rocky can hear him, “Bud, we were having a moment.”
“Moment over,” Rocky scuttles back toward Grace and hunkers his carapace down between Grace’s side and arm, folding his limbs beneath himself, “Tell me more about blue.”
The xenonite is only just warm against Grace’s skin, it really is an amazing insulator. He pats a gentle hand against the top of Rocky’s suit a couple of times, then settles his arm back down and rests it against the warmth. It feels good against the swaths of tight, taut skin. Actually…
“You know,” he starts cautiously, lifting up his other arm, “this claw-print I’ve got kind of means you’re with me forever now, too.”
Rocky stiffens against him, but stays silent, and Grace starts to wonder if he made some sort of cultural faux-pas. They’ve come this far without any egregious culture clashes, he couldn’t have just ruined it, could he? Has he broken the culture rule?
“Rock?” he tries to sound as lighthearted as possible, “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to upset you. I–”
“No.” Oh god, he’s really done it. “Bad bad bad.”
“I’m really, really sorry, please let me–”
Rocky cuts him off with a sudden noise that Grace can only compare to “Hmph!”.
“Bad bad bad,” he chirps firmly and presses himself further into Grace’s side, “You can have me, but I can’t have you.”
“Huh?” Grace says, very dignified, “What?”
Wriggling a clawed limb loose from its neatly tucked-in position, Rocky pokes him hard in the side.
“You are too squishy, too wet,” he pokes again harder, extracting a satisfying yelp, “If I took part of you, you would just leak all over. Gross. How would I even attach your piece to me? It would just fall off. Slimy.”
“Hey!” Grace tries to bat the claw away, but one arm is trapped beneath the offender and the other is at a terrible angle for applying force. Instead, he resorts to flicking at it, but immediately regrets it when his finger reminds him that Rocky is, in fact, covered in rock. “I’m not slimy!”
“Maybe,” Rocky’s chords hold for an extra beat. He removes his claw from Grace’s side and stretches it out straight, “Maybe take away instead of add.”
Grace looks at the outstretched limb, squinting a bit to see clearly beneath the waves reflecting off the xenonite, when it clicks. Lines and shapes cover Rocky’s appendages. Carved symbols of his mission crest, his family cluster, and… Oh geez, he’s crying again.
It takes Rocky a moment to notice, but when he does, he tries to clamber away.
Grace doesn’t let him, though, and manages to wrap his arms around Rocky. The hold is at a strange angle and off-center, but the smaller circumference of this placement allows him to lock his hands together pretty well. Rocky is stunned still for a moment, which Grace uses to pull himself closer, trapping two of Rocky’s limbs between them. The other three scramble helplessly at the grate.
“No no NO.”
“Shh, shh, shh,” Grace hushes softly and presses his face against the warm xenonite, “this is happening. Deal with it.”
“RELEASE ME, DEMAND” Rocky effectively screeches, “YOU ♪♩♬♪BASTARD”
Grace doesn’t let go, “No chance, bud. You’ve melted my slimy human heart. Now you have to deal with the consequences.”
Rocky tries prying the restraining arms off with his free claws, unable to wedge underneath, “DISGUST NOODLE ARM ♩♪♫♫ASSHOLE, ♪♩♮𝅗𝅥♬♭FUCKING STATEMENT”
He’s not trying that hard, really, but he has to at least make a scene. A few more dramatic wiggles, and he stops, defeated. He readjusts, tucking his limbs beneath him as best he can given the circumstances and with as much attitude as he can manage, and absolutely does not lean into the embrace.
“When we get to Erid,” his notes are as close to a grumble as he can produce, “I will tell them you held me captive. Evil alien blob creature, poor helpless Rocky.”
“Uh-huh.”
“Sell you to science. Prepare for ♬♪♮♫♩♪♭♬vivisection.”
Grace scrunches his nose, “New word. Prepare for what?”
“♬ ♪♮ ♫ ♩ ♪♭ ♬V i v i s e c t i o n,” Rocky repeats, a bit more slowly and with emphasis on each note, “Cut you open, poke around, hear what’s inside. You’ll provide much knowledge to Eridian scientists, thank you for your sacrifice.”
“Oh, vivisection. The English word is vi-vi-sec-,” a beat, “WAIT!”