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grace spent a lot of time in the lab these days. with erid getting closer and closer, he and rocky were increasingly studying the taumoeba, looking for optimal ways to speed up the whole “astrophage fumigation” process.
it was fun spending so much time in a lab again. better yet it was fun being the one in charge. back on stratt’s vat, he tried to exude professionalism as much as possible. after all, he was surrounded by a lot of cool people who literally depended on his ability and diligence to, well, not die a horrible icy death.
so there was a lot of silent, keep to yourself, lab work. or the occasional jazz playlist when he was particularly sleep deprived and needed the extra dopamine.
but back in grad school, he and his colleagues were on the opposite end of that spectrum.
ryland didn’t talk about this much, but he was a bit of a hip hop enthusiast in the 90s. i mean, what kid growing up in california wasn’t? but he’d taken some hip hop dance lessons. he would never brag about it, but he was pretty good. he was never particularly sporty, but he loved music and all things music theory. music is math and ryland grace loves math.
actually, he was anything but sporty. sometimes his brother could get him to join the occasional basketball game, but one too many broken pairs of glasses ended his desire to play. that and one broken wrist that had almost made colt disown him. (ryland used to be a bit neurotic about injuries. he’s definitely gotten over that now. totally.) but he loved to move, and dancing helped him think. even better, it helped him clear his head.
anyway, now he’s here on the hail mary. the only biologist on the ship, and the captain at that. he’s not trying to impress dmitri or show off to dr lokken. he knows rocky trusts him too. he’s the greatest microbiologist in space.
so he’s playing 90s hip hop as he sorts samples, mumbling along to the lyrics of easy-e and dr dre.
rocky likes it too, he’s loved every music genre that grace has shown him. but he especially likes hip hop ever since grace showed him some of his moves and they have the occasional dance party in the don’t-go-crazy room. rocky especially loves bragging about his ability to moonwalk, to which grace has to remind him that michael jackson could do it on his own feet, not a ball.
grace only wishes rocky could experience the sparkly glory of his disco ball. but they had a lot of fun together regardless. he and rocky always had fun together. now that the future was hopeful— they’d saved earth and were on the way to saving erid, rocky was on his way to being reunited with adrian, and they’d even rescued a man who surely would’ve died had they not found him. they were, to put it lightly, on a roll.
there’s only the matter of simon.
he’s been on the hail mary for almost 3 months. and he and grace are getting closer now that he’s mostly healed up. they eat together, sit together whilst doing their respective hobbies, and sleep in the same room. they even talk more openly about their feelings now, mostly grace but still. simon is just so serious.
ryland understands why. simon had opened up to him about his past on eden, then as the butcher, and then the blood ocean, one tearful evening. that was the first night that grace felt comfortable enough to hug him. human touch was still a bit much sometimes. it took a while for grace to be able to touch simon’s skin without thinking of the last times he’d touched humans—yao and ilyukhina’s cold, lifeless skin as he’d dressed them in their uniforms and buried them in the endless void. or the time before that when he was pinned down and drugged by a doctor whose name he couldn’t remember, and a guard whose name he never learned.
but hugging simon felt necessary. comforting him felt more important than ryland’s own struggle. and it was nice to replace those memories with a new one.
the last time i touched a human, i was handing simon a bowl of ramen. much better.
still, ryland wishes nothing more than to crack him. well. like, make him laugh. crack him up. hah. anyway…
he’s tried everything. it feels like he’s back in his first year of teaching, trying so desperately to be the funny, cool teacher. except at least middle schoolers will laugh at you. simon hasn’t even laughed once! even at grace’s expense!
it’s so irritating.
“grace take ‘brain break’ now. question?” rocky is hovering beside him in his ball.
“what?” ryland says, dumbly.
“grace stare at wall. have not moved in 2 minutes and 43 seconds.”
grace blinks, glances down at the sample tube that had been sitting loosely in his palm for, well, 3 minutes apparently.
“sorry rock,” he sighs.
“grace have memory. question?”
rocky knew by now that grace could zone out or look distracted upon “unlocking” old memories. that thousand yard stare wasn’t difficult to pick up on, especially since it was so drastically different from grace’s normal lively, nearly restless, behavior.
“sort of. more just lost in thought.”
“humans weird. eridians don’t get lost. especially not in one’s own mind. you are in control. can’t get lost.” rocky stamps his foot and shakes his carapace, an increasingly common technique for showing his disapproval of grace’s fickle human tendencies.
“well maybe you don’t get lost in there because there’s less thoughts,” grace retorts, sticking his tongue out.
“grace act immature. babies can’t do science, grace. need sleep to fix attitude-“
“okay, okay, i’m sorry,” he pats the top of rocky’s ball and gives him a small smile. “i’m not tired, i’m just thinking.”
rocky gives him an inquisitive look. grace has gotten really skilled at reading his “facial” expressions.
then, a classic comes over the lab’s speaker. a classic from grace’s early days in the lab with carl. he missed carl, hopefully he was doing well wherever he was and still abusing the heck out of that expense account.
it started as an inside joke between him and carl. but when he’d first arrived on the vat and found himself lost for words in front of 50 officials, half of whom knew him from his UNESCO disaster and didn’t wanrt anything to do with him, he’d blurted it out. why? he still didn’t know. loss for words? break tension? maybe both. he remembered singing this song as he drew models for the astrophage breeding tanks, the rest of his science team joining in around him. some of them were, admittedly, more hesitant than others. it sort of became the anthem of project hail mary. that was until stratt belted out harry styles at karaoke.
whoomp. there it is.
“rock. this is THE astrophage song.”
grace shot up, and began shuffling along the lab floor. his converse kicked aside papers and various clutter that had made its way to the floor beside him. he put his hands on rocky’s ball and began wobbling him around.
“astrophage do not sing. grace mood very confusing. but rocky does like to dance,” and grace laughed at the wobbly way rocky’s voice came out.
and then they were dancing. grace told mary to turn up the volume and grace was off to another level of consciousness. suddenly he was 21 again, drunk out of his mind at some party. he’d taken a mysterious pill from some girl he met by the bathroom. and he was feeling himself, doing the rock, shuffling around the room, shaking his hips.
rocky wobbled back and forth in his ball to the beat, singing along to the beat of the music. there were no translations for the words rocky was saying now. grace would have to remember to ask him what it was saying later. for now though, all thought went out into space as he wiggled his shoulders and laughed at his best friend’s attempts to follow his lead by shaking his entire carapace.
“what is this?” a voice broke through the music.
grace heard a record scratch in his mind as he looked up to find simon leaning against the doorway. his hair was messy but still fluffy and soft, as if he’d just woken up from a nap. beneath his embarrassment, grace thought he looked so cute. which actually added to the embarrassment.
“oh! simon! uh, gosh. i’m so sorry, did we wake you? i hadn’t realized you were sleeping, rocky never said anything about watching you sleep!” he clamored, fumbling with the speaker’s remote to find the pause button. he’d forgotten that he could just ask mary to do that for him.
once the room was silent, simon gave him a small, knowing smile. just teetering on the edge of condescension. that was all he ever gave, and it broke grace’s heart a bit. grace ran a hand through his hair as he caught his breath, simon mirroring the action.
“yeah, that’s why i didn’t say anything. kinda just wanted to be alone.”
“oh. right, uh, okay. i’m really sorry,” grace repeated. “sort of got lost in the moment there.”
he gave simon an awkward, toothy smile.
“simon should have told us about sleep. we would watch.” rocky stated matter of factly.
“no, rock. it’s okay if simon wants a little alone time,” grace interjected. “we can be quieter. we were just taking a dance break from organizing the lab. but i’ll turn the music off if you wanna try to get some rest.”
simon pursed his lips and fumbled with the hem of his, grace’s, shirt. he hummed thoughtfully and then looked back up at grace through his eyelashes, a little sparkle of amusement in his eye. so pretty.
“that was dancing?” simon quipped.
grace’s eyes widened and he tried to stammer out some sort of response. say something intelligent. this is a teaching moment!
“um. uh- yeah! it is! like- uh- a certain, like- genre? on earth. i guess, im not very good, but-“
genius.
rocky interjected. “grace is good! grace do dance classes on earth. grace do classes many years and then grace teach rocky human ‘hip pop’ dance. involves many ways of moving body often to mimic mating ritual. this song similar to eridian mating call actually.”
simon’s eyes widened and he looked back to grace, whose face had become a shade of red akin to the color of the petrova line, ironically.
“wow. okay. the mating call thing makes sense now,” grace said, running his hand under his glasses to rub his eyes. no longer have to ask him what those words meant. “and it’s.. it’s hip hop, bud. not pop.”
“but grace pop his hips forward and backward. hip pop. like human mating.”
“okay, rocky. i think he gets it!”
“grace body temperature and heart rate increase rapidly. is grace exhausted from dance. question?”
simon remained silent for the whole exchange. he looked back and forth between grace and rocky, an incredulous look on his face. grace briefly considered taking a short walk off the airlock.
“so. you took dance lessons?” simon asked, seemingly biting back a smile.
grace gaped at him. then he nodded frankly, accepting that he was now the butt of a joke. all embarrassment sort of went out the window when he saw simon’s mouth start to twitch.
“i did. i was pretty good, wasn’t i?” he wiggled his eyebrows at him.
simon’s face scrunched up at grace’s sudden confidence. it was a face ryland had never seen him make- eyebrows furrowed, eyes wide, lips pursed but turned slightly upward.
grace didn’t know what came over him then, but he started to dance again. he placed a hand on his waist band and another hand up in the air and began to shuffle his feet and thrust his hips into the air again. he imagined he looked a little deranged with his glasses strewn about his face and a wild look in his eyes. and then sang..
“if you wanna get down, i’ll show you the way! whoomp! there it is! whoomp! there it is!”
and simon laughed. it started with a wheeze, like the air was knocked out of him, but then his head was thrown back and he was fully laughing. and it was a glorious, scarily contagious laugh. soon enough ryland found himself unable to stay serious, snorting as he too began to laugh.
simon was doubled over against the wall and grace had fallen forward onto the table. rocky chittered off to the side too, all three of them in hysterics.
when the laughter finally died down, simon fully entered the room, hoisted himself onto the table to sit next to grace’s head, and sighed softly. grace was still fighting to catch his breath from the sheer giddiness he felt.
“haven’t laughed like that in a long time,” simon mused, gazing down at him.
ryland turned to face him, his cheek pressed into the cool metal of the table. he felt his face heating up again. “i almost thought you were incapable.”
simon just smiled at him, a real smile that reached his eyes, then averted his gaze. he went back to fiddling with his shirt.
standing up to fully face simon, ryland found that he had been relying on the metal to keep his face from overheating. simon seemed to be studying him. he stood in front of where simon sat at the table, between his knees. with simon up there, he was at ryland’s eye level. ryland placed a shaky hand onto simon’s knee as his gaze shifted to ryland’s mouth, and ryland started to lean in-
“grace teach simon to dance now!” rocky exclaimed, making both men jump.
grace practically launched himself backwards, awkwardly scratching the back of his neck.
simon laughed again, a smaller, more casual one. grace had a thought to log every type of laugh that simon was capable of. rocky didn’t even wait for grace to say anything, just prompted mary to unpause the song. simon hopped of the table and shot a look at grace.
“teach me how to hip pop, dr. grace,” he said, with the smallest, barely there, wink.
oh, that was definitely on purpose.
ryland smiled as rocky began lecturing simon on the fact that it was, in fact, hip hop. he couldn’t wait to make simon laugh again.