Chapter Text
“Rocky, be careful.”
“Use your words!” Rocky chirped back, not climbing down from his perch atop an old tube, where he was pulling a section of xenonite-insulated wiring through the ceiling panel, and Grace rolled his eyes.
“Rocky, be careful,” he whistled. “Rocky hurt Grace ship, Rocky fix Grace ship.”
“Rocky will always fix Grace ship.” Rocky yanked on the bundle of wires, and the flexible seal that connected them to the interior wall cavity housing the Hail Mary’s numerous electrical functions held. Sliding a ring of duct tape down the limb he’d slung it over, he hung upside down from his grips as he taped the wires neatly to the wall on a path towards Mary’s primary control panel. “More importantly, Grace is cheating words.”
“I am not!”
“Human word Rocky this, human word Rocky that.” The engineer maneuvered to his collapsable xenonite ladder, scuttling down it and plopping onto the floor to continue wrangling wires.
“Not in the mood to study-”
“Use word!”
“Study! Because that EVA hurt like hell and I’d rather take a nap.”
Most physical activity hurt these days, and Grace had downsized to Ilyukhina’s suit after Yáo’s had begun to hamper his movements. They were approximately a month and a half out from hopefully no more EVAs, ever, but Rocky had presented Grace with one last request in the form of a miniature xenonite satellite dish, ‘based on Blip-A design!’. The Blip-A had been equipped with cutting-edge radio communication facilities, which were currently drifting through deep space ~10 light years behind them. The Blip-A, unlike the Hail Mary, had been built to return, and it was a cosmic joke that their positions should be so totally reversed.
Irony or no, the two-man crew of the Hail Mary needed a satellite dish, and so a satellite dish was installed. Rocky hummed thoughtfully as he forced his body flat to the ground and scraped under the console.
“Not difficult to study. Rocky can teach Grace to say ‘Rocky’ eridian name ‘lick the split’.”
“I don’t know what you just said, but I’m sure it was wrong. Anyway, you’ve tried for years to teach me to say ‘Rocky’ and I just don’t think it’s gonna happen.” Grace settled back in the pilot’s chair, resigning himself to wait for his supervised sleep.
“Yes, Rocky has tried for too long. Should have done this a long time ago. Call Rocky ♬Ren.”
Grace blinked in surprise, craning his neck to find Rocky’s shuffling shadow. “That’s it?”
“Yes, try.”
“♬Ren.”
“Sounding like natural already.”
“That better have been a compliment. Rock, you never told me you had a nickname! What the heck have you been yanking my chain for all this time?”
“No chain involved.” Rocky waved two jazz hands out from beneath the console, for Grace’s visual benefit. “Does Grace like this name better?”
“Sure I do!” Grace pursed his lips and practiced again. “♬Ren. ♬Ren.”
“Question, however. What is compound word ‘unknown name’?”
“Nickname?” Grace waited for an affirmative chirp. “A casual name, something shorter and easier than your full name, or something representative. Or whatever your friends call you when you try to skateboard down a fire escape at the freshman bar and you get a Facebook page made about you.”
“... Understood. Casual name. Rocky will continue to call Grace ‘Grace’.”
“I still suspect you took some artistic liberties-” Grace interrupted himself with a jaw-splitting yawn.
“Anything Grace would like to ask ♬Ren, question?” Rocky appeared at the edge of Grace’s vision as he sang, his entire posture betraying his expectations.
Grace sighed. “♬Ren watch Grace sleep, please.”
“Of course, because Grace is extremely polite. Wait 60 seconds for Rocky to finish.”
The jerry-rigged radio device produced no results for three weeks, well into the window Rocky had assumed would be ripe for catching signals from Erid. They were depending on catching signals, because Rocky was not privy to the radio channels used by either the Blip-A's communications officer or Eridian ground control. By the time Rocky became the last able Eridian on the Blip-A, with the weight of the mission landing solely on his shoulders, Communications Officer Bridger had been dead for almost two years; each Eridian that accepted the additional responsibility of their position following not far after, until the last volunteer of no fewer than five ship positions finally died with neither the time nor health to teach them to another.
So, Grace and Rocky waited. Grace mostly waited in bed, with semi-regular journeys to the cockpit to monitor the systems there, rotate through frequencies, and soothe Rocky, who did most of his waiting while bouncing off the walls. He checked and rechecked his wiring on the hour, and Grace really couldn’t blame him for his fixation- he was so close to hearing another Eridian for the first time in centuries.
“Apology for wasting limited Grace energy on fruitless endeavor.”
Grace glanced towards his laptop, perched on an overturned storage crate beside him. The translator had made a return, following Grace on his shifts in the cockpit to ensure an even playing field of communication in the event of sudden radio contact. It was another way to ease Rocky’s anxieties- he barely accepted sleep these days when it meant leaving Grace (and the radio) alone.
“Grace good. ♬Ren good. Grace... uhh... how d’you say ‘never been better’?”
“Wasting more energy lying.”
Grace watched Rocky’s acrobatic maneuvers... two Rockys. Three? The dark shapes swam across the innumerable lights of the cockpit, on xenonite grips that Grace half-suspected acted more as enrichment than functional tools. Rocky pressed himself bodily against the walls and panels, straining to hear as he tap tap tap tap tap tap tapped.
“You’re acting more near-sighted than me, bud. You’re all up in Mary’s business.”
“Sensory information has been blurry lately. Necessary to verify.”
Grace glanced at the screen, double-checking what he heard with a frown. “Is that... bad?”
“Small to medium amount bad. Rocky will require human face jewelry soon.”
“Be careful.” Grace whistled, closing his eyes and listening to Rocky clicking and tapping, letting it join the ambient hum of the Hail Mary’s cockpit in a soothing shroud of sound.
Grace woke up to Rocky screaming.
His first fear was that the ship had been struck by something; but Mary’s alarms were silent, he was himself unharmed except for a surge of sudden, disorientating adrenaline, and the cockpit remained intact around them. As he struggled weakly against his harness, his eyes searched for and found the source of the high-pitched shrieks.
Rocky lay in a crumpled heap mere feet from him. His limbs splayed out around him, twitching erratically. His suit was fogged to the point of semi-opacity with steam, and a sickening puddle of mercury lay trapped between his cracked carapace and the xenonite. Grace’s mind raced to catch up with the scene- Rocky had been working, same as he had done for weeks, and now he was split open on the ground like an overripe peach grown too heavy for its branch.
Finally releasing his harness, he fell forward onto his knees and crawled closer, holding out a hesitant hand. The space between Rocky and himself was littered with small, shimmering debris that dug into his wasted flesh.
“Hurt hurt hurt hurt hurt,” Rocky chanted between whistle-shrieks of pain, and it was such a visceral sound as to make Grace flinch back.
“Rocky...?” No answer came. “Rocky, that doesn’t look good.”
Grace shuddered as Rocky pushed himself to standing on his spasming limbs, unable to ignore the way rivulets of mercury pooled in the limb-ends of his suit and painted his claws silver. Heat was rolling off of him with every burst of steam, which seemed to come uncontrollably quickly.
“Not... bad. Felt... worse.” He gingerly took a step, and then another, inching towards the hatch connecting to the rest of the ship. Grace balked.
“Who the hell are you acting tough for!?”
“Felt... worse. Don’t follow.” And with that strangled remark, Rocky grabbed the first rung of the ladder and swung himself down, his suit clanging against the metal rungs as he descended deeper into the Hail Mary and further away from Grace.
“You-!” Grace scrambled to catch up, blindly slamming his palms down on sharp plastic and shattered glass. “You’re going to make it worse! Rocky!” He army-crawled to the lip of the hatch, keeping his injured hands cradled into his body defensively as he shouted down at Rocky’s retreating form.
Whatever reason he had to leave Grace behind only bolstered his resolve to follow. He may not have been able to ‘see’ Rocky, but he could certainly hear him barreling through the halls towards the airlock separating their two environments; and as he hobbled in hot pursuit he spotted a smashed screen in the DGCR that hadn’t been there before.
He arrived at the terminus of his atmosphere just in time to watch Rocky shed his suit, falling off him in articulated strips like an orange peel. He began rushing again the moment he kicked himself free, leaving a trail of mercury footsteps as he grabbed and examined indistinguishable bags from among the supplies taken from the Blip-A. Grace opened his mouth to speak, and then thought better of it. Rocky was fully occupied with his task, and from this side of the barrier there was nothing he could do to help. There was never anything he could do, because there was always a barrier.
Rocky finally stopped his ransacking of the supplies, retreating to clearer floor space with his prize of two small parcels. He held one- a soft bag with a small protrusion- close to his wound, his claws gripping and ungripping over the tab with hesitation before crushing it in a final, imperceptibly fast motion. Rocky's body was suddenly enveloped in a thick mist that made Grace's head ring painfully with memories of morning fog; the pressure could've split his skull, and when it failed to fade away, Grace finally recognized it as a scream that teetered against the inaudible.
Rocky fumbled for the second parcel, tearing at it until a strip of fine, flexible mesh fell out. He braced himself against the xenonite barrier as he wrapped the mesh over the wound on his thorax, giving Grace a grisly look at the shattered pieces of carapace floating over wet flesh. A gash, at least four inches long, stretched diagonally from mid-abdomen to dangerously close to a shoulder joint. Pieces of the damaged mineral composite flaked off with each movement, landing in oozing mercury like autumn leaves caught in a brook.
“Grace? Said... don’t follow. No need to see.”
“Did you only just notice me!? That doesn’t exactly give me confidence about... about... this...” Grace trailed off weakly. He lowered himself slowly to his knees, drawn morbidly towards the evidence of their sudden catastrophe carved into Rocky’s body.
“Apology,” Rocky said, dodging the question. “Have to hurry before incapacitated by fluid loss.”
“And this... what you’re doing, will help?”
“Normal circumstances, doctor applies splint. Tight to avoid carapace drifting, not so tight that broken edges buckle and pierce internals-” Rocky cursed suddenly, loudly (and crudely) enough to make Grace jump.
His last experience with a healing cycle hadn't been like this. Rocky’s internal systems had grappled with the consequences of freezing oxygen exposure for weeks while his carapace remained a bulwark, damaged and worn but ultimately unbreached. If he set his mind to it then, Grace could have fooled himself into thinking it was any other sleep cycle. This injury, raw and shiny and weeping, was impossible to ignore.
“Better than doing nothing.” Rocky’s voice returned, smaller than before, but his first aid appeared complete. “Remember from crew. Rocky expert now.”
“That doesn’t mean you have to go all lone wolf on me, Rock. We’re in this together, right?”
Rocky wobbled precariously, slumping against the barrier. Grace’s hand drifted to press against him. “Together,” Rocky whistled weakly. “Apology for scaring. Sleep... will fix.”
Grace exhaled, willing his trembling breath to stabilize enough to support the notes.
“♬Ren sleep. Grace watch.”
Grace waited until Rocky’s form came to complete stillness, until the mercury seeping from beneath the splint finally stopped before he took stock of his own body. He glanced at his hands- his scrapes and punctures had already clotted and sealed. His deadened legs screamed in protest as he tried to rise, requiring several unsuccessful attempts before he was able to stand unsupported. He had to keep going. The Hail Mary would not, could not stop now, even lacking a member of her crew. Grace was the acting captain, with all of the responsibilities that entailed.
It was a brief hunt to find which screen the camera feed was connected to. Grace followed a loose, meandering set of extension cords to the lab, bundling the screen there into several layers of tarp to protect it during the long walk back to the nose of the ship. He did fall, twice, before coming to the conclusion that there was no one there to laugh at him for crawling the rest of the way with it lashed to his back like a baby opossum. He allowed himself a brief detour to collect pillows and blankets- they would be very necessary if he wanted to get any sleep in the cockpit.
He'd give anything to sleep now; to give his body and his mind the only relief they knew from the perpetual exhaustion and pain. He could still curl up at Rocky's side, radio be damned... but it meant so much to Rocky. Grace gritted his teeth and put one weak limb in front of the other, dragging himself the length of the Hail Mary.
As he finally hauled his supplies up the ladder towards the hatch, he gingerly tested the floor for the debris that had pierced his hands, pushing himself over once he was satisfied. He landed on his stomach with an ugly wheeze and clumsily pawed his sweat-soaked hair out of his eyes.
There, at the epicentre of the disaster, were the remains of his laptop, and even in his addled state Grace was able to piece the chain of events together.
“Oh,” he choked out to the empty room, the seeds of hysteria he'd firmly shoved down seizing the opportunity to germinate. "I guess things can always get worse."
For four days, Grace waited.
He only left his makeshift nest to tend to vital functions. When sleeping in the captain’s seat began to cause painful, swollen bruises, he switched to the floor. When the silence began to drive him crazy, he brought a spare laptop up from Ilyukhina’s locker- it may not have had the translator, but it did have In the Aeroplane Over the Sea.
All the while, the comms panel was mute. The wires were exactly as Rocky had left them and Grace resented them bitterly. Were they worth almost dying for?
It had to have been something Grace had done. Rocky had provided him with the cumbersome disc, the hardware used to attach it, and the wiring used to braid the new connection into the Hail Mary’s electrical systems— all immaculately constructed. He’d talked Grace through each step, patiently repeating himself as Grace’s head swam and body fought every step taken in the molasses of empty space. Evidently, it hadn’t been enough to fully idiot-proof the procedure. Was this something he could fix on his own? Mary would continue to handle the autopilot long enough for him to do one last check of the external installations. One last check.
They were so close to Erid.
“Unknown vessel, please identify yourself and your purpose in 40-Eridani system.”
Grace's neck cracked as he performed a painful double-take. Was he hallucinating? He stumbled up to kneeling from his pile of blankets and clutched the pilot's chair to stabilize himself as he looked over his shoulder for Rocky, about to urge him to hurry up and help him. The message played out as his adrenaline surged and then ebbed, leaving Grace- still alone- to process what he'd just heard. An Eridian voice. The second real voice he'd heard in the seven years he'd spent in space. A stranger on the radio was now, unwittingly, the second witness to Grace's entire existence. The second he would tell that Erid was saved. Tears welled up in his eyes. Rocky should've been here for this.
“Unknown vessel, please identify yourself and your purpose in 40-Eridani system.”
With that, Grace was wrenched back from the edge of his philosophical rabbit hole in order to more effectively panic. Nobody would be able to know anything if he didn't speak, but how should he start? The message he’d spent weeks drafting was now comically beyond his physical capabilities. He’d spoken to Rocky before, but that was Rocky. Would they know he was friendly? Would they listen long enough to hear how badly the two of them needed help? Did they have long-range missiles already trained on him, an interloper hurtling towards their atmosphere?
He took a deep, shaking breath, holding his hand over the inconspicuous switch that controlled his untested radio. He could do this. Just start with what was truly important.
“Hello!”