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He’s sitting in the lab when the world starts to go just a little bit fuzzy and red at the edges.
Grace looks up from the modified taumoeba breeding tank he’s been scrutinizing, leaning back in his chair and blinking in confusion. He pulls his goggles up from his face, then scrubs the heel of a gloved hand into his eye sockets, trying to clear the haze. It doesn’t really help—it makes his vision a bit fuzzier, actually, and then reclarify slowly back to that strange fog and faint maroon tinge.
Huh.
Grace fumbles across the table for his glasses, after a moment, and slips them on. It clears the blurriness up a little, but it doesn’t take away the odd tint to his vision. There’s a headache starting to prickle at the back of his skull, too, though it’s nothing unusual. Between the increasingly depleting rations and larger amounts of taumoeba-enriched coma slurry in his diet, he’s been feeling the effects of early-stage malnutrition for some weeks at this point.
It doesn’t explain the odd distortion in his vision, though, all of a sudden—unless the taumoeba is having an unexpected impact they hadn’t predicted. The thought makes him stiffen, a little, unease fluttering in his chest.
Well—first human to ever eat an alien. Anything goes, I guess.
His work forgotten, Grace sets his goggles down and pulls off his gloves, then stands from the workbench. He squeezes his eyes shut against the headrush that flares up at the movement, his vision going swimmy. His legs feel a little weak beneath him, but if it’s from the dizziness or his sudden spike of anxiety or something else he can’t be sure.
“Rocky?” he calls.
There’s a pause, and then he hears a distant shifting and the skittering of familiar claws against xenonite, clambering up from the tunnel leading down to the dormitory. He’s stepping over toward the door to the hall as his Eridian companion emerges on his side of the barrier, twisting deftly to grab the handles that protrude from the transparent walls.
Rocky trills, his notes inquisitive. The computer’s a couple of steps away on the floor of the lab, so the English translation of his words is a little distant, but Grace hardly needs it anymore. “Yes, question? Something happen, question?”
“I—I don’t…” Grace stammers, finding himself at a bit of a loss. He hadn’t thought this through—he doesn’t really know what’s going on. “I don’t know.”
Rocky tilts his carapace in confusion. He taps his claws against the xenonite. “Why Grace say Rocky name, then, question?”
“I’m…” The haziness is intensifying now, alongside the throbbing ache in his skull. It’s making it a little difficult to think. “Something’s weird. I feel…”
Rocky’s frame goes rigid at that, his concern unmistakable. He taps again. “Something wrong, question? Grace hurt, Grace sick, question?”
Grace winces. It’s no surprise that Rocky’s so on edge about his health—with the way the rest of his crew had all passed with him powerless to help, and the projected negative physical effects of Grace’s limited diet on their journey to Erid, he couldn’t blame him for being uptight about it. They only have each other, and they can’t afford to lose that. Neither of them could.
“Grace no die. Grace friend,” he remembered Rocky saying, months ago, and the firmness in his notes left no room for argument.
“Explain. Explain to Rocky. What wrong, question?” The resolute tone is back in Rocky’s voice, now, even as it’s a bit distant to Grace’s ears. The view of the lab seems to be drifting in front of him, a little, blending together into an odd smear of shapes and slightly red-tinged colors.
“I’m…I don’t know,” Grace manages again, a little stupidly. He can’t seem to focus his eyes on anything. He huffs out a sharp breath, feeling a panicked rattle in his chest. Something is wrong.
“Grace go to Armando,” Rocky orders, shifting his stance in the tunnel. He’s agitated—air leaves his vents in a sharp hiss, mirroring the exhale Grace had made just moments before. “Armando check on Grace. Armando fix.”
“I…” Grace agrees; that sounds like a really good idea. He should be going to Armando, but his body doesn’t seem to want to cooperate. His limbs feel heavy. He has to fight to make sense of the jumble of thoughts and confusion swirling in his head, all of a sudden.
“Just—just gimme a second,” Grace chokes out, stumbling a pace or two and bracing his arm against the wall. He lands with a bit more force than necessary, his vision off and movement uncoordinated. His elbow stings at the impact. He hears a sharp trill of alarm from Rocky, but can’t make any meaning or sense of it.
What’s happening to me?
Rocky is chittering anxiously, his voice spiking in pitch. Grace can only make sense of some of the words. “Grace brain—weird thing—activity, what—question?”
His breaths feel tight in his chest, the oxygen in the air too thin. Is it getting too thin? Has there been an issue with the CO2 scrubber, or some other part of the life support and environmental control system, or something? He hadn’t heard any warnings, any messages from the Mary—but maybe he’d just missed it, somehow, or the issue was so widespread that it had cut the alert system and the ship had no way of telling him what was wrong.
Anything could be wrong. Anything could be wrong, but something is wrong, he knows it is, but he doesn’t know what it is and he doesn’t know how to stop it.
Grace pants, fighting back a clawing wave of fear in his chest. He feels his legs give out beneath him, and he sinks slowly to the floor, half-collapsed in an awkward position against the wall. He’s lost feeling in his arms, pins and needles stabbing all the way up to his torso.
He huffs out a noise that sounds a little bit like a whine, a little bit like a whimper. He tries to say something, anything, but doesn’t really know what he’s trying to say, much less how to find a way to put the words together. Help, he wants to beg, maybe.
The room spins, and he feels his eyes drift with it, dizzy. There’s movement in the corner of his vision, and he hears a tapping—no, thudding—against the xenonite wall. Fear coils in his stomach—he’s scared, he doesn’t know what’s going on, and he’s deteriorating fast. “Nnn…”
High, pealing screeches of terror echo through the blurring room, sounds that fill him with a painful, gut-twisting dread. He can make out one word: “GRACE—GRACE—”
He’s going to die.
Grace gasps for breath. A sharp, salty odor floods his sinuses, all of a sudden, like the briny scent of the Bay air when you’re walking close to the water’s edge. It fills him with a melancholy wave of nostalgia. He’d thought he’d never smell it again.
He feels his body lock up, and then the world collapses around him like a black hole into nothing.
• ☆⊹ ˖ ⊹ ࣪ ★ ⋆.˚ ⊹ •
Awareness drifts back to him in fragments. One of the first things he identifies is that he hurts—his arms and legs ache something fierce, his brain throbbing in his skull. His whole body is sore, as though he’d just finished running a marathon. Which…which he wouldn’t know, actually. He’s only ever managed a 5k at best—there’d been a walkathon fundraiser at Grover Cleveland Middle, years ago. He’s not much of a runner, more of a biker, and not by choice.
His eyes flutter open, then, almost of their own accord. Everything’s blurry and far-away, as though he’s squinting through a tunnel to see it. His glasses are gone. He’s horizontal, sprawled out with his legs twisted awkwardly underneath him, lying on what feels like the floor. It’s cold and hard and presses uncomfortably against the side of his face. Something lukewarm and wet has pooled against his cheek, gathered around the corner of his mouth.
What…?
His left wrist throbs with a vengeance. The pain flares suddenly, sharp and unexpected enough to make him shift and moan in pain. It almost feels like he’s sprained it, which…considering his notable lack of his namesake, it wouldn’t be a huge surprise. He can’t remember what he’d done to make it hurt like that, though.
He can’t…he can’t remember what…
He can’t remember anything, almost.
Grace twitches; he tries to move, but his body is heavy. A slurred, fearful sound escapes him. His tongue feels thick, unfamiliar, not like his—and it’s also throbbing, he realizes, sore and raw on one side. The coppery tang of blood sits heavy in his mouth.
Something is pinning him down against the floor.
Terror pierces his chest at the realization. No, no, no—not again, not again—
His body jerks a second time, pure instinct and fear. He grits out a low, wounded noise from between his teeth; a clot of frothy blood and spit sprays out to splatter on the floor. There’s a sharp, startled sound directly over his head, and the pressure is gone, all of a sudden, retreating from his chest and back. A series of rapid, scuttling footsteps pulls away from his side.
There’s a warbling of frantic musical notes, something thrumming and trilling and squeaking like whale-song; it’s familiar, and he knows it, he should understand it, but his head is filled with fog and it hurts and he can’t focus his mind enough to think.
Grace lies on the floor, panting, adrenaline and confusion still tearing through his veins. He doesn’t know what happened—all he knows is that he hurts and he feels awful and he can’t move and there’s someone with him and that something is very, very wrong.
The humming and shifting continues, sharp and rapid, somewhere close by. He’s—he feels like he should know…
“GRACE,” the humming trills, and he gasps a shaky breath. That much he understood. “GRACE—hear me, question? Must breathe, breathe air, no leak, Grace must not die—Grace—”
Rocky. It’s Rocky, standing over him, shuffling frantically on his claws, now outfitted in his form-fitting xenonite suit. Rocky had been with him, Rocky had been there, Rocky had been asking him questions when he…when he’d…
He hadn’t remembered him, almost, for a moment. The terror of forgetting—a painful, awful, far too familiar experience—surges up in his chest, squeezing his throat and drawing tears to his eyes. More tears, he realizes, belatedly—some have already been leaking across the sweat on his face to drip into his hair.
He can’t do this again.
He’s started to tremble against the floor, a little. Rocky trembles back at him, a sharp, recoiling, shuddering thing like he’d done when Grace had first shown him a vial of astrophage. “No—no,” he trills, his notes sharp and harsh with fear. “Grace stop—no more shake, no more shake—”
Grace whines another noise. His head is spinning, and the frantic notes rattle around in his brain. They’re making everything hurt more. “Nnh—”
The footsteps skitter closer, and a pair of arms, solid and inhuman, slip under his shoulder and stomach. Grace croaks out a dizzy groan he’s maneuvered carefully up to sit, pulling from his awkward twisted position against the floor. Something trembling and warm is pressed into his chest, his stomach, more arms wrapping their way around his back. Rocky pulls him into a shaky hug, his vents cycling air anxiously, thrumming and chittering in fear. “Grace breathe, Grace must breathe, Grace keep breathing—”
Grace feels himself leaning into the hug, as much as he can. It’s firm and warm and it’s something that’s safe amidst the swirling chaos around and inside him. He doesn’t know what’s wrong; he doesn’t know what happened, but Rocky is here by his side, and that much is okay. He sniffles and shakes, more tears spilling out to trail across his face and drip into his beard, slumped over atop the xenonite suit of Rocky’s carapace.
They sit there for…some time. The world is still fuzzy; it’s a long while before things start to settle back into some amount of clarity around him. The reddish tint to his vision is gone, though the blurriness still remains. He can’t taste salt anymore, only blood. Grace gasps and cries and leaks all over Rocky’s suit, but he doesn’t seem to mind—he stays pressed tightly to his front, quavering thin notes of comfort and pleas that seem directed toward no one and both of them at once.
“Grace fall, then Grace shake hard hard hard,” Rocky manages, at one point or another. “Not normal shake. Heart fast, breathing fast, brain activity strange. Make bad noises on floor, like choking. Why Grace do this, question? Rocky call and call, but Grace no answer. Grace go to sleep, question? Why no answer, question?”
He sounds so scared. “Sss…m’s’rryyy,” Grace slurs out, his tongue still heavy and stinging with pain. He shudders a little at the unpleasant memories that stir at the sound of his own thick, garbled voice, small and lost and confused within the sterile white walls of the Hail Mary.
At least he as the presence of mind to remember it, though.
Rocky grips him a little tighter, cooing a low, humming noise that reverberates through the suit. “No. Grace no apologize. Is okay. Grace sick, Grace hurt. Rocky fix. Rocky find way to fix.”
Grace breathes out a trembling sigh, closing his eyes. The words, however shaky, are soothing.
He doesn’t know how much time passes—he doesn’t know if he drifts off a little, or what—before Rocky is pulling away, gently, nudging him a little with two claws. “Grace stand now, question? Grace Rocky go to Armando. Armando give medicine. Armando fix.”
Grace swallowed numbly, wincing at the pain and the taste of blood traveling down his throat. “I don’…I dunno ’f…”
“Grace try.” Rocky’s voice is stern and pleading, both at once. “Up on feet.”
Rocky doesn’t seem like he’s going to take no for an answer, though he has the patience enough to be gentle. Grace does try—he really does. He shifts his legs a little to try to position them under his body; that much goes well enough, but he has no strength to push his weight up off of the floor, or to support it for any length of time. He’s panting from the strain, his whole frame shaking against the xenonite, when Rocky decides to take matters into his own hands. Grace feels his claws slip under his knees, another one of his arms tightening in its place across his back. His stomach swoops as his weight is shifted over and up, cradled carefully in the Eridian’s hold.
Grace groans, still panting, pressing up against one of the planes of Rocky’s carapace. Even the slight shift in altitude makes his head spin. Rocky coos a wordless noise of comfort, a low thrum that oscillates like the swell of the ocean tide. He’s hurrying for the doorway leading to the hall and the dormitory beyond, balancing easily on his three free limbs, carrying Grace against him as though he weighs nothing.
Grace buries his face into Rocky’s suit, letting out a slow, shuddering breath. He doesn’t have the presence of mind to figure out what happened, or to know what to do about it, but he trusts Rocky. He trusts Rocky with his life, and he knows that he’ll fix this.
The dizziness and exhaustion swells back up to consume him. Grace can vaguely feel that they’re descending down into to the lowest level of the Mary, hurrying in the direction of the medical bay. Rocky’s movements are so sure, so steady—he navigates the rungs of the ladder without pause or misstep, almost as though they’re in zero gravity.
There’s shifting and movement around him, and more trills that he can’t find the energy to piece together. Grace is lowered onto something soft and flat, wincing as the pain in his body flares from the new pressure against it, and there’s a faint whirring above him that draws nearer after a moment or two. “Multiple injuries detected,” a computerized voice reports overhead.
There’s more whirring and clicking somewhere close by. Grace shifts uncomfortably with a groan; his upturned right palm is met with warmth as Rocky slips his claws around it, taking his hand and squeezing gently.
“Grace rest. Rocky watch.” Rocky’s notes are soft.
Grace has no choice but to listen. He drops back off into darkness to the sound of Rocky’s gentle humming and the feel of his hand in his own, and this time he feels a bit more safe.