Archive of Our Own

We were prepared for me to get sick. Once we had Rocky and his belongings transferred to the Hail Mary, and had set our course for Erid, there was plenty of time for us to do whatever, and when he wasn't making me watch Mythbusters with him, Rocky chose to spend his time, hour after hour after hour, in various Wikipedia spirals. I couldn't blame him; I'd have done the same if I'd had Eridian Wikipedia. It was fun when he was learning about dolphins and whales and demanding to meet them. But it also meant that he went down a deep rabbit hole on various human diseases, effects of malnutrition, organ failure, psychological disorders, and on and on. I'd actually had to talk him down from his anxiety, a few times, when he started catastrophizing about my appendix or my family history (which Rocky dragged out of me like the world's most implacable intake nurse) of heart disease.

"I'll live as long as I live," I said, once, when Rocky was anxiously shifting and tapping and clicking about whether I'd had enough sun exposure on Earth to develop melanoma. I surprised Rocky by saying it; probably not as much as I surprised myself. But I'd gone through that feeling and all the way out to the other side when I made my decision to turn around and save Rocky. It hadn't been easy, but I'd accepted it. Even with Rocky's plan for Grace Not Die on Alien Planet, living on Erid was going to be dicey: they might not be able to make sufficient nutritional food for me, the gravity would mess with my joints and my circulation, and the psychological effects of living as the only member of your species on an entire planet were . . . well, completely unknown.

"Not acceptable," Rocky sang, after a moment of stunned silence.

"No, I mean it," I said, tears prickling at the corners of my eyes. "I'll live as long as I live, and I'll live that time with, with you. And it'll be a good life. Right?"

"Want time with Grace to be long," Rocky said. "Human lifespan very short already."

"I know. Yeah. I know." That was all I wanted, too: more time with Rocky. A real lifetime with him. Maybe that was weird, to want so much commitment from a best friend, but Rocky seemed to want the same, and there was really no reason to judge my relationships by human standards anymore. If we both wanted to be together, why shouldn't we? It was unarticulated between us, maybe, but it was real, or I thought it was.

So, Rocky promised to do fewer late-at-night-while-Grace-is-asleep Wikipedia spirals, and I promised to write up some procedures for Rocky to follow in the event of various medical emergencies. I wasn't a medical doctor, but I was closer to it than Rocky, so I got to do a few Wikipedia spirals of my own, writing up a manual on how Rocky might plausibly remove my appendix or restart my heart if it stopped. I found the process strangely soothing, thinking about how Rocky would care for me if I needed him to, how Rocky always wanted to care for me. Putting my life in his hands was nothing new, really, but it was funny how often I ended up happy-crying while writing up a Rocky-friendly explanation of an endoscopy or a tracheostomy or a limb amputation. Because all I could think was how much I trusted him, how he made me feel so safe.

Rocky memorized every word that I wrote, and made his own notes as well. The How to Fix Grace binder, as I labelled it, grew thicker and thicker as we made plans to look after my soft human body.

So, after all that, of course it was Rocky who got sick.

I noticed the lethargy first. Rocky started sleeping longer, and taking longer to wake up and move when his sleep was done. He was slower, and less focused, too; once, he asked me to repeat something I'd told him earlier in the day, and I was shocked into silence. Rocky had never before asked me to repeat anything he'd already understood.

That was what motivated me to ask him about it. I didn't want to be indelicate about something that might be a natural cycle, but I was worried that he was too out of it to notice how bad his symptoms had actually gotten.

So I sat down next to his ball while he was trying—with what looked like uncharacteristically clumsy movements—to weave something out of xenonite, and put a hand to the panel.

It took him a moment, but then he reoriented his carapace towards me and trill-stomped a yes? at me.

"Rocky, I'm sorry if this is inappropriate to ask, or whatever. But. Are you okay? You seem . . . out of it, lately. If you had a human immune system I'd say you were sick."

Normally, Rocky's response to this would be to comment on the frailty of human immune systems, or the soft and porous nature of the human body, or the elegance of his own worker cells. The fact that he didn't respond right away made my heart jump into my throat and start beating there.

I still had my hand on the xenonite, and Rocky took off his weaving gloves and put a hand up to match me. "Grace worry," he said. "Heart go fast."

"Yeah," I said, swallowing. "I'm worried, pal."

Rocky made those cooing sounds that he sometimes made when he was feeling particularly soppy about me. He'd never translated them for me, so I thought they were his equivalent of going awww, shhhh, like you would at a child or a dog.

"Do you know what's going on? Can I help?" I scratched my fingernails against the xenonite, prompting Rocky to scratch back.

"Rocky . . . know. Has never been this bad before. Mind and body both slow, stupid. Hard to think, hard to fix."

"What is it?" I moved to sit crosslegged and shuffled a little closer to the barrier, bumping my knees against it.

"Some Eridians . . . worker cells get sick. When worker cells die, is normal, get replaced. But when worker cells sick like this, start attacking other cells, start causing problems. Healthy worker cells need to repair more and more damage. Start sleeping long, trying to repair."

"Oh. Like an autoimmune disorder in humans."

Doctor Rocky, Wikipedia MD, gave me a human nod, which was always very cute and sweet of him. "Yes, similar."

"It sounds very dangerous. This has happened before?"

"Yes, three attacks before. All minor, all three times sick worker cells were purged before serious symptoms." He paused, but clicked his fingers, so I waited for him to come out with whatever else he had to say. "Some said, Rocky should not go on Tau Ceti mission, Rocky too weak. Had to prove no attack in over fifty years."

"That's such crap. They're lucky you went after all."

"Yes, yes, can gloat, Rocky brilliant savior of entire planet."

"You are. But right now you feel like ass, huh?"

Rocky went still for a moment. "Colloquialism?"

I smiled. "Sorry. Means you feel awful, sick."

"Yes."

"How can we purge the sick worker cells? That's the treatment that worked before?"

Rocky shifted from foot to foot, changing handholds, moving for the sake of moving. Uh-oh. "Not much medicine on Erid. Grace know. Hard to administer, body not accessible like human body. Have to feed sick worker cells kind of poison, they die, leave body. Very specific poison. Targeted. Not kill healthy worker cells."

"And I'm guessing you don't have any of that poison-medicine on board."

"No." He clicked some more. "Hoped attack would go away. Pass naturally. Can happen sometimes. But didn't. Is getting worse."

"Is the poison that targets the sick worker cells something we can synthesize?"

"Not know." He hunkered down on his limbs, as if exhausted just by this conversation.

"Okay. Okay. Well. Let's find out."

Rocky told me everything he knew about the necessary compound, which was pretty comprehensive, but I made him go over it multiple times, just to make sure he didn't leave anything out. This, of course, pissed him right off, and we had to yell about it for a bit before he would do it.

"Rocky told! All facts, told!"

"Just one more time."

"Grace not trust? Not believe Rocky?" His insistent use of the attentive-formal pronoun, which translated as Rocky or Grace, was on purpose, to tell me how angry he was. I lobbied a couple back to let him know that I was annoyed with him.

"Grace believe and trust Rocky, okay? I just think we should be sure if we're gonna synthesize a poison and feed it to you."

"All components listed, Grace have list, Grace hearing not so good maybe, Rocky already know this—"

I cut him off, sharply. "Rocky! I swear to god, I am not trying to be a jerk about this, but last week you forgot to finish the navigation checks. I am worried you'll forget something here if we're not careful."

I hadn't wanted to play that card, but it brought him up short, as I knew it would. "Rocky . . . not forget," he said, uncertainly.

"Sorry, bud, but you did. I noticed it later and finished them for you."

There was a long pause. He drooped in his ball, clearly humiliated. For an Eridian to forget something . . . I could see that it was something deeply shameful, to him. I immediately softened my voice and put a hand on the ball to reassure him.

"It's okay. It's okay. I'm here to make sure nothing gets missed. I'm taking care of you until you're better, all right?"

Slowly, he put his hand against mine.

"Rocky go over components again."

"Good. Thank you."

"Rocky trust Grace. I trust you."

Whew. I knew he was serious if he was breaking out the familiar-intimate pronouns for the conversation. It was a lot of responsibility, the kind that would've made me run screaming in my old life. The kind that did make me run screaming, in fact, across a field and up against a barbed wire fence.

But there was no time to dwell on my own trauma just then, so I got to work synthesizing Rocky's medicine.

*

"I think it's ready."

"Be sure," Rocky hummed. He was lying down on his side of the barrier, not asleep, but with his legs spread out as if he were. He had been in that position more and more, as if even his usual anxious fidgeting had become too tiring for him.

"Well, I made the compound as instructed, I measured the dose, I soaked your food in it." Apparently the few medicines that Eridians did have were a) massively heat-resistant and b) consumed with food so that it would actually be taken up by the body. "Do you wanna check my work?"

"Brain not work," Rocky said, quietly. "Too stupid to check."

I didn't know how to respond to that, to the sadness and shame I knew Rocky was feeling. My vagus nerve did something weird, making all my insides clench and spark and roil with emotions, but I didn't know how to express any of them, or which ones Rocky might want to hear. I settled on saying far less than I felt.

"That's okay, Rock. I checked it. C'mon. Time to eat."

Rocky dutifully, slowly, dragged himself to the airlock. "Will be more sick. After medicine. Sick sick sick. Grace not freak out, please."

"Um. I'll try. Will you sleep? After the medicine?"

"Maybe."

I nodded, trying to brace myself for that. Sure, I was just gonna feed my best friend hastily-synthesized poison, and then he was gonna go to sleep, ie, be motionless and cold with his hearts not beating, for a period of several hours. And I was definitely gonna be normal about all of that and not freak out.

I brought him the food with the worker-cell-poison in it, biting the inside of my cheek to try to stop my hands from shaking. It went through the airlock, and Rocky pulled it slowly towards himself. But he was too exhausted to hold himself up for long; he kept collapsing back down whenever he tried to stand and eat.

"Okay, okay," I said, sweat breaking out at my temples. "Come here. Lean on me."

"Will crush you," Rocky objected.

"Nope. Just lean, okay? Not all your weight." There was a large flexible panel built into the barrier here, that Rocky had installed not long after we'd set out for Erid. It was about three feet tall by two feet wide, and I turned around, putting my back and shoulders against it. Rocky shuffled over and heaved himself up onto me, letting me take some of his considerable weight.

"Not crush?" he asked.

"Not crush. I can take more. It's okay."

At that, he trembled, and let go, and I felt what must've been two hundred pounds of him resting on my shoulders and back. I strained, and braced myself with my feet on the floor, and held him up.

"You hear me eat again," Rocky noted. He generally kept that to himself, barring the one time he'd shown me how his eating worked.

"I won't listen," I promised, trying to keep my body braced and my breaths even.

"No, is okay. Is good, you listen, make sure I eat all."

I didn't point out that my listening skills weren't good enough to know how much he was eating or when he was done, that I'd have to turn around and see him for that. Instead, I tried to reassure him. "I'm listening. I'll make sure."

"I am too stupid right now. Brain slow. Grace make sure."

"Grace make sure," I said, formally.

And then he ate, the sounds much less enthusiastic than the last time he'd let me watch. I waited until the eating sounds stopped to slowly turn around, bracing my hands to hold him up as I shifted position. All the food was gone from the dish I'd passed him.

"You did really good, Rock," I said. "You're all done. You did so good."

"Sleep. You watch." That was all Rocky managed to say before he collapsed, and I settled in for a long, terrible vigil.

*

I played minecraft, I sobbed into my hands, I watched that episode of TNG where Data tells Worf I chose to believe that I was a person, and I sobbed into my hands some more. I tried not to think about the possibility that I had killed my friend while trying to help him. And then, eventually, wrung out and empty, I dozed off, next to the barrier, sometime between hour eight and hour ten. When I woke a few hours later, Rocky was still asleep (or dead, my traitorous brain whispered, he could be dead, you won't know for days if he is) but after I blinked my hot, gummy eyes a few times, I saw that he was also sort of . . . oozing.

Black, goopy sludge was slowly dripping from his vents and from his seam. It was terrifying: I didn't even think that anything but air could come out of his vents. He was supposed to be a closed system, a safe, enclosed body inside an impenetrable rock fortress.

I thought about trying to collect a sample of it to analyze, to figure out what it was, but I couldn't see how I could get it from where Rocky was lying to the airlock to bring it into my atmosphere. So I lay there, reaching my hand through the barrier, stroking his big split leg, the only part of him I could reach. I knew he couldn't feel it. But as I watched the goop pool and spill from his body, it was the only thing I could do.

After another hour or so, Rocky did wake. He made a sound that didn't translate, but that I thought had a lot in common with a human saying euuuuughhhh. It was certainly less musical than his usual expressions.

I rubbed my eyes and sat up as he began to stir. "Rocky? You okay, buddy?"

His yes was not as high and happy as it usually was, but it was a yes. "Leaking," he said, plaintively, like it was the greatest disaster that had ever happened.

"Yeah, I saw. Is that . . . is that normal? Is it good?"

"Normal, yes. Dead worker cells purged with fluid."

There weren't a lot of emergencies that his body dealt with via fluid, not to mention that his fluids weren't very . . . fluid, in this case. It looked sticky, like it would jam up his vents. "Doesn't look comfortable."

"Feel gross gross gross, disgust disgust," he agreed. The air coming from his vents was blowing the goop around, but not really dislodging it. He sounded muffled, weirdly. "Hard to talk. Rocky will clean." But none of his legs were moving; he looked like he was still exhausted.

"Come here," I said, after a moment. "Give me something to use, and I'll help you get cleaned up."

He twitched, then hesitated. "Gross gross gross, should not touch."

I guessed it was a cultural barrier; it made sense that Eridians would be repulsed on the rare occasions when their fluids started leaking out. It was probably how I would feel if Rocky had to deal with my poop. Which I absolutely knew he was willing to do, because we'd discussed, in very embarrassing detail, how he could give me a colonoscopy if he needed to. I knew he was willing to touch any disgusting leaky part of me, and I had an entire binder full of laminated instructions to prove it. I wasn't about to let him suffer.

"Shut up. I'm taking care of you. Will you get over here and let me help?"

He dragged himself closer, and produced a tool from somewhere, a long stick with a bristly, staticky brush-like end. It had a thick cylindrical handle, so thick that my hand barely fit around it, and when I brought it to Rocky's vents, I understood why: the bristles used some kind of static electricity to attract the goop, and then the goop got sucked into the handle, leaving the bristles clean and ready to be used again.

"Good design," I said, and Rocky gave me a half-hearted giggle.

Rocky shuffled closer to where I was sitting crosslegged, and pushed his carapace into the barrier hard enough that the weight of his torso was resting on my legs. It reminded me of a time when my ex-girlfriend's particularly enthusiastic black lab had decided to crawl into my lap like a pomeranian. I ooofed and shifted to better distribute his weight, but then it was nice, the pressure, the way he was resting on me, the way he was trusting me.

"Thank you thank you, Grace," he said, formally. "Embarrass to ask. But big help. Thank you thank you."

"Hey, it's okay," I said. I kept thinking about how much Rocky had committed to do for me, and how little he was asking of me now, how ashamed he was to ask for such a small thing. "I want to take care of you. I want to help. That's . . . it's what we do, for each other, okay? You don't ever need to thank me for that."

He shuddered, but relaxed against me. It was astonishing, how clearly I could feel his body through the xenonite, how his anxiety and trust were transmitted to me via the tiniest movements of his body. We hadn't done a lot of touching through the new, bigger panel, and I wondered why that was. I loved being able to almost-touch him, to feel the trembling and shuddering of his vents under my hands.

I wondered what Rocky might have had in mind, when he installed this panel. We hadn't used it to touch, but we hadn't used it for much of anything else, either.

I started running the brush-thing over his vents in slow, careful strokes, letting it suck up the goop. Of course Eridians would invent a way to wash that didn't use water. It was painstaking work: the goop was caught deep in his vents, and needed to be encouraged upwards before it could get caught in the static field of the brush. I worked at it slowly, carefully, until Rocky stopped shuddering and started making those little cooing sounds instead.

"Feel good?" I asked, smiling.

"Good good good," Rocky said, sighing from his now mostly-clean vents. "You good with brush. Feel good."

"Oh yeah? Should we do this sometime when you're not sick?"

Rocky didn't answer for a moment, then said, "Yes, if Grace want."

"I'd love to do this for you. Whenever you like." It was like brushing a cat, except if the cat was sentient and your best friend and also the sun you kind of planned to orbit for the rest of your life. I worked the brush down into one of Rocky's vents, very gently, and he squealed. He didn't sound upset, and didn't pull away, so I did it again, finally getting the last bit of goop from that crack, and he wiggled happily against me.

"Good good Grace," he sighed. I blushed, pleased. I wanted to be so good to him.

"What's it feel like?" I asked, to cover what was probably an increasing heart rate.

"Mmm. Clean. Good scratch. Tingly. Deep brush make feelings go from vents all the way down to claws."

"Yeah? Good feelings?" I gulped. I really needed to not think that was sexy, but it sounded kinda sexy.

"Good good," Rocky confirmed, which didn't help at all. We should probably expand our vocabulary.

"I'm glad," I said, and I was. I guessed I didn't need to know how exactly Rocky was feeling good, so long as I could make him feel that way. Especially after his long illness.

"Brain already feel better. Still tired, but sharp."

"That's such good news," I said, some surprise tears escaping from my eyes and falling down to spatter on the flexible xenonite over Rocky's vents.

"You leaking too," Rocky said, reaching up a slow, clumsy hand to touch the xenonite beneath the tiny pool of my tears.

"Yeah. I was so worried about you. I—I love you so much."

I hadn't said it before. It had been implied, between us, many times, but I'd never said that to him before. It felt like something inside of me had to break, for me to say it, something old and rusted, a tall gate covered in heavy chains. And as I cleaned the goop from his body, as I cared for him, I was finally able to break through.

He cooed. "I love you." He said it simply, like he said all facts, and I cried on him a little more while I finished up his vents.

"Okay. Looks good," I said, swiping my forearm under my fogged-up glasses and over my eyes, wiping away the tears and snot on my face. "Anything else?"

Rocky hesitated again. I stroked over his vents with my fingers, feeling the play and motion of them. God, I loved him. I loved him! I couldn't believe I hadn't ever said it before.

"It's okay, whatever it is," I added. "Nothing's too gross for me. Not if it helps you."

"Rocky abdominal hole also need clean. Rocky can do later." But he followed this last statement up with a quiet question-tap on the floor. Rocky can do later?, like he thought that might be too much to ask of me.

"Not unless you don't want me to do it," I said. "If you turn around, we can have you all cleaned up really soon. You'll feel better then, won't you?"

"Yes. Yes, Grace, good sweet Grace."

I felt it again, the rush of blood and heat when he praised me. In that moment, I wanted to be nothing else in the world, in the galaxy, but Rocky's good Grace.

He shifted around, slowly, agonizingly, and my heart broke again with how much effort it obviously took him. Then he was pointing his orifice towards me, legs splayed to keep them out of the way, and I felt suddenly embarrassed, shocked, to be the recipient of so much vulnerability.

"Are you—more sensitive? Here?" I gestured towards his leaking seam with the brush, not getting too close.

"Yes. Slow. Soft. You are good at brushing. I trust you, you will be gentle."

"I will," I promised him, solemnly. That was more intimate pronouns than I had ever heard him use in a row.

I ran the brush as softly as I could over his seam, collecting all the leaking black goop, tidying it away. He shivered, while I did it, and one of his legs occasionally spasmed if I hit a sensitive spot, but he stayed still and quiet while I cleaned him. There were fewer nooks and crannies here, so it didn't take as long as his vents, though I thought there was more of the goop by volume.

"Okay, all done, I think." I pulled back, only realizing retroactively how close I'd had my face to his hole. It was probably extremely impolite for Eridians, even taboo. Hell, it was kind of taboo for me, when I thought about my mouth being so near his eating/pooping/sex hole. But if he didn't mind, I didn't mind.

"Feel better. Grace said no, do not say thank you, but Rocky need to say. Thank you thank you. Poison worked. Cleaning worked. Much better."

"I'm glad," I said. I tossed the brush away, preferring instead to touch him with my hands, but he was still sitting in that exposed position, so I just ran my hands up and down two of his splayed legs.

He twitched under my touch, then slowly shifted around again, sitting on his legs and facing his smooth-sided facet towards me.

"Hug," he said, and added a question particle. There was no question in my mind.

"Yeah," I said, and leaned foward into the barrier. Why hadn't we been using it for hugs? Had Rocky designed it for hugs? Whatever, I was going to hug him daily from now on, whether he liked it or not.

He kind of seemed to like it.

We didn't have as much flexibility as we needed to properly wrap our arms around each other, but it was enough to feel Rocky's whole body against mine, enough for us to stroke each other gently: his claws trailing over my chest, my hands gripping and squeezing his carapace. I couldn't help pressing a soft, lingering kiss to the top of his vents.

He trilled, tired but happy. "Rocky get kiss."

"Rocky get whatever he wants," I said, probably recklessly, because he would absolutely use an open-ended promise like that to insist that we watch another three-day Mythbusters marathon together. Oh well.

"Good," he agreed. "Sleep again. Many hours. Grace not freak out."

"I won't freak out," I said, though I was definitely planning to freak out just a little more, as a treat, once he was unconscious.

"Grace always freak out. But you always take care of me."

"Always," I agreed. "Anytime."

And he splayed himself out, more carefully this time, and slept. I imagined his healthy worker cells, swarming through his body, repairing all the damage, bringing him back to his full strength.

And if I planted one more kiss on his carapace, right where his forehead might be if he were a human, well, I didn't think he'd mind.