Chapter Text
Grace felt like he should gag, but he couldn’t stop staring.
There’s… blood. Okay, understatement. There’s a heck of a lot of blood, tons of it, sticky and congealed and run with vines like something could actually grow in that much blood. The blood is also, surprisingly, covering a submarine, made of repurposed metal sheets and a whole lot of crossed-fingers and go-get-em attitude. Said submarine was, again surprisingly, floating in space. The red of the blood glinted in the starlight.
Grace couldn’t help but think that if he and Rocky weren’t out on another Astrophage/Taumoeba checking mission, they never would have found it. The blood soaked box would have floated off into space, amidst the stars, lost.
The stars were brightening, slowly, but that didn’t mean everything was okay. A good scientist couldn’t assume, he needed evidence. So here they were, back in the Hail Mary, now adapted by the Eridians with better engines and a heck of a lot more food (just in case) and he and Rocky were once again a due team of star saving heroes. Five to ten samples, every couple of months, and so far there had been no changes. The Taumoeba hadn’t adapted again, the astrophage was being hunted to a healthy population level and really everything was hunky dory… except there was a submarine. In space. Full of blood.
‘Life signs detected.’
Oh, and there was that.
One look at the submarine and Rocky had forced him behind a wall so thick and triple locked that Grace couldn’t get to it if he tried. So he watched, feet pacing incessantly across Mary's smooth flooring as his heart hammered hard enough to leave his ribs bruised and chest aching.
“Rock-” Grace protested, not for the first time.
“Radiation! Radiation bad for Grace, bad bad bad. Grace die, statement. Rocky not let best friend Grace die, statement. Grace stay behind safety glass, watch Rocky do big science.”
Rocky’s two front legs waved pointedly, his xenonite ball rolling rampantly back and forth as the submarine was brought to dock against one of his tunnels. He was right, Grace knew that, but that didn’t mean he had to like it.
“What is new object, question.” Rocky asked, from halfway down the tunnel.
“It’s…” oh, how to explain this to an Eridian, “It’s a submarine.”
“What word mean?”
Grace sighed. “It’s a craft, like a boat, but made for moving around underwater. It’s airtight, pressure tight, with crew and supplies and- jeez, Rocky, are there people inside?”
“Hmm…” Rocky went painfully quiet, and Grace was forced to listen as the door of the submarine was forcefully opened. Grace felt momentarily glad to be on this side of the glass, thick and sturdy for his own protection, but his need to know was rapidly outweighing his relief.
Rocky let out a shrill that had Grace’s blood run cold, and the Eridian ran back up the tunnel at an impressive speed, all the while yelling, “Flood! Flood! Lots of water a flood!”
Grace looked behind him, expecting a flush of ocean water to spill out across the tunnel, but his mouth ran dry.
“Rock… that’s not water.”
—
Grace did gag. He couldn’t help it.
The blood had flowed into the tunnel like an open wound, and the more they forced open the overgrown deep sea container, the more blood came. Grace had never seen anything like it, not in movies, or documentaries, or the worst of his own nightmares.
The submarine itself was scientifically inaccurate - that was his biggest issue with it. It was so inefficient, and decades behind safety requirements. Like a bunch of low funded criminals and toddlers had worked together to create their best approximation of what a submarine should look like. It was cheap, and about as uncheerful as it could be. What little Grace could see of the interior was overgrown, thick red vines and roots consisting of what looked horrifyingly like blood entwined and twisted through the interior.
Rocky had cleaned up the mess, somehow, Grace wasn’t paying attention. His eyes were locked on what looked strangely person shaped in the centre of the… blood-vine-mess. Rocky still wouldn’t let him closer, choruses of ‘dirty dirty, why so dirty,’ and ‘bad bad bad’ ringing in his head.
Mary had said life signs were detected. Could it be the blood? The vines? Some horrible alien plant that looked gag-worthy enough to avoid, growing itself into some space junk? It was disturbing. And fascinating. Grace wanted to dig his hands in and learn it. With gloves.
Hours passed, Grace’s pacing dissolving into stock-still staring, his forehead pressed to the glass. It got to the point where Grace didn’t expect anything living to emerge from the blood soaked submarine, and he’d already been planning a diagnostic to run on Mary’s system and her definition of ‘life signs’. Then Rocky started… cutting.
The sound was, for lack of a better word, wet. The colour was red as more blood seemed to leak from each open vine, and as he cut back the thickest, a mass fell away from the console. A human(ish) shapes mass.
Grace stared at it. His eyes were burning, but he stared. More time passed, too much time in his opinion, and then the mass was dragged out of the submarine, a heap of flesh and meat and red red vines hauled across the tunnel's floor.
Rocky was warbling. Grace couldn’t hear him over the blood rushing in his ears.
Mary confirmed, once more, ‘Life signs detected’, the synthesised voice ripping Grace from his stupor and forcing him to hear one of what was many questions from Rocky.
“Human, question. Grace okay, question. Grace not answer, statement. Grace dizzy, question.”
Grace found some odd comfort in the translator, hearing Rocky’s melody natural beneath, but this was the voice that got him through the hardest days on Mary, post amnesia, pre-ammonia burns.
Arm-ando was enlisted by a rampant Rocky, at some point, Grace didn’t know. He was dizzy, but made it from the protective wall to where the hunk of blood and flesh was hauled onto a medical bed. The moment it was, the blood just seeped into everything. The mattress, the sheets, even the metal looked like it was being coated.
Arm-ando wiped, cleaned and sterilised, leaving a heap of red soaked swabs and wipes on the floor. Nothing touched the sides. They had no other option than to submerge the mass. Grace had a hard time calling it a body, until Arm-ando wiped enough thick, slick blood from what was most certainly a nose and mouth, and strapped an oxygen mask to the face.
The body was placed carefully inside the decontamination chamber, and jet washed. Red. With each cycle the air and water was stained, sullied, utterly ruined by red. Clear, clean water turned dark and vile, chunks of heck knows what floating into the drains. Grace though it would never stop, that the red would keep coming and coming until the body beneath wore away, the shape of arms and legs, chest and head reduced and shrunken until there was nothing left, eroded like a stone under a constant drip over thousands of years.
Finally he saw skin, tan and broken and burned, but real skin. Dark hair was washed out from a paste to clean, dark black strands, and the whites of teeth appeared, not on the mouth but lining the left cheek in a row of vicious sharp incisors.
It was a man, one so close to human that Grace didn’t care if he had three tongues and fire breath - he looked human.
They left him in the water until the water ran clear.
Rocky warbled all the while, not for the man, but for Grace. The sound of the human’s heart was loud and terrifying, hammering against his all too sensitive hearing.
“Grace heart rate elevated, statement. Grace feeling dizzy again, question. Need sit down, question.”
Grace felt a smile tug at his lips, the tell-tale adoration of his best friend tugging at his heartstrings. He got dizzy, yes, more than he’d like, but that’s what happened when you were drugged, comatose, abandoned and starved.
He’d lost the muscle, (oh he’d loved that muscle) and the fat, and the bulk, and when he’d arrived at Erid he’d been a poor example of a human. He didn’t remember the first few weeks, but he did remember Rocky insisting to the other Eridian’s that humans weren’t supposed to look so thin and brittle.
“I’m scared, Rock.” He admitted softly. “This is the first human I’ve seen in… years.” He crouched down, pressing his forehead to the glass of the decontamination chamber as another wave of water flooded through, tinted pink. “If he dies, I…” He pulled back, and a hollow bong sounded out as he thumbed his head against the glass.
Rocky sang with concern, too low for the translator to pick up the words but Grace understood. He’d understood for years now.
“Rocky Grace big science!” Rocky declared, a happy tone to his otherwise robotic voice, “Rocky Grace keep new human alive for Grace, so Grace not lonely.”
“Yeah… sounds good bud.”
—
They got the ‘new human’ as Rocky dubbed him, out of the decontamination chamber, and Grace couldn’t tear his eyes away. He was hot. Wait- to clarify, his skin was hot, very hot, enough that it could have been a fever or the radiation still cooking at the base layers of his bubbling skin. He was also, objectively, sexy. That was just scientific fact, and so Grace had no shame in thinking it.
He was Korean, if Grace had to guess, but he wasn’t a fan of labels of any kind. He had a long-ish face, a strong nose, great beard, long fluffy black hair and frankly the rest of him was an indulgent level of bulky that suggested the man liked to exercise.
But he was human. With human skin, and human hair, and human eyes… well. Grace had inspected him, his body, under pure scientific curiosity of course, and that last part might be inaccurate. The teeth were a dead giveaway, as were the vine line tendrils dangling off of the stump of his amputated left arm, but when he’d carefully pulled back his eyelids, and moved past the gorgeous brown of his right eye, he was stunned to find his left eye was pure, vicious red.
It wasn’t bloodshot by any means, more like the blood had stained it so severely that this was its colour now. Or always had been. It was a predatory red, so to speak, the kind that if you were to see it in a dark field, hallway or forest, you would defecate and run the other way. It was fascinating.
Even though the new human was completely unconscious, he felt like that eye was watching him. He closed the lid, fingers running carefully over the outside of the protruding teeth from his ear to beneath his cheekbone.
“New human have radiation poisoning, statement.” Rocky informed him from his end of the medical bay. He’d been running tests. Lots of tests, more out of pure human-centric curiosity than anything else. “Grace not touch new human, not safe.”
“Hmm…”
Grace’s fingers had a mind of their own, tracing each tooth and raw pink indent they made to fix to the outside of his jaw. The new human’s mouth opened with ease, revealing a perfectly normal set of teeth inside, but the further it opened, the more it unhinged, until the outer jaw took over and the mouth was wide enough to fit Grace’s head inside. He closed it, promising himself to look again later, for science.
He focused instead on the burns. They made his own burns look… kind. There were of course radiation burns, the kind that ate away at the flesh until the skin cracked, blistered and killed the nerves, leaving him feeling heavy and numb.
Grace felt his stomach lurch, and twisted the dial beside his patient's bedside. A fresh dose of pain medication swam through his IV, pure morphine mixed with a creation of the Eridian’s design that Grace could confirm covered even the pain of starvation.
He hoped it would be enough to fend away the pain of the radiation, and amputation, and concussion that left a split across the man’s forehead. He had a red mark across his nose that looked both like both a scar and a bloodstain, but like a papercut was likely to ache as much as everything else. The man was covered head to toe in scars, layers and dug into his skin. Pain was no stranger to him, but Grace would be damned if he woke with the same agony and confusion as he had.
If he ever woke up.
Grace sighed, imagining a long, lonely life looking at this man’s sleeping face, never able to speak, or laugh, or look back at him with those brown/red eyes. He considered giving him a name, but pushed the thought aside. No, he has a name, and I’ll learn it, today, tomorrow, in a year? I’ll wait. I can do that, I’m super duper patient.
The new human had arrived in such a sorry state that his clothes were, well, disintegrated, save for the harness that Grace had insisted on cleaning and preserving despite Rocky’s confusion.
“Why save, question. Dirty, dirty, dirty.”
“Just- because.” Grace had stuttered. “It’s a human thing.”
“Human! Rocky love learn human culture. Grace share with Rocky-”
But they’d also pulled a pendant from the decontamination chamber. A simple glass circle indented with a tree sapling. The simplicity of it hit something deep within Grace, something that told him that whilst this didn't look like much, it was worth more than gold. That, or he was reaching. He pulled the pendant from the table beside the medical bed, winding the worn cord through his fingers. It was cheap glass, likely cut from something bigger and repurposed, sealed quickly with a soldered metal rim, and an old cord, worn and used and yet… precious. The sapling inside had a single, tiny green leaf, preserved and kept, and the glass was shining as though polished and adored.
He curled the cord around the new human’s hand, where it rested against his chest, the pendant pressed firmly against his vast, calloused palm.
Grace’s fingers lingered, running over the joints of his fingers, across that slightly too warm skin, feeling the rough, warm texture of his finger tips. He lingered, longer than he rightly should. How could he not?
He glanced at Rocky, and the burns indented into the skin of his own arm, and sighed. What he wouldn’t give to touch someone. His hand settled, purposefully, and he twined his fingers with those of the stranger on the bed.
“I don’t know if you can hear me,” he said gently, clearing his throat to allow his voice past the lump in his throat, “I don’t know if you’d want a stranger holding your hand, or sitting at your side, but… until you wake up, I’m gonna do that. So… you better wake up fast, and tell me to fudge off.”
He chuckled to himself, watching the man’s face with bated breath for a movement, a twitch, a smile… nothing. There was nothing, of course. He could wait.