Chapter Text
For once, Grace was not looking out the cupola window as he sat near it, curled up under the quilt. His eyes were instead directed at a screen, moving across digital pages at a steady speed. It was pretty comfortable, if he said so himself.
A stinging pain drew Grace's attention away from the downloaded novel he had been reading. With the pain came annoyance, that it had disturbed him again. It was easy to quiet the stabbing pain for now. All he had to do was comb through the feathers until he found the one which needed straightening out. Simple.
That simple solution was a band-aid. He was treating the symptom, not the cause.
There was this nagging feeling that followed Grace around the ship. When he worked, it would lean over his shoulder. If he slept, it followed him into unconsciousness and out of it again. It was always there, in the room with him.
Grace tried to get his mind back into the world of the story he had been engrossed in a moment ago. He just had to read the words on the page. Words on a page. The scene was nowhere near as vivid to him now.
He read the same paragraph again. Re-read it.
The feeling poked at him, prodded him. It crawled under his feathers to settle there. This made him shudder, card his fingers through the plumes as if he could get a hold on the feeling and throw it away.
Novel-reading was impossible when this sensation was bearing down on him. He closed the computer down, resolving to read at some other time.
Rubbing his hands over his eyes, Grace considered what he would do instead. He needed something to distract himself with. Something to occupy his mind. That way he could not focus too hard on the feeling creeping in on him by the seconds.
Getting up made the quilt fall into a little heap on the floor.
Slipping on his shoes, Grace set out to wander some aimless path around the ship until he could think of something to do with himself.
First stop was the lab.
The taumeoba were behaving well, so he would rather not risk that by messing around with them. This generation just needed to breed, no need for Grace to intervene for the next while.
Lab work without reason was out of the question as a rule. It was fun, he loved doing it. The issue lied in being on a spaceship with limited supplies. Supplies he might actually need at some point on their journey.
Checking their other supplies would similarly be pointless. He knew exactly how much food he had, or rather how he did not have enough. At least he could get to Erid with it. Heck, he even had enough to stick around a while after that. Tallying the number of meals left would not make more appear though, so he tried not to think too hard about it.
There was no work to do, no maintenance he had to see to. Aimlessness rolled around inside him. He had too little to do. Too much time on his hands.
Grace was walking in circles. Not literal circles. Circles as in he was moving between the same spots in the Hail Mary, not settling in one place, constantly in a repeating motion.
He needed to break the pattern. To stop alternating between the same handful of tasks.
Of course, the Don't Go Crazy Room! The entire point of the room was to keep him sane!
A late-night recording of some beach had been going on a loop. It was the same thing, over and over. At the beginning, the sun would have dipped just below the horizon, waves rolling over the sand at a steady pace. With time, the sky would continue to darken, revealing too-bright stars that were definitely highlighted on the recording. The waves would quiet down, not stopping, but slowing.
If he spread his wings out as much as the room allowed, and closed his eyes, he could almost feel the breeze on them. Gentle, rushing sounds from the speaker system made for a decent illusion. It would have to be good enough.
Insects buzzing, flying by and birds calling served as time stamps. When the third seagull flew by the screen, he would know the loop was about to repeat, bringing the sun back up.
The fourth repetition was when Rocky came rolling in his ball. The clunking sound tore Grace's eyes from the screen. He folded his wings closed to make space on the platform.
"What's up, pal?"
Rocky came to a stop beside Grace. "You're spending a long time in here, why?" Two stomps.
"It's nice, I guess," Grace began. His shoulder bumped against the ball. He settled into it, continuing, "to look at Earth for a little while, pretend that I'm outside."
"I understand. What place?"
Before he answered, Grace glanced at the screens, as if they would reveal something he had not noticed in the past hours.
"I'm not sure. It's a beach, but you can probably hear that. The video is pretty dark, it's a late-night recording, I think." He sighed, letting his head rest on the xenonite.
"You sleep soon. And you put on a beach at night," Rocky mused. "So the time lines up with Hail Mary time? You have explained before, light dictates human sleep pattern."
"Yep," he said. "You caught onto that pretty quick."
"It was easy."
"You could at least pretend I'm not that simple to figure out," Grace laughed.
"Will not."
A few seconds passed with only the sounds of the beach.
Rocky shifted, focusing on Grace. "Does pretending to be outside work?" The notes he spoke with made a soft melody.
"It helps. It's not the same, but I feel a little better." Grace considered stopping here, letting the subject drop. He decided against it. This was Rocky, he knew Rocky would listen.
"I still can't move around that much in here, of course. I miss that. Miss the feeling out being outside, having the option to just take off," he said, gliding his hand through the air in a swooping arc.
That soft listening sound came from Rocky.
Grace went on, "I didn't even fly much on Earth. It's just, up here I don't have the opportunity at all. So the ship feels- it feels too closed. Even though I can walk around, I can't really go anywhere."
"Too small living space," Rocky said. "I feel the same."
"What do you do to deal with it?"
"Listen to the Mary. It makes lots of sounds, all the time, in the systems. Listen to you, you always make sounds. Sounds from the speakers are strange, but still nice. They do not sound like Erid. I still like it." There was a bittersweet tinge to it.
"What about on the Blip-A?"
Rocky's fidgeting was slower than usual when he spoke. "We made the ship to carry sound in a specific way. Made the strings to carry sound precisely." His hand plucked at the air like the string was right in front of him. "The whole ship carried sound, much like some places on Erid. It was not perfect. It worked the best when there was more sound."
Rationally, Grace knew where was little he could do to alleviate this. There were not exactly recordings of Erid on the computers he could put on the speakers. Even if he could, they would not be made with echolocation in mind.
"I know it's not the same, with Earth recordings," he began, "but if you want we could see if there are any that sound more like Erid."
Humming, Rocky seemed to consider it. "Yes. We will look another day, thank you. Now we listen to the beach. You will need to sleep soon, you take longer to fall asleep, observation."
"I know," Grace breathed. "That's why I came here; I wanted to see if taking a break from the lights on the ship would help."
He felt his friend shift. "The lights are bad for your sleep?" Two taps.
"Kind of. They're either on or off. So they're too bright for me to get tired like I do with this kind of light," he waved at the screens around them.
"Grace. You are being tired stupid. I can fix this, it is very easy."
He had honestly not considered this. "How?"
"Very simple. I will make adjustable filters you can put over the lights. You will help make them filter the right wavelengths and amount of light."
That was a glaringly obvious solution. Being called tried and stupid felt justified in that moment.
"I didn't think of that. Thank you, Rock."
"Okay, let me see what else we have here…"
Grace closed another audio recording he had found buried within the ship's digital storage. Images made no difference to Rocky, so he focused on looking for something that could sound like Erid, not look like it.
So far mountain sounds had been too rushing, with the fast winds in the background. Canyons often had strange animal sounds, which sounded normal to Grace, but alien to Rocky. He had been looking for locations with stony landscapes.
The rock formations were not enough, there were more things to factor into this. He had to get all the variables right.
Of course! The atmosphere!
Erid's ammonia atmosphere was at a much higher pressure than Earth's. The sound would carry differently. If he could find a recording of somewhere with a landscape mainly comprised of stone and rocks, with a high pressure environment, it could be it.
Density, depth, location. Finding a list of options did not take long.
"Alright, this one is a bit different from the other ones I showed you," Grace said and pressed play.
A recording of an underwater cave system played over the speakers.
Rocky, who had been fiddling with the light filters, froze. Then, his body shuddered. Attention torn from his project, Rocky turned to Grace.
"Where is this?"
Checking the file details again, Grace replied, "A cave system, somewhere in Portugal. How does it sound?"
"Good good good. Save this one."
Nodding, Grace transferred the file to a folder he had titled "Rock Music."
Rocky's tone was quiet when he spoke over the recording. "It does not sound like anywhere I have been on Erid… But it sounds as if it could be there, somewhere."
At this, Grace felt a soft smile form on his face. "I'm glad. Want to find more or keep this one going?"
It took a while for Rocky to respond. "Let this play. We find more like this later. I want to listen to this while I work. The first filter prototypes will be finished soon, so we can test."
"The first ones? You have a bunch of them over there," Grace wondered as he craned his neck to see the pile of highly advanced lampshades.
Holding two of them up, Rocky began to explain. "These have different wavelengths. This one lets out light to imitate "sunny" weather," he held one up, "and this one imitates "cloudy" weather."
"Oh, wow, that's- You're even making different kinds of weather for me?"
Each filter was set down in its original spot at Rocky's workstation. "Yes. They will change the light based on the time of day, and can stimulate weather changes like on Earth, so the days are also different."
That made perfect sense. Of course it did, it was one of Rocky's ideas. It was like he had somehow known that the days on the ship felt monotonous to Grace.
Nothing ever really changed inside such a controlled environment.
He knew they were travelling through space at high speed, sure, but with no landscape rushing past the windows, no day or night cycle, it hardly felt like they were moving at all.
"Thank you," Grace rasped. "That means a lot."
It had taken an entire day for Grace to psych himself before he was ready to take care of his feathers.
That entire day, that nagging, itching feeling under his skin had forced his attention away from any task he tried to do. Finally, he had had enough. This needed to be dealt with.
Sensing his anxiety, Rocky had never wandered too far from Grace today. Wherever Grace went, his friend silently followed moments later.
At present, Rocky had settled in his tunnels. He was watching something with his texture screen and taking something else apart at the same time. Grace did not miss the way Rocky clicked every so often, essentially glancing at him.
Steeling himself, he settled on one of the stools. It would be more comfortable to do this sitting on his bed. He could have, it was just-
No, he did not need that reminder of how it used to be when things were so different now.
He curled one wing forward, so that he could reach the inner feathers first. They looked dull. Grace began from the far end of his limb, working his way inwards, until he got to the feathers on his back. A flexible human might have been able to reach their own back. Not Grace. Not with the way the shoulder and wing joint blocked such mobility.
"Grace? Need me to leave?" Rocky called.
It made Grace look away from his task.
"What? No," he shook his head.
"Is this different from other human cleaning rituals? You have not done this before, not when I have seen. Social discomfort?"
Repeating himself, Grace tried to clarify, "No, this is different, no social discomfort. This is more like, I don't know, doing my hair. Not private, no worries."
"Explain more, what is it that you're doing?" Rocky asked.
"It's called wing preening or grooming. It's a way to maintaining the feathers by manually aligning them, plucking loose ones if need be, or help loosen the shell around a new pin feather. That kind of stuff."
Rocky trilled and clicked a few times, getting a better look at Grace. "How often do you need to do it?"
Grace shrugged, trying to keep his body relaxed in spite of the question. "Depends on the person. I've been putting it off for a while."
Rocky stayed silent, waiting for a proper answer. His attention bored into Grace.
"I mean, it's not like I remember it exactly," he tried to play it off. "I think my parents used to say it should be once a week."
"Every week?" Rocky echoed. "How much have you been putting off doing this?"
While Grace appreciated that Rocky cared, he needed to dissuade his friend from worrying too much. "I've been doing it in, like, small increments. So it's not like I haven't been doing it at all. I'd adjust my feathers as needed. So if something was poking me, I'd-" he said and showed how he would right it.
Rocky, observant as always, questioned the explanation. "Why put off doing this?"
"I never like doing it, I always put it off."
"You told me parents say to do this every week," Rocky said. He had caught on and was not letting this go. "Why not anymore?"
Grace groaned. "I meant what I said about not liking doing it. When it was with my parents, I loved it. Preening by myself is- I don't know, it sucks. So I minimize the time I spend doing it."
"Is this like watching sleep?"
Grace threw his hands up. "I guess. But not really. It's not that we watch each other, we usually help with the grooming. So my parents would help me and each other." He could not help curling in on himself as he admitted it. "You're right about it being a social need."
Rocky skittered closer to the wall nearest Grace. He put two hands against it and asked, "How can I help?"
Grace shuffled closer as well. He looked down at his hands. "Can you stay here and just talk?" He traced the lines on his palm.
"Yes yes yes. Of course." Rocky settled down at once, tucking his limbs under himself. "What do you want to talk about?"
Grace's eyes turned back to his wing, as did his hands. "Nothing in particular. Whatever is on your mind I guess."
"Question. Could Armando help with this?" The question was quiet.
Grace's gaze flickered in the direction of the robot, then returned. "No, I don't think they programmed for that." They expected him to have a crew to help him. "And even if it could, it would feel weird to have something not living doing this."
His thoughts flashed to what could have been, if his crew survived the journey to Tau Ceti alongside him. Ilyukhina would have been happy to help, he thinks. He does not remember her helping him with this on Earth, or any other member of the project. Still, he thinks she would have done it with a smile on her face.
He shakes off the thought. Wills himslef to think about the robot, about practicality instead.
Considering it, there might be more to the lack of help from Armando. "Armando is meant for medical needs. Since this is more of a social one, they knew I could do the mission without. Safer to keep his programming simple."
The Eridian sound for sympathy was a little melody. Something about it was familiar.
"But it helps that you're here," he tried to lighten the tone.
A primary feather came loose at a slight tug. He had been attempting to align it when it came free. It feel, a little too fast in the one-and-a-half gravity, to the floor.
Rocky's echolocation noises picked up.
"Request. Can I have that?" He pointed at the feather where it had landed.
The question was unexpected. It had caught Grace off guard, to say the least. He picked it up and received a noise of confirmation from Rocky; this was what he meant.
"You want this?"
"Yes. We cannot be in the same atmosphere. But I want to know what that part of you is like, and this is inorganic. Will not be burnt by my atmosphere."
Rocky had a way of getting right to his emotions.
Grace walked over to a small airlock not too far from where they were sitting. He was about to drop it into the chamber when he paused.
"I should probably explain." He took a deep breath. "You can have this if you want, don't worry. Um. Giving someone a feather, a primary like this, is sort of meaningful to humans."
He stayed still in front of the airlock. No matter how quietly he spoke, he knew his friend would hear. "Normally it's reserved for family or very close friends to exchange them, as a sign of trust, sort of, permanence."
Rocky came closer to the airlock.
Grace finished off his explanation. "I'd like you to have it. I just wanted you to know first."
He still had not put it through the hatch.
Rocky focused on him, Grace could tell by now. His echolocation was locked in on Grace.
"I will take care of it. You are my best friend, Grace, and it is part of you."
Not trusting his voice to answer, Grace placed the feather in the airlock.
Atmospheres cycled. The opposite side was opened.
Grace's eyes were trained on the feather as Rocky opened his side of the airlock. Three claws curled around it with the same precision Grace had witnessed every time Rocky crafted something. Rock held it like it was a delicate thing.
As Rocky settled into his spot again, Grace followed with his attention solely on Rocky's hands. He paid no mind to where he was going, only that he was following his friend.
Sitting down again, he was distantly aware of where his body was. He knew he was settling on the same stool again.
Across from him, Rocky was turning the primary over in his hands, rotating it this way and that. He ran a claw across it, over and over.
"Very soft," said Rocky.
He knew, he really did, that this was the one barrier he would never be able to cross, could not hope to. There had to be a wall between him and his best friend.
That did not matter in this moment. Some small part of Grace had crosses the barrier, and was being handled with care.
Grace's hands felt lighter when he returned to preening his wings.