Work Text:
The slurry had been sitting on the edge of the bunk for forty-seven minutes.
Grace knew this because the clock on the wall read 14:22, and he'd watched it tick to 13:35 when he had first set the bag down, the contents untouched, and he'd been watching the ceiling ever since.
It was a good ceiling. Lots to look at. The same bolt patterns in the same corners, the same faint discoloration near the air recycler where condensation had once formed and dried and formed and dried until it left a ghost of itself behind. The two dozen or so dents that the ceiling - the same as every other surface on the Hail Mary - had picked up throughout Grace's suicide mission across the stars.
They were great for counting, those dents. Almost better than sheep.
One...
Two...
Three...
With an annoying beep that pulled Grace out of his dull mind, the computer said, "Nutritional intake is overdue."
Grace didn't answer, returning his gaze to the dents in the ceiling.
Four...
Five...
Six...
"Nutritional intake is overdue," it said again, in the same voice, with the same flat patience it had used forty-seven minutes ago and would use forty-seven minutes from now if nothing changed.
And nothing was going to change.
The slurry sat in its bag, white and still, the zip-straw extending from the top at a slight angle. The angle bothered him, distantly. It used to bother him enough to straighten it, like he used to do with the juice boxes he got for lunch as kid.
Now, he watched the ceiling instead and thought about nothing for a while, and then about something, and then about nothing again, and then something, and the something was the face of a twelve-year-old named Daniela who he taught in his first year as a middle school teacher. Daniela, who had asked him during their space unit if astronauts ever got scared and he'd said something funny that made the class laugh and he couldn't remember what it was that he had said. He'd been good at that. Making kids laugh. It had seemed like such a small skill at the time.
He didn't know if he had it anymore.
Grace didn't have much of anything these days. Less appetite, less strength, less of whatever it was that made a person reach for a disgusting coma food slurry bag and drink it down because it was necessary to live and do it all over again tomorrow because tomorrow existed and had things in it worth being alive for.
He couldn't locate those things anymore. He'd really looked.
Grace was very tired. He wasn't sleepy - it felt like he did nothing but sleep, these days - but he was just... all used up. Sleepy was a kind of tired that sleep fixed. Nice and easy, like nothing in Grace's life ever was. This was the other kind of tired, the kind that sat heavily somewhere in his chest and made the simple act of lifting his arm, much less getting out of bed, feel like a fight his body kept losing. The hand resting on his chest had a faint tremor in it that hadn't been there two months ago. He watched it the way he watched the slurry - from a moderate distance, noting it, not particularly moved by what it meant.
He'd been tired like this for months now. Maybe longer. He'd stopped counting.
There was a sound from the entrance to the dormitory. As usual, Grace heard Rocky before he saw him - the clanking of his ball against the floor paneling, Rocky's five-limbed version of walking. Coming to check.
He came to check on Grace a lot, lately.
Grace kept his eyes trained on the ceiling, and kept counting the dents.
Seven...
Eight...
Nine...
"Grace." Rocky's voice filled the small space, and somehow the computer-generated voice conveyed a tone of concern, which really shouldn't have been possibly with Grace's frankensteined-together code, but... it somehow was.
"Hey," Grace said.
"You not eat."
"Yeah."
A pause. Grace heard Rocky settle beside his bunk - that particular adjustment of mass and limbs that meant he was settling down with the intent to stay. "Slurry is there. Is time. Grace need food to stay healthy."
"I know," he said. The words came out slower than he'd intended, slightly wrong in his mouth, like his body was quietly deprioritizing the effort of speech. Days of almost nothing did that. He was aware of it the way he was aware of the tremor in his hand - noted, set aside.
"Grace." The frequency shifted. "You not eat yesterday also."
Grace closed his eyes. The ceiling existed behind his eyelids. He'd stared at it long enough that it had its own afterimage, floated there in the warm dark like something phosphorescent.
Ten...
Eleven...
Twelve...
"...I know," Grace said again. In different circumstances, he would have responded with a sarcastic quip. But not now.
"Grace... Grace sick, question?"
"I'm not sick." He said quietly. He didn't have the energy for anything looser. "At least... not like that."
The silence that followed had a distinct feel to it. Rocky was thinking. Rocky was cataloguing what he knew and finding gaps where there shouldn't be gaps, running his problem-solving framework against a problem that kept refusing to fit nice and neat.
Grace had watched him do this with engineering challenges a hundred times - that particular quality of stillness before the burst of motion, of solution. Grace was watching him do it now, through his closed eyelids, without seeing him at all.
Not that there would be a solution, this time.
"Explain," Rocky finally said. "What Grace mean, not sick in that way, question?"
Grace breathed out. The air smelled, as it always did, faintly of ammonia - a ghost of Rocky's atmosphere that years of carefully refined seals and sanitization hadn't fully exorcised.
"There's a kind of human sickness," Grace said, "that isn't in the body. It's not from pathogens, or toxins, or anything like that."
A sound from Rocky. Uncertain.
"The human brain sometimes gets... sick. Not the same way the body gets sick - regular doctors can't fix it, there's no injury to repair. It's more like..." He paused. Tried to find the right words that Rocky would understand. It was hard. Thinking was hard. Everything was hard. "You know how Eridians need to sleep near others. How it's so important to watch and be watched?"
"Yes." Immediate. Certain. "Is important. Very important."
"If an Eridian spent a long time - a very long time, much longer than you did - alone. With no one to watch. No one watching them. What would happen?"
The silence was different this time. Longer. Rocky made a very low sound, his limbs skittering across the floor of his ball as he shifted uncomfortably.
"Bad," Rocky said, finally. "Very bad. Eridian alone for long time - they become..." He searched. "Wrong. Something breaks inside. Something invisible. We have word. ♪♫♪♫."
"Yeah," Grace said. "We have a word too."
He didn't say the word. He looked at his ceiling and felt the tears start at the corners of his eyes, tracking sideways the wrong direction because he was lying down, running toward his temples instead of down his face. He didn't try to stop them. It took energy to stop things. Energy he just didn't have anymore.
His vision blurred, and he couldn't see the dents anymore.
He'd gotten to twelve.
"Humans," he said, "need other humans. They need to be near them, need to see them and talk to them, and humans need to be - touched. Physically." He lifted one hand slightly and let it fall back to his chest. "Without that, if it goes on for long enough, the brain starts to-" The word that came was fail. "It starts to... decide things. About itself. About the human. Things that maybe aren't necessarily correct, but to the sick brain, they seem right."
"Sick human brain decide things," Rocky repeated. "Decide what things, question?"
"Rocky." Grace stopped. He looked at the ceiling. The bolt patterns. The blurry dents. Daniela's face, the one he couldn't quite remember, like a photograph that was taken in bad light. "Do Eridians ever... do Eridians..." Grace had to stop for a moment, a shuddering breath working it's way up from deep within his chest, his eyes blinking rapidly as tears rolled down his temples, falling to leave spots on the pillow he didn't have the strength to lift his head from. "Do Eridians ever choose to die? When they're not ill. When their bodies are still working. Do they ever just... decide to stop living? Because they don't want to anymore?"
The silence that followed was the longest yet.
"...no," Rocky said. He said it the way someone says an answer that was so self-evident the very existence of the question confused them. "Die is bad. Die is worst thing. Why would-" He stopped. Grace heard the shift of limbs. "Grace. Grace, question? Why- Grace, why ask, why Grace ask, question?"
"Humans do," Grace whispered. "Sometimes. When the brain gets sick enough. When it's been wrong for long enough, and there's no one to fix it and it doesn't seem like it's going to stop-" His throat closed briefly, and for a moment it felt like he couldn't breathe. "Sometimes a human will decide to die. On purpose. And sometimes... Sometimes there is no fixing that."
He heard Rocky make a sound he didn't have a word for. Something new.
"Grace," Rocky said, very carefully, "what Grace saying, question? Why Grace ask about die, question? Why Grace tell Rocky about this, question?"
"The Hail Mary mission was always supposed to end in my death," Grace said. "That was the plan from the beginning. I knew that. I agreed to it." He hadn't agreed. Stratt had decided for him. But that was a different conversation and he was too tired for different conversations. He was too tired for this conversation. "But I just- I thought it would be different. I thought I'd run out of fuel or food or something would go wrong and it would just..." He made a small gesture. "End. Nice and quickly. Something easy. Like the rest of my crew."
His stomach cramped. He breathed through it, waiting for it to pass, the way you waited for turbulence. It had been doing that. Cramping around the absence of anything in it, his body sending signals that he kept reading and setting aside. Yes. I know. I know you're hungry.
"Grace..."
"I have a year and a half left of this," Grace said. "Maybe two years. And I'm- I'm so tired, Rocky." His voice didn't break. It just came out flat and honest and so very, very quiet. "I'm so tired and the slurry tastes like absolute shit and my muscles feel like wet paper maché and I haven't-" He stopped. Started again. "I haven't felt the sun in two years. More than two years. I don't remember what it feels like on my skin. I keep trying to remember and I can't. I can't remember what my own sun feels like."
"Grace, how fix, question?"
"I just... you know, It's really stupid, but I really miss the smell of grass." Grace knew he sounded like he was ranting and he couldn't help it and he couldn't stop because stopping required energy and caring, and he was running low on both, along with every other single thing he needed in order to function. "Cut grass, when you're mowing the lawn, in the morning before it gets hot. And the fog. The Bay Area gets this fog in the mornings and it's cold and damp and it smells like the ocean and I-I miss the beach. l hadn't visited a California beach in months before I left Earth."
A sound came out of him that was shaped like a laugh and contained nothing of one. "But I'd give anything. I'd give anything to just stand on a beach and feel cold and damp and get sand in my shoes and get all annoyed about it. I miss it so much. I miss Earth so much. I miss my kids, I miss my home, I miss not being so alone, I miss, I miss-"
"Grace." Rocky's voice had gone very high, so high that Grace almost couldn't hear his musical chimes. "Grace-"
"You know that I had students." The tears were moving again. He didn't raise his hand to wipe them. There wasn't a point anymore. "Twelve and thirteen years old. I used to give them high-fives every day on their way out of class. And there was- there was this girl, Daniela, she asked me once if astronauts got scared, up in space, and I said something silly and they all laughed and smiled and I can't remember what I said. I can't remember. My students are all twenty and thirty-something now, if they-" His throat again. "If they made it. If any of them made it. I don't know. I'm never going to know. They could all be dead and I wouldn't know. I don't know. I don't know, I don't know, I don't know."
It was hard to breathe. It was impossible.
"Grace," Rocky interrupted him, "Rocky watch you sleep every night."
Grace took a breath. A shaky, uneven breath, but a breath all the same.
"I watch you sleep," Rocky said again. His voice was very careful. Very deliberate. Like he was picking each word up and checking it over to make sure it was exactly what he needed before he used it. "Every night. You are not alone. I am here."
"I know." And he did know. He knew that. Of course he did. "Rocky-"
"You touch-need. Other humans, touching. I cannot-" Rocky made a sound of something that Grace had learned to read as frustrated sorrow. "Rocky cannot give. I know this. But Grace not alone. Grace not alone in the way sick brain is saying. Rocky here. With Grace. Rocky not leave Grace alone. Always here."
"I know. But... my brain isn't wrong about the time I have left," Grace heard the gentleness in his own voice and recognized it distantly - the tone he'd used to deliver bad news to students, to explain that no, there was no extension, the deadline had passed and the circumstances didn't change that. "It's not wrong that there's only a year and a half or two left and I have..." He pressed his palm flat against his chest. The tremor moved through his fingers. "Less than that in here. I'm out, Rocky. I ran out. Nothing left."
"No." The word was sharp and instant. "No. You get to Erid. Eridians make new food - real food, good taste, the good kind humans like. I don't know how yet but we make it because we are smart and because Erid owe Grace everything-"
"Rocky."
"We make ocean for you. Not Erid ocean, but-" Rocky's arms were moving, Grace could hear it, the restless motion of something trying to engineer a solution in real time. "We make place with water and cold and the taste-smell, whatever smell Earth ocean has, Grace tells Rocky and we make, make Grace happy, fix Grace brain-sickness-"
"Rocky." His voice came out softer than he intended. "I know."
Silence.
"I know you can build it all," Grace said. "I have zero doubt. You're so smart. You can build and create so much. I know that if we get to Erid, Eridians will- would-" His voice did something then. Something small and involuntary. "I know they would try. I know you'd make them try. I know you'd- I know you would, Rocky, I know-"
He stopped. The ceiling was blurring again, the details hidden by an ocean of tears.
"The problem," he said, "is the getting there. The part between here and there. That's where I am. That's what I have to," He pressed his palm against his chest, "survive. And I don't think I can."
"You can," Rocky said. The pitch was wrong. Too high, too urgent. "Grace is strong-"
"I'm not," Grace said. Just a fact. "I haven't been strong for a long time. Maybe not ever. I've been performing as being strong because there was work to do and you needed me to be and I wanted to," He breathed out. "I wanted to. I really did. I wanted to be just as strong and brave as you, Rocky. But now the work is done. We're just... traveling now. And I don't have anything left to do except eat this slurry and wait. Wait and wait and wait. Nothing to distract my brain."
"Not much more. Already more than halfway to Erid-"
"I've written seven papers." He said it and even he could hear how hollow it sounded. "Rocky. I've written seven papers since we left the Blip-A. Seven papers that will never be read by anyone on Earth. I wrote them just to write them. I've catalogued everything there is to catalogue. I've played every video game on the ship. I've read every book. I have-" He stopped and the word that came to him was nothing, and he let it sit there, unsaid, taking up its proper amount of space.
I have nothing left.
Rocky was very quiet.
"I understand," Rocky said finally, "...Rocky watching is not enough."
Grace closed his eyes again.
"Rocky understand that Rocky is not- not the right kind. Of company." The tones underneath the translated words were doing something complicated, so emotional in a way that made Grace feel ill. "Rocky know that Rocky cannot be what Grace need. Rocky not human company. Cannot touch. I know this. It has made me..." A pause. "Sad. For a long time. Rocky very sad."
"It's not your fault, Rocky."
"Rocky know this also." Rocky shifted, his ball bumping against Grace's bunk, as if he was trying to move closer than their circumstances allowed for. "Does not change the sad."
They were quiet for a moment. Grace's stomach cramped and released. The grey at the edges of his vision came and went.
Grace felt something in his chest that had been completely flat for months shift, very slightly, and it reminded him of the way ice shifts in an empty cup, with a movement slight that it's unclear whether it's beginning to melt or just settling. He didn't trust it. He'd learned not to trust the small movements. They never lasted.
Grace didn't say anything.
"Grace saved Erid," Rocky said. "Erid does not know yet. But Erid will know. And when Erid knows, they will want to know Grace. The person who came so far and ate bad food and stayed awake and turned their ship around when," Rocky made a small sound, "when they did not have to. They will want to know who Grace is. Brave and strong Grace. Braver and stronger than Rocky."
"I don't think that's true-"
"No. Listen. Grace needs-" Rocky's voice cracked across the frequencies, a desperation that came from trying every solution and none of them working. "Grace needs to eat, needs to not purpose die-" The English was fracturing, the way it did when Rocky was moving too fast and speaking in a frequency too high for the computer's translation to perfectly catch. "Bad bad bad, Grace not purpose die, Grace needs-"
"Rocky-"
"Rocky not want to be alone again!"
Grace stopped breathing.
"Crew die die die." Rocky's voice was in a register Grace had never heard before. "Rocky was lonely, working in workshop on ship. A long time. Very lonely. Then crew- then crew died and Rocky was all alone. And then Grace came and made Rocky not alone, but then Grace left to go back to home and Rocky was all alone and Rocky was going to die but then-" A sound. "Grace turned around. Did not have to turn around. Turned around anyway. And Rocky was not alone anymore."
"Rocky..."
"Now Grace wants to die," Rocky said. "Grace decides to die. Rocky cannot stop. Rocky cannot fix. And Rocky..." His voice fractured again. "Rocky lives. Again. Alone again. No. No. Bad bad bad. Rocky can't. Cannot. Not again."
Grace had been staring at the ceiling for most of this conversation.
Now, he slowly turned his head. The motion brought the grey back in at the edges, vertigo making the room spin, and he held still and waited for it to pass, and then he looked at Rocky.
Rocky was not still. His arms were all in motion - not purposeful motion, not building or repairing, just the helpless movement of a creature that needed to do something with its body and had nothing to do. He was braced against the wall with his carapace oriented fully toward Grace, five arms cycling through small gestures that resolved into nothing. The side of Rocky's body that Grace has associated most with his 'face', mostly because it was the one Rocky usually faced him with when speaking, was oriented directly toward him with an attention that Grace had once found strange and now understood was the most intimate thing Rocky's species knew how to give.
Grace looked at Rocky.
And then he thought: I am the worst friend who has ever existed in the history of any species.
Grace looked at Rocky, at the only friend he knew for certain he still had, and thought: I have just introduced the concept of suicide to a creature whose culture has no word for it, whose people require companionship the way my lungs require air, a being who spent decades alone in a dead ship believing he was going to die there, all alone and completely helpless to stop it - and I've told him I'm choosing the very thing he feared most.
Grace listened to Rocky's desperate tones, the sounds he hadn't heard since Rocky had saved him over Adrian, and with a bone-deep sense of guilt, thought: I did that to him.
The sob, when it came, didn't feel like it belonged to him. It came from somewhere below his sternum, pulled up through a body that had been running on empty for weeks, and it cost him - he could feel it costing him, actual physiological resources he didn't have going into the shuddering exhale that followed, the way his whole frame tightened and then didn't quite release. He didn't have the energy for this. He was crying from a deficit.
There should have been no tears left to cry, but his body was apparently doing it anyway, hot tears running sideways across his face, over the bridge of his nose, down toward his pillow, his chest clenching and releasing in the rhythm of something that was trying very hard to be weeping with almost nothing to work with.
"Rocky," he managed. His voice came out wrecked. "I'm sorry. I'm so sorry. I didn't..." Another shudder. "I didn't think about..."
He hadn't. That was the truth of it. Stuck in the fatal orbit of his own ending, he hadn't thought about what it looked like from outside. He'd been so far inside the mathematics of his own diminishment that he hadn't run the calculation that mattered: he hadn't considered what it would mean for the creature on the other side of it. The creature who had been alone. Who had sat in a dead ship and waited and not died because of course Rocky wouldn't be the kind of thing that chose to die, and then Grace had come, banging on the hull in the dark, and Rocky had not been alone anymore.
Rocky had been so happy, to not be alone anymore. And Grace had been about to...
Grace was still going to die.
That hadn't changed. He could feel the truth of it sitting in his chest, patient, unchanged by crying or by Rocky's fear or by that little part of him that he couldn't reach anymore, that little part that still so desperately wanted to live. He was still going to run out of whatever it was that made a person want to continue. He couldn't change that just by deciding to. He'd already tried deciding, over and over again.
But.
But.
A year and a half. If he could just - if he could just hold on until they got there. Until Rocky was surrounded by other Eridians. Until Rocky was not alone. Until the lonesome vigil over Grace's bunk was replaced by something larger and safer and capable of surviving Grace's absence.
Grace could not make himself want to live. But maybe he could make himself stay alive long enough for it not to wreck his friend.
He didn't say any of that.
"I'm a bad friend," he said instead. "I'm a really, really bad friend."
"No," Rocky said immediately. "Grace brain is sick. Sick Grace is not bad Grace."
"Rocky, I..."
"Grace turned around," Rocky said. His voice had come down from the fear-register, but only partway. "In this ship. Turned around when did not have to. That is not bad friend. That is-" A pause. "I don't have word. Is the word for - when something costs a lot and you give it anyway."
Grace closed his eyes. He was anything but selfless.
"Okay," he said. "Okay. Give me a minute."
He lay there. His stomach cramped again - harder this time, longer, his body staging a small protest against what he was about to ask of it, even though it was exactly what it had been demanding for the past day. He breathed through it. He was going to reach for the slurry. He was going to take a drink and he was going to hold it down if he possibly could and it was going to be terrible and it was not going to fix anything and tomorrow was still going to exist and require the same battle all over again.
But Rocky was not going to be alone because of him. Not if Grace could help it. Not if he could hold on just long enough.
He reached for the bag. His arm trembled. His fingers closed around it and he got the straw to his lips and the first taste hit him - chalk and aspirin and medical nothing and it was absolutely terrible, so god-damn fucking terrible - and his stomach immediately registered its objection, a slow rolling lurch that he had to breathe through with his eyes closed, jaw tight, waiting for his body to decide which way this was going to go.
It settled. Barely.
He swallowed.
He took another mouthful and set the bag back down on the edge of the bunk and lay there looking at the ceiling again, breathing carefully, willing his stomach to accept the little it had been given.
Grace lay back. He was already fading - he could feel it happening, the way a tide goes out gradually and then all at once, his body finally overruling the part of his brain that wanted to keep staring at ceilings.
"Rocky," Grace whispered, with the little bit of energy he had left.
"Yes, question?"
Grace lay there with the slurry half-drunk beside him and his stomach doing its slow uneasy work and his hand trembling faintly on his chest, and he thought: Erid. Just Erid. Just that far.
"Can you..."
"I watch," Rocky reassured him. "Rocky watch Grace. Grace sleep."
Grace focused on the ceiling above him.
Thirteen...
Fourteen...
Fifteen...
His eyes closed, and Grace slept.