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Someone is carding their fingers through his hair.
Grace is aware, distantly, that he’s dreaming, but he can’t, won’t, drag himself out. The figure hovers over him, brushing his sweaty hair off of his forehead, pressing the back of their hand on his clammy skin.
“You have a fever, Ry.” The sound of his mother’s voice doesn’t startle him. Her fingers are long and bony, but they feel nice on his face. He misses her, in a faint, distant, way. “I’m glad you stayed home from school.”
She’s shaking, just slightly, and he remembers. He remembers how sick she was, he remembers how thin she was, he remembers how, in the last few months, she couldn’t leave her bed. He remembers how he was afraid to look at her face, scared that instead of his mother, he’d see a skeleton, gaunt and dusty and dead.
He wishes he looked at her more, just to solidify her image in his mind.
Her eyes were blue. No, were they green?
When Grace wakes up, his face is wet with tears.
***
They are close to Erid, and that is the only thing that tethers him.
He hunches over the toilet, dry heaving, and he knows, either in mind or in body, that he is dying.
Rocky knows, too. Rocky tried to fix him, to piece him back together with tape and xenonite, but the sickness was buried too deep in his bones. A dangerous combination of starvation, isolation, and whatever the taumoeba was doing to him. Now, Rocky just sits with him. Monitors his heartrate, his fever. Watches him sleep.
The bile is red. He slumps against the wall, and Rocky leans on him.
“Close to Erid,” Rocky chirps. Every time he says it, he never specifies how close. Grace trembles.
They’re silent, for a moment, and Grace’s breathing is too loud in his ears. If he focuses too hard on it, not that he’s been focusing much lately, he’s back in the spacesuit, back on the hull of the ship.
“Eat?” Rocky speaks like he knows what the answer will be.
“Can’t.” It hurts to talk. It hurts to breathe. For a horrible, greedy moment, Grace’s mind flashes to Yao’s gun, to Ilyukhina’s heroin, to the myriad of ways to die ingrained in the ship itself.
“Grace need food,” Rocky says.
Death by taumoeba, death by starvation, were not his preferred methods. He wonders what Stratt chose for him. He wonders if she chose anything. He wonders if she felt guilty.
“Grace,” Rocky says again. Grace hates how worried he sounds. He picks at a hangnail, stares at the tiny spot of blood. He’s fading again, drifting back into his staticky mind.
“I’ll try.”
***
His mom smelled of sickness.
He’s hazy, trapped in swirling memories, and he’s confused, he’s always so confused, now. Stuck in the space between dreams and wakefulness, he squirms on his bed, unable to get comfortable. He’s clammy and hot and cold all at once, and the conflicting sensations nearly send him into overwhelm.
His mom is combing his hair, and he can’t see her face, but he can smell her. Smell the sickness, smell the death, smell the vaseline she coated on her dry lips.
Someone thunders downstairs, and in his foggy memory, he tenses, but he can’t remember why. It’s something instinctual, an animalistic, conditioned fear. He leans further into her, feels her bony lap against his head, and she mumbles something he doesn’t remember.
“I love you,” she says. Grace was, is, too afraid to say it back. “Go back to sleep, Ry.”
***
His father smelled of alcohol.
His footsteps were heavy, clamboring. Most kids had monsters under their bed, or inside their closet. Grace had a monster downstairs, asleep on the couch.
He can’t remember his father’s face, either. He remembers the sting on his cheek, the gruffness of his father’s unintelligible words, the smell. He remembers crying, his father’s ever present threat of “I’ll give you something to cry about.”
Grace is curled up in his bedroom. His mom is back in the hospital, again. Or is he on the Hail Mary, curled up against sterile lab equipment?
His father was, normally, a kind man, and that is the part that confuses him. He was kind until he wasn’t, until Grace said something too strange or argumentative, until Grace’s inability to act normal became impossible to hide.
And then, and then, the sting on his cheek, his glasses askew.
Grace’s chest hurts, rattling with every breath. He curls in further on himself, pressing his head onto his knees, pulling at his hair in a way that makes him feel safe, in his own all too familiar self destruction.
Rocky is next to him, tittering. Grace is so hungry that he can’t even feel it, overcome by everpresent nausea, the feeling of his stomach ripping itself apart. He’s dangerously skinny, now. He looks like his mom.
“What does Grace need, question?”
Grace needs to die, statement. Not that he would say it. But he’s desperate, grotesquely desperate, as his skin unravels and his gums bleed. He wants it to end. He wants to get off of this ship. He wants to utilize the one modicum of control he still has. The only power he has over his life is the ability to end it.
He couldn’t do that to Rocky. Couldn’t leave him alone.
It would be so easy.
He strikes his temple with his fist, just once, and even that causes Rocky to chirp angrily at him.
“Stop. What does Grace need, question?”
He tries to find an answer, somewhere in the depths of his hourglass mind, if only to appease Rocky. What he needs, Rocky can’t give him.
He hates this, hates what he’s doing to him. Rocky had to watch all of his crew die slowly, painfully, unable to help. And now, Grace is condemning him to witness it again, an everpresent loop, a spiral of death and loneliness and friendship and death again. His body is collapsing in on itself, a supernova. Would it be easier if his death was quick? A gunshot, an overdose, a knife slicing into his wrist.
He shakes his head at the thought, but that only serves to make him dizzy.
“Some water would be nice,” he says, lying through his gritted teeth. He is the opposite of thirsty, and the thought of consuming anything makes his stomach churn.
Rocky rolls away before he even finishes his sentence.
***
He doesn’t know how long it’s been, can’t discern the fuzziness in his head. He’s home, and he’s in his apartment, and he’s in the lab, and he’s still on the Hail Mary. Maybe he’s already dead.
At home, it’s silent, the kind of quiet that makes his ears ring. He feels hollow, ragged, his mom is dead, dead, dead, but he’s the one who’s a ghost. He drifts through the house like he doesn’t belong there, and he doesn’t know if he’s asleep or awake, and he doesn’t know where he is. He can still feel the phantom graze of his mom’s fingers in his hair.
It happened like it was nothing. There was no explosion, nothing momentous, nothing like the great finale that was Dubois and Shapiro. She was here, and then she wasn’t, and time paid no attention to it.
He ran out of the hospital room. And now, at home, it’s quiet.
He creeps past his father who stares at the blank television screen, and Grace is eight and thirty and dead all at once.
“Get me a drink,” his father says, and his voice is jagged glass. Grace nods, walks to their fridge that has too much food for just two people. His stomach hurts. It hurts like he’s been stabbed, like he’s starving to death. Fat tears roll down his cheeks, and as they splash onto the floor, realization seeps into his strangled lungs.
She’s dead.
She’s dead.
She’s-
He wakes up, though he wasn’t asleep, and he’s crying. He scrubs at his face, tugs at his hair, trying to calm down, trapped in his hazy, frantic, mind.
It feels like he’s losing her for the first time, again. Her slow, agonizing death plays on repeat in his mind, and again he thinks of the gun and the heroin and the knife and the gun and the heroin and the knife and the-
***
“Grace, Grace, stop, bad, bad, bad, stop!”
Rocky is shouting, and Grace knows he should know why, but all he can think of is the knife in his hand.
His wrist looks like the Petrova line.
Rocky rolls into him, knocking the knife out of his grip, and he hardly flinches. His mind is detached from his body, watching himself in third person with distant panic.
His wrist looks like the Petrova line.
Why did he do that?
“Sorry,” he says, and he can’t hear his own voice over the rush of ocean waves. Is he crying?
Rocky doesn’t seem to know what to do. He begins many words, but finishes none of them. Under other circumstances, Grace might’ve found it amusing. It would make no sense, in Rocky’s logical mind, for someone to hurt themself on purpose.
Right now, though, Grace can’t voice an explanation, or anything other than “sorry”, over and over, a metronome.
He has the vaguest feeling that he’s done this before. When he was younger, maybe. An attempt to externalize his grief.
“Grace, shhh,” Rocky says, and his notes are like windchimes. “Shhh. It okay. Grace okay.” It isn’t, and he isn’t. He appreciates the comfort, though, and feels himself stop talking.
“What wrong, question?” Rocky always tries his hardest to understand the inefficiencies of the human mind. This, though, Grace doesn’t know if he’ll be able to explain.
“I want my mom,” he whispers and dissolves into dust. It’s pathetic, but he doesn’t care. He's scared and he’s dying and he wants his mom and he misses her like a gaping wound inside his chest. His grief is a terrified animal, clawing and scratching at his ribcage, and he wants to bash his head against the wall until he’s nothing but flesh and blood.
He’s scared. He’s so, so scared. He would never regret going back to save Rocky, but his death is just like his mom’s and he doesn’t know what to do.
Grace sobs and heaves as if reaching some great precipice, covering his eyes with trembling hands. Rocky is saying something, but he can’t hear him, too overcome by the ocean and the waves and his mother’s voice.
Rocky rams into Grace’s body, knocking the wind out of him and ripping him out of his spiral.
“Grace lie down. Rocky fix. It okay. Rocky fix.”
Grace finds it in himself to stand and limp toward the bed, Rocky holding up most of his weight. He follows Rocky’s instructions, lying down, as Armando reaches for his still bleeding arm. He curls under the quilt like a child, and fades into a hazy sleep.
***
When he wakes up, his arm is bandaged, and Rocky is nowhere to be seen. It causes a spark of panic to rush through him, until he hears the familiar, distant clanging of Rocky’s tools.
Grace falls back asleep.
***
He dreams of sunsets and windchimes. His mom liked windchimes, he thinks.
***
He wakes up once more to Armando straightening out his quilt. He messes it up again, just to be annoying.
***
His mom had a shell collection in the living room. They would go to the beach, and Grace would give her the prettiest ones. She would rub his head, brushing his windswept hair out of his face, straightening his glasses.
***
Grace wakes up fully and he feels…better. Not good, barely even okay, but better, as if his breakdown had served to purge him of some of his rotten thoughts. Rocky chirps a greeting, but there’s something different about him. Grace sits up, still shaken, and puts on his glasses.
“Is that new?” he mumbles. Rocky poses.
“Made it while Grace slept! Do you like?” Instead of his ball, Rocky wears a xenonite suit. “Now Rocky can give hugs. I come up.” Rocky clambors onto Grace’s bed, still clumsy, not yet used to his new mobility.
“Oh, Rock.” Grace is touched by the gesture, though he feels a bit guilty. Rocky put in a lot of effort to make the new suit, just for him. “You didn’t have to–”
All of his reservations fade away the moment Rocky truly, actually hugs him. His breath catches, and he feels fresh tears start to form. He buries his head into the crook between Rocky’s body and one of his arms, ignoring the slight sharpness of the xenonite.
“Thank you,” he whispers.
“Grace rest.” Rocky pushes Grace off of him, so that he’s back to lying down. Grace tries to sit up again, but Rocky is far stronger than him, and keeps him down easily.
Before he can voice his protests, Rocky starts carding three fingers through his hair.
A mixture of nostalgia and complete and utter safety overtakes him. He sighs, and feels his body relax for the first time in months, maybe years.
“Grace like?”
Grace nods.
“Good, good, good.”
When Grace falls back asleep, he dreams of Erid.