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They are halfway to Erid, and Grace has gone completely mad.
Okay, maybe he’s giving himself less credit than he deserves. He’s currently on a maybe-suicide mission to an alien planet, eating coma slurry twice a day to space out the rest of his real food before he commits to eating taumoeba for who knows how long (largely dependent on whether or not it kills him!), all to save an alien species with his semi-new alien bestie. Anyone would be going a little insane, given the circumstances.
He’s been trying to keep his mind off things by doing more experiments on astrophage, writing papers about his results that no human will ever read (he’s writing one about Rocky and his species, too, which is only fair because Rocky is constantly taking notes on Grace’s habits). He also wants to do more experiments on taumoeba, in part to figure out definitively whether or not he can eat it but in larger part because it’s awesome, but unfortunately he cannot deal with those little suckers escaping for a third time. Instead, he just jots down everything he wishes he could do, knowing full well he’ll probably never get to do any of it.
He’s also been trying to watch every movie ever created, which is, perhaps, the second of two things he will ever thank Stratt for—it’s one of the major reasons his brain hasn’t melted out of his ears.
None of this helps the fact that he is truly, deeply lonely, which is the crux of all his issues. No amount of movie-watching can save him from that (and, in fact, sometimes it makes him feel even worse). It's a strange feeling, to be so alone when there is certifiably someone nearby at all times, but he and Rocky are always separated by a thick sheet of xenonite so they don’t literally kill each other. Ironically, that hurts more than anything.
Oh, but the science! he tries to tell himself. He’s learned so many fascinating things on their journey, such as the fact that this insatiable restlessness he feels is not something Eridians really experience—Rocky is usually working on some kind of project because he likes it, but he also seems just as content to sit and stare at some random part of the ship for a very long time, presumably lost in thought. They don’t even have a succinct word for “stir-crazy” in Eridianese, just a general description. Grace’s current hypothesis is Eridians have such long lifespans that they don’t really mind waiting for things, while Grace’s is so comparatively short that he’s biologically hardwired to feel like he needs to be doing something all of the time. It’s contradictory to the whole “endurance predator” thing, but Grace has never been particularly athletic, so.
It’s all going in the paper, in any case. Not that anyone will read it. Maybe that’s the plus side to being the only human in a several light-year radius: he doesn’t have to wait for extensive peer review before publishing.
“Hey Rock,” Grace calls out, getting sick of his own thoughts. “Do you and Adrian ever, like, hold hands?”
Rocky makes a curious chirping sound. It’s the one he makes when he thinks Grace is being a little stupid but in a funny way, which, rude. “Why we would do this, question?”
Grace shrugs. “I dunno. Humans do it.”
“Humans do many weird touch. Eridians not do this.” Grace snorts. Rocky did not like learning about penises, and especially did not like learning about what people often do with their penises. To be fair, Grace didn’t really like talking about it either. “Eridians lay close when watch sleep. Only time for comfort.”
“Hmm. Understand."
Grace gets up from his lab table and stretches. He should probably eat something, and take a painkiller for the general…everything his body is feeling. He hasn’t been sleeping great recently, related to the giant gaping cavernous hole growing in his soul from the lack of—stop! Relax!
“Why Grace ask, question?”
“Just curious,” Grace says, a little bit like a liar. He picks up the stack of papers dedicated to his Rocky thesis—working title being, “On Non-Water-Based Life Forms: Everyone Else Can Suck It”—and waves them around. “I need it for my paper.”
“Understand. Sometimes hold pebble, when they are very small and stupid. But mature Eridians not do this.”
Grace laughs. If nothing else, he has Rocky’s unintentional blunt humor to drag him through everything.
“What funny, question?”
“You called your species’ babies stupid.”
“They are. They cannot think. Too tiny and dumb.”
“Human babies also stupid,” Grace says. “And they cry a lot. I think that’s probably why I never had any.”
Grace is sitting in the visualization room, staring up at the blue pixels of a decidedly fake sky. There’s a faint rainbow arching across a couple of panels, ends hidden by a fake canopy of trees. Well, it’s all real footage, but. You know.
He’s been playing this particular video on loop because of the two mourning doves that flutter into frame a couple of minutes in, landing on a branch beneath the rainbow. They’re all fluffed up in the aftermath of the rain, and then they press their fluffs against each other with a couple of quiet coos.
“Oh, God,” Grace cries quietly, head pitching forward in pure misery. He curls in on himself, trying to hold as much of his own body with his arms as he can. It hits him in these very distinct moments, this realization that he will never experience a hug—a real, human hug, where both parties can actually wrap around each other—ever again. He runs his fingers over the scar Rocky’s claw left when he saved him, face buried in his knees.
He has no one to miss, and yet he mourns all the same.
He hears Rocky roll into the room and suddenly begin making very concerned, high-pitched warbling sounds. “Why Grace in death pose question?! Why why why?! Grace dying question?!”
Grace lifts his head with a huff of amusement, looking over at where Rocky is insistently tapping his foot with every question. “I’m fine. It’s, uhm—we call it the fetal position?”
“...like human baby, question?”
“Yeah, like human baby,” Grace agrees tiredly. “It’s, uh…it’s like giving a hug to yourself, I guess. It’s comforting.”
“Humans like hug. Like touch.”
“Uh huh.” Grace scratches the back of his neck, stretching his legs out in front of him. He’s a little sheepish—how do you explain what it means to be “touch-starved” to an alien species that doesn’t care that much for touch? “It’s sort of—we don’t need it to survive, or anything. Not like food. But it makes our brains release this chemical called ox-y-to-cin—which makes us happy and less stressed—so most humans go a little crazy without it.”
“Hm. Understand.” Before Grace can say anything else, like asking Rocky if he remembers what “cortisol” is (of course he does), Rocky raises his carapace suddenly. “This why you ask if Eridians hold hand.” He tilts his body, producing a similar effect to a dog cocking its head. “Grace want to hold Rocky hand, question?”
Grace buries his face in his knees again, wrapping his arms around his head. This is rapidly becoming more mortifying than talking about penises.
“Grace wants a hug,” he mutters, as if lowering his voice will somehow keep Rocky from hearing him. He’s startled by how quickly tears spring to his eyes at the admission, and he rubs the scar again to self-soothe. “But we’ll kill each other.”
“Oh,” Rocky says, chords an octave lower now. “Understand.”
A beat passes, and Grace thinks that will—mericfully—be the end of it. But then, “Grace want touching machine question?”
Grace chokes so hard on surprise that he gags, whipping his head back up.
“Do not—” Sputter. “—do not call it that. Gah.”
“Why not, question?”
Grace runs a hand down his face, feeling himself go flush with embarrassment. “That is—you’re describing something very different, buddy.”
“What? What Grace mean, question?”
Now he just glares at Rocky. “It relates to the human anatomy you find disturbing.”
“Gross gross gross. But should know for science, question?”
“Absolutely not. Use your freaking thinking machine if you wanna know so bad.”
Rocky lowers his carapace and makes an annoyed sound. “Fine. No talk about touching machine.”
Grace rests his head on the wall, closing his eyes. “It wouldn’t be the same, anyway. Nothing is the same. I’m just gonna go wrap myself in a bunch of blankets, and then I’ll probably feel better.”
Rocky makes some humming sounds of disagreement, to which Grace just rolls his eyes and goes off in search of said blankets. He is the human in this situation, after all. He knows what humans need.
…though, in all fairness, knowing was never really the problem.
Grace has been walking around wrapped in blankets for…several days now. At least a week. He’s been a little reckless in his coffee consumption, too, just to feel something. He should axe that habit in particular; he’s not sure how much coffee is left, but he knows the answer is generally “not enough”.
Rocky has a new pet project, though he keeps giving vague answers whenever Grace asks about it. All Grace knows is that it involves making dozens upon dozens of tiny clear xenonite pieces. They look like the constituent parts of the “meshy” panel in Rocky’s big ball, so Grace’s guess is he’s just making a better, more maneuverable ball. That would be nice. He’s gotten a lot better at steering, but he’s still prone to knocking stuff over.
“Grace sleepy,” Rocky says to him and his armor of blankets. Grace huffs, sleepily. “Drink too many awake drink. Mary?”
“Yes, Rocky?”
“No more give Grace awake drink.”
“Hey!” Grace chimes in. “Ignore him! I’m the Captain!”
Rocky makes a frustrated sound, spinning in a circle before stomping his foot at Grace. Some of his little xenonite pieces rattle around, and they also sound frustrated.
“Grumpy angry stupid. Need sleep.”
“I have been sleeping!”
“Grace need minimum 29,000 seconds. Grace now only sleep average 18,000 to 20,000 seconds, sometimes less. Bad bad bad.”
It’s true, Grace is turning into a right and proper insomniac. The weight of his blanket mound does help, but it’s become less effective as time wears on, and he can only fight off so many existential crises before giving up and just laying awake.
Still, he resents Rocky for pointing it out, so he just glares at him and takes a long drink of his coffee.
Rocky stomps his foot again, producing a string of chords that has no direct English translation but means something like, I am very annoyed at you and also concerned, you big fleshy idiot.
“Graaaaace,” he whines insistently.
“The coffee is already poured, pal. I’m not going to waste it. Besides, that’s not why I can’t sleep.”
He takes another sip. One of his other side projects has been trying to figure out how to produce an infinite coffee supply, in the event he actually survives on Erid for longer than a week. He’s learned that the Hail Mary brews coffee “fresh” from freeze-dried sheets, and he imagines they contain enough of the original coffee grounds’ molecular structure to potentially be reproducible. He has absolutely no idea how to go from sheet to plant, though…coffee is just too finicky. He’s been reading a lot about—
“Why Grace not sleep then question??”
Rocky’s corresponding foot taps are hurried, indicating that he really wants to know the answer. Grace sighs, setting his cup down.
“Sometimes this just happens,” he replies, again avoiding the real answer. “It’s called in-som-ni-a.”
Rocky chirps his version of the word. Okay, cool, Eridians also have random trouble sleeping sometimes. “Understand. Eridians also have this. Usually when too much or too little food,” Rocky explains. “Sometimes also when sad.” Then he jumps up, and Grace already knows where this is going. “Grace not sleep because too much cortisol. Heart rate too high. You are stressed. Stressed because…” He wiggles back and forth, thinking, and then settles back down and says in low tones, “Stressed because no touch. You miss humans.”
“Yeah.”
“I not human. Cannot fix. Apology apology apology.”
Grace exhales slowly. “Hey, I’m not asking you to, bud. It’s nobody’s fault my crewmates died.”
Nothing is anybody’s fault, really. Not even Stratt’s.
He tugs the blankets tighter around himself and takes another sip of coffee. Rocky doesn’t say anything else; he just goes back to toying with his xenonite pieces.
They’re watching Ratatouille. Rocky really likes this one, for reasons Grace does not understand. Not because it’s a bad movie, or anything—Grace really likes it, actually—but because Rocky loves it so much that if they go more than a couple of months without watching it he starts to get grumpy angry stupid.
They’re currently at the part where Chef Skinner is chasing Remy through the streets of Paris. Grace has to be quiet until this bit is over, or he “ruin Rocky ability to sense scene” and has to rewind.
Not that Rocky is even watching this time! He’s still fiddling away with those little xenonite pieces of his, though all of the big piles he’s been accumulating have disappeared. Grace has no idea where Rocky put them; there’s exactly one place on the Hail Mary that Rocky can access but Grace can’t, and it’s this little black box Rocky made so he has total privacy when he eats. Grace thinks it’s a little unfair, given that even if Rocky is in another room he can still “see” Grace going to the bathroom, but whatever. The point is that’s where Grace thinks the pieces must be, though he has no idea why. Maybe he was totally off-base and Rocky’s actually building some kind of sophisticated waste receptacle.
“Haha! Chef so stupid,” Rocky cheers when Skinner falls into the river. So, apparently he is watching. When you have five hands, Grace supposes you probably get pretty good at multi-tasking.
Grace is, technically, supposed to be sleeping and not watching Ratatouille. He’s developed a really bad habit of going straight to the visualization room at night instead of even trying to fall asleep, which Rocky admonishes him for relentlessly. Grace has repeatedly tried to tell him that human dads do this all the time, but Rocky insistently—and, okay, correctly—points out that it’s still not healthy.
He always follows Grace, though, and forces him to bring a pillow. Grace knows Rocky is trying to “trick” him into falling asleep; sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t. Tonight is looking like a “doesn’t” sort of night.
Even still, his head is resting on said pillow right now, warmed by Rocky’s ball underneath. Grace explained that having it propped up like this is a better position for his neck, but he’s pretty sure they both know it’s about the touch thing.
“Okay. Grace can talk again. Stupid stupid stupid chef.”
Grace chuckles a little.
“How can you even watch the screen and make all those little pieces at the same time?”
“Eridian hear sense better than human light sense. Can do many things at once.”
Oh, so Grace was right. That’s going in the paper.
“And what are you making, exactly?”
“Humans ask sooo many questions. Annoy annoy annoy. Go to sleep, bother man.” Graces barks out a surprised laugh; that’s a new one. Rocky chirps. “Is funny because you are only human I know!”
That sours Grace’s mood again, even though it’s not meant to. He forces himself to reply, “Trust me, many people on Earth are bother men.”
Rocky makes his laughing sound, and continues to tinker.
“Grace come here! Grace Grace Grace! Grace come use light sense now now now!!!”
Grace startles awake from where he was sort-of napping, sort-of coffee-researching at his lab table. Rocky sounds positively delighted about something, voice so high and rushed that he’s making random squeaking sounds every few words. Grace has only heard this pattern once before, when he found the Blip-A again and rescued Rocky from the taumoeba disaster; whatever it is, it must be important.
“Coming,” he yells back, even though yelling is unnecessary. He tiredly gets to his feet and drags himself and his blankets—yes, he’s still doing the blankets thing, and has been for a month and half now—towards the sound of Rocky’s ecstatic chirping.
“Grace so slow. Slow slow slow. Go faster!”
“I’m trying! I’m trying!”
He eventually finds Rocky in the same room as his black eating box, standing on the floor and bouncing his carapace up and down as he continues making squeaky excited sounds.
“Rocky, what—”
Wait.
He’s standing on the floor.
No ball. No tunnel.
On the—
“Oh my God!” Grace yelps. “Oh my God! How are you alive?! Oh my God, where’s—”
And then the rest of his sleep-deprived brain catches up, and he realizes Rocky is still in a xenonite casing. It looks like it’s composed of all those little pieces he’s been making, and, save for a bit of a volume buffer so Rocky can adequately experience the Eridian atmosphere, is form-fitting and articulated.
Rocky raises two of his limbs, doing excited jazz hands.
“Is okay! Am still in xenonite! No touch make Grace stupid because no sleep. Now Rocky can hug Grace and make Grace not stupid.”
He sounds a little snarky, albeit still thrilled. Grace is in too much disbelief to care.
“You…”
Rocky scuttles across the floor towards him—man, he really does look like a spider—and starts bouncing around at his feet. He pokes Grace in the leg to emphasize his new creation.
“You like question? Cannot do create in here, but is okay. I keep tunnels and ball. This just for Grace time.”
“Grace time,” Grace repeats quietly.
Rocky tilts his carapace up towards him expectantly, humming and chirping.
“You is surprise! I keep big secret even in tiny ship. Amaze amaze amaze.”
Grace falls to his knees, tears pricking the corners of his eyes. He’s completely useless to stop them. He wraps his arms around Rocky, and, this time, Rocky wraps two of his limbs around him in return.
Rocky is so warm.
Grace sobs.
He presses his nose against one of Rocky’s five shoulders, chest heaving and hiccuping as he absolutely bawls his eyes out. Rocky makes a few distressed sounds and tightens his hold, which only makes Grace cry harder.
“What wrong question?? Rocky hurt Grace question?!”
For a moment Grace can’t even speak, and he just shakes his head back and forth. “Nothing,” he finally weeps. “Absolutely nothing is wrong.”
“Ohhh. This leak because happy, not sad. Yay yay yay.”
Grace makes an honest-to-God whimpering sound, pressing himself against Rocky as tightly as he can. Something in his chest feels like it’s been split open, pouring out everywhere in true leaky space blob fashion.
He never thought he would experience this ever again.
“You make oxytocin now, question?”
Grace gives a wet laugh. He feels a little hysterical.
“Yeah. I make oxytocin now, statement.”
“Good good good. Happy happy happy.”
After he eventually stops sniveling, Grace drags himself back across the Hail Mary and crawls into bed. Rocky joins him, as if this is the most natural thing in the entire universe. At this point, it probably is. Grace curls his entire body around Rocky’s, burrowed deep in his nest of blankets with a couple of Rocky’s limbs intermingling with his own. It’s sort of like laying with a dog, but if the dog was a freak. A good freak. The best freak.
“Can I—can I sleep?” Grace asks. Rocky makes a sound that Grace often equates to him furrowing imaginary eyebrows.
“Yes. Is point.” Rocky wiggles a little, like he’s getting comfortable. “You sleep. I watch.”
“But you can’t do any—”
“You sleep,” Rocky insists, annoyed, “I watch. No question.”
Well, Grace can’t argue with that. He nestles his head against one of Rocky’s limbs, eyes fluttering shut without even having to try.
“Okay, okay. G'night, Rocky.”
“Goodnight, ♫♩♬♩♩ Grace.”
Grace wants to ask what the new word is, but before he can even finish the thought, he blissfully falls asleep.