Chapter Text
Rocky has been home on Erid for nearly two years, and he is miserable.
His best friend is dying: slowly, painfully dying. He sits by Grace’s side and listens to the machines that keep him alive buzz and click and hiss and hum, and is helpless to do anything more. He’s an engineer, not a doctor, damn it. That is from Star Trek. Grace showed him Star Trek. Grace showed him the entire span of history and creativity from his alien people, and then gave it all to Rocky for free, and now he’s dying.
The best scientific minds on Erid are working tirelessly to find a way to keep Grace alive. He saved them – saved their star, saved their planet – knowing it would kill him. It’s the least they can do. Their star is already brightening, and Grace is fading away.
Rocky remembers how he sounded when they first met – alien and horrible, wet and squishy and leaking all the time. Now he isn’t squishy enough and he leaks too much. His internal carapace – his bones – are pushing through his skin. His teeth loosen in his skull. The burn marks on his arm have been oozing fluid for weeks, and several small spots on his body have opened up and dribble as well. When he’s conscious, he explains something called “scurvy” and how the human body breaks down without the right nutrition to different Eridian scientists over and over. Rocky trembles with impotent fury next to him. There is nothing he can do.
Adrian is working with the habitat team, putting the finishing touches on the biodome. They’ve pumped in thousands of gallons of water and are working on purifying it and getting the saline levels right. Currently, it’s not nearly salty enough – the salinity levels are closer to that of Grace’s blood.
Rocky is lucky. Adrian waited for him, never giving up hope that he would return. Out of all the mates and families of those that left on the ship, Adrian alone was rewarded for that hope. Neither of them are sure how to feel about that, but they are quietly, achingly grateful. Rocky is lucky – Adrian comes to the medical center to watch him sleep so he doesn’t have to leave Grace’s side, but Adrian also bullies Rocky into getting out of the medical center sometimes and walking around the planet he nearly died for. He was ready to die for it. He should have died for it. And yet, it sounds the same – the singing buildings, the roar of the wind, the fluting hum of mechanical transports, the deep, comforting pressure of the high gravity tethering him back into himself. He always felt so lost in zero-g, like he’d fall apart if he turned too fast, limbs detaching from his body for lack of gravity. Grace had told him about deep-sea creatures on Earth which appeared normal until raised into the lower pressure of shallow water, where they turned into shapeless blobs without the heavy pressure of the whole ocean to hold them together. Rocky understands how that must feel.
He has been building a new exosuit now that he has access again to the highest-quality materials. Grace called it all xenonite, but it’s not all the same. Rocky hopes he can explain it to Grace soon, when he gets better.
But he’s not getting better.
The next time Adrian tells Rocky he has to go outside for a minimum of three point five hours (time which Rocky still translates into Earth units in his head, so he doesn’t get out of practice), he puts on the exosuit and goes into the biodome.
The medical center is attached – the habitat team synthesized enough atmosphere that it just made sense to keep them connected, though there are breach doors at several points throughout the building – so all Rocky has to do is step out one of the airlocks to Erid, remove the current exosuit (which catches at his joints), and put the new one on before stepping back into the medical center’s Earth atmosphere and its killing air.
He tested the suit already. He’s not a stupid reckless idiot, unlike some people.
When he passes through the doors into the biodome, he can hear the shape of it – bare highland bluffs (which will be planted as soon as the habitat team grows enough seeds from the remnants of the Hail Mary’s hydroponics system), partially hollowed stony cliffs that drop down to a sandy shore, and the mini-sea stretching to the edge of the dome on the other side. The habitat team isn’t done with it yet – the motors and the massive arm which will generate waves are still in testing stages, but the water moves anyway, as any large enough body of fluid will. Rocky tries not to think about Grace and the fluid that oozes out of him, or the fluid inside him which isn’t working correctly because Erid hasn’t figured out how to get the right nutrients into him. They have them – their planet has the materials that will keep Grace alive, but they’re in component parts in solid form, or in their own food which is full of heavy metals which are toxic to humans and their stupid soft bodies.
Rocky shakes himself off and walks slowly down the shore toward the sea. There is very little sound here now – the habitat team has generated atmospheric soundscapes from the Don’t Go Crazy room, but with Grace in medical, there’s no point in running the system. There are no recorded bird calls, no recorded insect noises, no wind – only the ambient lapping of the waves and the crunch of the sand under Rocky’s limbs as he makes his way to the water.
The salinity still isn’t right. He can tell from here if he concentrates. It’s his job to see how things go together and come apart, but he can’t even do his job with Grace. His best friend is falling apart, and nothing Rocky can do will put him back together.
He settles himself at the edge of the water and reaches a single claw out, letting the ripples touch the exosuit. Grace used to make a motion over the projections in the Don’t Go Crazy room like that, twisting his palm across the rushing waves below their feet as if he could run his hand through the sea, like he was remembering doing so on his own home planet.
And now, unless they can find a way to feed him, he will never run his hand through the waves again.
There were times after Rocky moved into the Hail Mary when Grace would be hunched over an experiment, struggling to make things work; struggling to find the solution that Tau Ceti held, then struggling to grow nitrogen-resistant Taumoeba faster. Sometimes he would sit staring at the farm-tanks, slouched in his chair with his hands dangling over his knees, and whisper to himself. “Please,” he would say. “Please, please, please.”
“Who is Grace talking to?” Rocky had asked in the stilted way he’d been stuck with at the time.
“No one,” Grace had shrugged. “Or anyone. Anyone who’ll listen.”
Rocky does not understand humans. There was no one else within light-years of them where they floated in empty space, except for the astrophage and the Taumoeba itself.
But he does not have to understand humans to know that they have achieved things his people have not, and to know they have senses that Eridians do not. Their hearing is terrible, but the thing called sight sounds like a wonder.
Now, he sits on the shore of an infant sea, a brand-new constructed world all around him just waiting for its single lonely occupant to take control of it, and wonders if human senselessness is worth a shot.
“Please,” he whispers, running his claw through the water. “Please, please, please.”
The sea does not respond. After the requisite three point five hours, Rocky goes back inside. He keeps the new exosuit on. This one does not pinch at his joints.