Chapter Text
PERSONAL CORRESPONDENCE FROM DR. EVA STRATT TO DR. RYLAND GRACE, SHOULD HE BE ALIVE WHEN THIS MESSAGE REACHES THE PLANET ERID
[PAGE 1 OF 6]
12 OCTOBER 2047
Grace,
I do hope you're alive to receive this message. I will almost certainly be dead by the time your response could possibly reach Earth, so I'll save us some time:
Yes, yes, I know. Shove it because you were right, fuck me because I am horrible, screw me and this mission and everything I did to you, and all that.
Acknowledged.
A few key points:
(1) I am not sorry for what I did, because it saved humanity.
(2) I am sorry that the mission I sent you on had to be a suicide mission. And that you woke up alone with two dead crew mates. And that, remarkably, your mission may not have been a suicide mission after all, but you will never see Earth again.
(3) Your students, now grown, send messages of praise and thanks and hope and adoration and all that mushy stuff, which you will find attached elsewhere. All but seven individuals (unrelated to war or famine) from your classes of 2017 through 2022 are alive and well to the best of my knowledge at this time of writing.
(4) Globally, we lost fewer people to conflict, famine, or climate change caused by the effects of Astrophage on our sun than we lose annually to colds and flus combined.
(5) Based on your logs, Dr. Vincent Morrison, Ph.D Psychology, MS Sociology, at the University of Toronto, Department of Gender & Sexuality Studies, wishes to inquire further into the exact nature of your relationship with the Eridian you call Rocky.
Take that as you will.
(An additional "shut up" and "fuck you" are hereby preemptively received and acknowledged.)
[CORRESPONDENCE CONT. ON NEXT PAGE]
— RETURN JOURNEY, WEEK 4 —
"Do humans have word for thing that is bad, because sad, but also because gross?"
Rocky asks this abruptly one day early in the return journey to Erid. The two had finally started settling into a routine most "days" which involved several hours of working on their own mission white-ups and sometimes adding stuff, or tidying up or fixing things in a now-comfortable shared silence.
"Um… context?"
"I had twenty-one dead Eridians on ship. Bad. But also sad. And later gross, also."
Oh. Right.
"Disturbing. Word is 'disturbing'. Related word: 'uncomfortable'. Uncomfortable is a feeling. When I woke up from a coma with dead people next to me, I was disturbed, and uncomfortable. And sad." And really confused, he doesn't say.
Rocky enters these words into his language system. He doesn't need to, his memory is perfect, but he seems to be doing so diligently anyway. Probably for Erid to study later on.
"What do humans do with dead? Your ship very small, where did bodies go?"
Grace also finally figured out recently how Rocky's question-denoting inflection worked and explained to him how humans do basically the same thing, so Rocky was no longer saying the Eridian word for the English word "question" at the end of every question. Which is nice.
"Well…" Grace finds himself suddenly very concerned about how deranged launching his friend's corpses into the void might sound. It didn't feel so great to him, either, but it was the best option. Kind of the only option.
And what humans do with dead bodies more generally, well, that's a whole other can of worms.
"We've done a bunch of different things in different places and times and religions and stuff, but the most common is called 'burial'. We put a body in a box, bury them a couple meters underground, then put a stone marker on top with their name carved in, so people know who's buried there."
"You put dead under the ground? Strange. We have buildings. We prepare body, remove organic matter, dress, put in smaller room in bigger room in big dead buildings."
"Actually, we have some of that too, but mostly just for, like, really important people. Or really rich people, I guess. Called a 'mausoleum', that's probably what we'd call your buildings, too.
But anyways, um, to the other part of your question... I released my crewmate's bodies out into space. I put them in their flightsuits, left some of their photos and personal stuff in their pockets, and then I just... let them go. Overrode the airlock from inside and watched them drift away."
Rocky remains silent for a long moment. Grace starts to worry he thinks he's a complete monster or something now.
Finally, Rocky replies one whole octave lower: "I considered doing same. I had no tools to prepare bodies or ♪♩ clothes. Could not do right."
The new word gets catalogued as "funeral". Might be a bit of a leap, but they already got "death", "burial", "mourning", and "grief" established, so Grace takes the risk.
"And now you're worried their families will be upset you aren't bringing their bodies back, aren't you?"
Rocky seems briefly surprised at this assessment, perking up and shifting his weight restlessly from one side to the other, but then he simply says "yes."
They both sit in silence for a moment. Luckily, that seems to be a shared tendency for talking about heavy stuff.
"They'll understand, Rocky. We couldn't use your ship. You just did what you had to do. And they'll know that. You did everything you could."
"Thank," he says, still in the lower range. "You are right."
This is an interesting first: Rocky didn't actually have a question he needed answered so much as he just opened a conversation with the premise of a question because he needed to talk about something with his friend.
How very human.