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For just a blink of Ryland’s heavy eyelids, the planetary figure hangs with all the perceived stillness of the moon. It comes crashing down into the palm of his hand. He rolls the crocheted replica of Earth to the tips of his fingers and launches it above his head again. And again. He repeats the aimless motion so many times that he begins to feel a dull soreness develop in his wrist from overuse.
Funny. He’d always thought that grading papers semester upon semester would be what gave him carpal tunnel. Not the rapid wearing of his body in the yawning expanse of deep space. Ryland considers that it could also the lack of sleep that’s making him feel as though he’s unravelling on a cellular level. He hasn’t exactly been getting the American Health Association recommended amount of hours. Something about the whole “intended suicide mission to save humanity that it turns out he didn’t even sign up for and tried to flee for fear of his life” thing doesn’t make him feel all warm and fuzzy inside. It’s more like he’s filled with an entire butcher block worth of knives.
Rocky had once called him a leaky blob, and Ryland supposes the Eridian isn’t wrong. One wrong thought can cause one or more of the knives to prick his insides, and next thing he knows, he’ll be bawling his eyes out all over again. There’s a lot of things that encourage the tangled mess of sharpness inside the framework of Ryland’s rib cage to jostle uneasily. One of these days, he’s going to smooth a hand down his torso and cut his fingers on a blade poking out from between his deteriorating bones.
Another scrape of the yarn against his still too-raw skin and he is thinking about how it’s hard being the coward assigned to carry the weight of humanity’s survival on his shoulders. Atlas had been yoked to the world but at least he had been brave about it. Nobody had had to strap his unconscious body into a bed meant for an interstellar coma patient and hope he carried the responsibility with a certain level of self-respect instead of pure animal terror.
He’s got one major win over Atlas though. He’s had Rocky with him when it really mattered, and the two of them together? They can do anything. They’d proved it by doing the impossible task of saving their respective planets.
Ryland sneaks a glance over at him in between tosses of the ball. They had spun the ship apart to have their party but his joy at their success had slipped right through his fingers upon their return from the Blip-A. He’s found himself bogged down by his own thoughts.
While Ryland mulls over his memories, Rocky works on the mechanisms of some device that the ex-teacher has no name for. And he’s humming, Grace realizes, making quiet vocalizations as he pokes through his tool bag with one of his five hands.
Affection rushes up his throat in a choking torrent. It feels like being pinned against the console of the Hail Mary all over again, disoriented and unable to breathe. It feels like digging his fingers into the blistered, weeping wound on his forearm the best friend he’s ever had left behind. It’s the leaden weight in his chest because for once he’s more scared for someone else than he is for himself. With the swell of emotion, comes clarity.
He loves Rocky.
Isn’t that something? You shoot a science teacher into space and he falls in love with an alien. How cliché. It would be even more so if he were harboring a stomach full of extraterrestrial eggs and a plot to overthrow the United States Government. But there’s none of that. There’s only the mechanical lungs of the ship keeping Ryland alive and the soothing vibrations passing over Rocky’s vocal system. The days upon days of silence had been more than Ryland could bear. Only, there was no place to run away in space. He couldn’t exactly exit Mary and flee out into the stars to escape the boiling ocean of his feelings.
All at once, he’s unspeakably grateful to Stratt for mowing right over him and throwing him on this sophisticated tin can against his will. He might even try to find a way make an e-card and fit it somewhere in the Beetles’ storage. He might as well get some use out of the nearly countless programs that she had gone to court over. Nothing wrong with a little 2000s WordArt to say “Hey, Stratt, thanks for betraying me. By the way, it all worked out. I met the love of my life and he’s a talking spider rock and we solved the problem of astrophage with the power of science and, you guessed it—love.”.
He lets out a laugh. Of course he would have to go into the warm glow of another star to finally find someone he loves with every fragile, too human fiber of his body. Despite his best efforts at conforming, he can’t seem to manage to not wander off the well-trod path most people traverse.
A tap on the side of the ball warns him that Rocky has stopped working and has clocked his irregular behavior. His movements are silent now after having set aside his party costume when they had reboarded Ryland's ship.
“What is funny. Question.”
The ball nearly misses the waiting flat of his hand. He fumbles the catch but manages to wrap his fingers around it before it hits the smooth floor. He squeezes until his knuckles go white.
He knows now that Ryland been a coward, unworthy of respect no matter how kind, how unassumingly good he had tried to be during his life on Earth. Grace thinks he’s someone braver now, someone actually worth a damn. He doesn’t want to make the same mistakes of skirting around and using his work as a defense to keep anything too personal from leaking out through the cracks. He’s not the same man who poked his fork through a still icy microwave dinner in his empty shoebox apartment and realize that the world was going to end if someone didn’t stop it from being consumed. Those crunchy noodles hadn’t told him he wouldn’t be alone when it really, really mattered.
The man turns and gets onto his knees on the other side of the barrier keeping his science partner alive. The smooth metal bites at Grace’s kneecaps and worries the already existing bruises. He looks at Rocky for what feels like a lifetime, but his stopwatch would tell him only 6.37 seconds have elapsed.
“I love you.”
Rocky goes rigid. He rises up onto the tips of his claws in the way he does when he’s experience any strong emotion. He holds the position for so long Ryland is almost expecting to get a wildly shaking fist in his face as the Eridian berates him. Maybe Grace isn’t supposed to love him—maybe the confession is so repellent that Rocky doesn’t even have the words to tell him to jump out of the airlock in a way they have shared vocabulary for.
Ryland waits. Resigned.
Then, Rocky’s five shoulders come around his carapace as he relaxes. His bounces in place, fingers shifting on the bottom of his ball. His entire body seems to be emulating jazz hands.
“Love Grace too. Statement. Much much much,” he says, “Rocky glad Rocky and Grace together.”
A smile tugs at the corner of his mouth. Grace is helpless to stop it as it spreads further, scrunching the corners of his eyes and nearly unseating his glasses. The tension he’d been carrying in his own body swirls down the drain. He feels lighter.
“Wish Grace and Rocky could touch. Want touch. Hug,” Rocky adds. The Eridian’s voice is pitched low.
Tucking the stress ball into the pocket of his celebratory jumpsuit, he presses his forehead against the xenonite. The angles of the structure dig awkwardly into his arms when he drapes them over the uneven sphere. His vision fills with mottled swirls of brown as Rocky clinks up against the other side. It’s not quite an embrace, but it’s the best they’ll have. Grace is happy to have even this much.
“Me too, buddy, me too.”
They will have to go their own separate ways tomorrow, but at least Grace won’t be leaving with things unsaid. He won’t have a repeat of what happened on Earth. He knows he’ll think about Rocky every day for the rest of his life. He can only hope that Rocky might reflect fondly on him from time to time in return.