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There’s not much to be had in the way of traditional foreplay when one of you is always going to be suffocating or crushed (or catastrophically decompressed) in the other’s atmosphere. More’s the pity, because Grace would really, really like to get his hands on Rocky sometime soon. Or ever. But especially soon.
The closest thing he has for now is watching Rocky tinker endlessly with something new at his workbench. Grace can’t seem to get his head around what it is, exactly, but it is delicate and intricate, like lengths of Tønder lace in iridescent xenonite, like faerie chain mail made of bees’ wings. When your special person is an engineer, maybe that’s just what foreplay is anyway, he thinks.
He’s curled up against the barrier in bed, reading a book on one of the tablets, when Rocky finally tap-tap-taps on the panels. He proudly holds something in two of his hands, but it’s hard to discern exactly what it is from where Grace sits.
“Is finished!” Rocky chirps. “Excitement! Observe, statement!”
Grace leans in closer, trying not to fog up his glasses as he presses his nose against the xenonite like a kid at the zoo.
“It’s finished! Wow! And it’s… uh…?”
Rocky huffs, holding his creation aloft to give him a better view. It looks like some sort of harness, almost like his tool belt if it was meant to be worn on top of his carapace instead of underneath, but far less substantial than any of his celebration outfit. Grace can still discern the delicate, lacelike construction that Rocky has been chaining together for weeks, but each piece is now part of a much greater whole.
Usually, he wishes he’d spent more time teaching Rocky non-science words. Today, though, he wouldn’t wish to have met anyone other than an engineer like Rocky.
“Observe!” he repeats, gesturing as he begins stepping each leg into the larger rings like he’s putting on the world’s most complicated raincoat.
“Xenonite possess high heat capacity. Hungry hungry. Hold much heat,” he explains dutifully. “And Grace atmosphere excellent for heat disperse. Grace know this. So! Great mass of xenonite, touch great surface area on Rocky body. Understand?” he finishes with a small, happy flourish.
And boy, does Grace understand. Rocky has designed a thin chain mail heatsink. It’s beautiful.
“So, wait – how much heat, exactly?” He asks, trying to hide his excitement.
“Enough for safe touch Rocky! Enough for safe Rocky touch Grace!” he sings, abruptly skittering back around the corner to his workspace before returning with a small, opaque… backpack?
He straps the second accessory onto the top of his carapace, near the edge where his vents open. Grace supposes he thinks of that as Rocky’s “back side,” sort of like the back of his head, except for the fact that Rocky has neither a back side nor a head. The Project didn’t cover that in their science briefings, okay?
“Rocky… tell me you did not make a SCUBA.”
“What is SCUBA, question?” he fiddles with a miniature ratchet strap on one edge of the seal.
“A SCUBA is Earth technology. It’s used for breathing underwater, where humans can’t breathe. It’s an acronym” – shoot, have they covered acronyms? – “that stands for Self Contained Underwater Breathing Apparatus.”
“Hmm. Suppose could use in water. But why Grace want Rocky to say opposite of fact, question?” he twitters excitedly.
Before Grace has a chance to process that, Rocky is scrambling back around the corner to his airlock and Grace is itching beneath his skin. This little genius made a SCUBA suit. His little genius made a SCUBA suit. To be able to touch him. Grace is going to be sick.
He hears the decompression pumps hissing and makes his own mad-dash scramble for his side of the lock. As soon as the hinged xenonite door swings open, he all but throws himself toward Rocky. He only stops short when he hears “Stop stop stop stop!” in a panicked pitch. He recoils as if bitten.
Stop?
Rocky fidgets nervously with one cuff of the harness.
“Yes. Caution,” he sings, dropping his carapace in a way that tells Grace he feels unsure. Maybe even embarrassed.
“Small touch,” he adds. “Small small small first touch only. Confirm temperature safe for Grace.”
Grace is so used to trusting Rocky implicitly, with anything and everything and every problem, that it never occurred to him to need to safety-test something of Rocky’s creation. He learned long ago that Rocky didn’t do things by half measures, and that if Rocky said the project was good to go, then it was good to go. Why would he suddenly doubt himself?
As if reading his mind, Rocky makes a soft, sad noise and spreads the fingers of one hand apart, holding them aloft in the exact same shape burned into Grace’s arm.
Oh, buddy, Grace thinks. He smiles sadly, closing the last few steps to where Rocky stands with slow, measured steps and settling down on his knees. He holds a hand out to test the air around Rocky’s body first. It’s warm, almost hot, but by no means unbearable. He lets his hand drift closer, turning it over so that the back makes contact with Rocky’s carapace first. Still warm, warmer than his own body temperature, but not dangerous. He flips his palm back over, does a small tap-tap-tap on Rocky’s top, and gives him a hearty thumbs down.
“It’s good, bud,” he smiles. “You’re good.”
“Good good good. Good for Grace,” Rocky barely gets out before Grace has his arms around him, clinging, holding on for dear life. It’s like holding a basket of laundry fresh out of the dryer, he thinks. Well, except a lot less soft. Whatever. He hasn’t held many things this large and warm before. He’ll take whatever comparison he can come up with.
He wraps his arms tighter, half-pulling all several hundred pounds of Eridian into his lap as best as he can. Grace suspects Rocky does most of the heavy lifting, literally, because he keeps most of his arms on the ground for leverage but lifts one to wrap around Grace’s waist in return. Tight.
Grace tells himself he’s not going to cry.
He cries.
Leaky space blobs tend to do that.
He turns his head and begins to press his lips against every inch of Rocky that he can reach without moving, and even though he knows that Rocky doesn’t fully get it, he can’t help himself.
“Cultural difference,” he says by way of no-room-for-argument explanation, ending the conversation before it even has a chance to begin. Rocky knows, at least, that this is affection; that this is love and affection and special attention from special person, so he cherishes it nonetheless.
Grace notices, as he touches, that Rocky’s carapace feels slightly less rigid than it’s always appeared when he’s in his own habitat; a small tendril of his mind starts chasing hypotheses about the differences of relative pressure on body structure until he somehow jumpscares himself with thoughts of the blobfish and reigns the disobedient thread back in.
There are more important things to focus on right now.
Grace digs his fingers in to re-ground himself, noting the slight give, and taps and drums them softly against Rocky’s side. He’s rewarded with the start of a low, steady drone, one that Grace would almost describe as a purr if he still had enough cognizance to do so. Again: more important things. Just barely.
Rocky settles himself more fully into Grace’s lap as Grace continues to hold him, droning contentedly all the while. He lets a bit more of his weight fall onto Grace, just barely holding himself up with his arms that remain on the ground.
The weight. The warmth. The closeness. The humming. The sheer disbelief of finally laying his hands directly onto this fellow star traveler for the first time in years after hardly spending more than a few feet away from each other at any given time. It’s overwhelming. Grace’s brain is awash in a cascade of neurotransmitters: norepinephrine, dopamine, endorphins beyond belief. Every piece and cell and part of his body is being told that this feels good.
Every part, unfortunately.
So sue me, he thinks. He’s holding his partner in astrophage crime cum best friend cum special person (jeez, jeez, WHAT) for the first time ever, which he never thought would even actually be remotely possible, and now here he is. Here they are. Everything that’s happened; everything they’ve survived; everything that still lies ahead on the trip to Erid, assuming he survives to see it. He can’t help it, and frankly, he doesn’t want to help it.
He shifts his weight on his knees to find a bit of relief and brushes up against the underside of Rocky’s carapace, not realizing how close to touching they already were. His gut swoops, and his brief hope that Rocky may not have noticed is dashed as he begins to feel, more than hear, a faint noise that Grace really can only describe as a melodic purr despite his earlier hesitance. Deep, rumbling, undulating, and almost certainly too satisfied to be wholly proper.
It reverberates through Grace’s ribcage, bouncing around like he’s full of moths and he’s holding the sun.
Rocky is the first to move again, breaking their detente. He puts just a little bit more of his body weight down onto Grace, lowering himself against his now fully-hard dick. Grace groans brokenly, and something like instinct compels him to move a hand off of Rocky’s torso and onto one of his arms, fluttering and tapping his fingers up and down its length, shoulder to hand and back again.
It must be the right thing to do, because Grace bucks as Rocky squeezes tighter, pulling Grace even closer as his rumbling goes almost subsonic. He realizes that they haven’t spoken a single word the entire time; it might be the longest Rocky has gone without speaking since Grace has known him.
Good to know, he thinks. Next time I need a bit of quiet concentration time, I’ll just get my dick out.
He can feel the heat spreading through his groin. Quite literally. Rocky’s dispersal net still seems to be working as intended, but being this close, touching, so close to skin-to-carapace, is a literal steamy experience. Steamy enough, in fact, that Grace begins to sense “damp” as much as “heat,” and it takes him a moment to register why that would be. It hits him like a freight train, and it takes all of his self control to startle backwards instead of up, into, please–
He pulls back another inch, slowly, just enough to reach into his back pocket and pull out a handful of capsules. He swallows them dry, wrinkling his nose. Ugh. They smell and taste like mercaptan - rotten eggs - and it almost threatens to take him out of the moment until he reminds himself of why he’s taking them.
Succimer, also known as dimercaptosuccinic acid (DMSA), is a drug sold under multiple trade names. It is a chelating agent used to treat lead, mercury, arsenic, and other heavy metal poisonings. Dosage should be calculated as 10 mg/kg of patient body weight PO q8h for 5 days, followed by 10 mg/kg q12h for another 14 days. A second course may be required in cases of chronic or prolonged heavy metal poisoning, and should be administered starting no less than two weeks after the first course.
Side effects may include vomiting, rash, and low blood neutrophil count. Liver problems may occur as a result of prolonged use. The use of dimercaptosuccinic acid is not approved for the prevention of lead or mercury poisoning in anticipation of exposure in known contaminated environments.
Right. His experimentally-prophylactic sexpills. He gives a brief mental salute to Iluyukhina’s memory and the gifts of her Motherland. Spasibo, he thinks. He doesn’t tell Rocky what he’s doing. It feels rude, somehow.
But Rocky never met a human social norm he didn’t try to obliterate.
“Grace eating snack, question? Grace anticipates needing extra energy, question?” Rocky sings teasingly, in clear disregard of this monumental effort of politeness on Grace’s part. Grace drums his fingers playfully on Rocky’s shoulder.
“That? No, Rock, that wasn’t a snack. That was something else. Not important. Well– yeah, important, but we don’t need to talk about it,” he says reassuringly… he hopes. He resists the urge to make another snack joke, because he’s still not quite sure where Rocky’s at with the whole “normalizing eating metaphors for sex” thing; they haven’t had much of a chance to explore that.
Yet.
But God, he’s hungry.
Grace leans back down to lay his forehead flat on top of Rocky’s carapace again, doing his best not to scrape his glasses, and wraps his arms around him once more. He breathes slowly; deeply. It’s funny what you get used to when you’re around it long enough and when it’s associated with all of the only good things left - when it’s associated with all of the only things left in the world that you like. It’s funny how the faint sharpness of lingering ammonia should be irritating, but to Grace, it just smells like his best friend is here. He’s warm and solid and alive and he’s here, in Grace’s arms, chirping and crooning and still vibrating softly.
Grace drops his hands back down to run them a bit more fully around Rocky’s torso, to map and memorize every inch that he can while he can. No matter how many times they cheat death, he’s always going to wonder when the other shoe will drop - there could be five of them, after all - and that means he wants to take every moment he can while he can.
The extra nice part about Eridians not really having a “back” or “front,” however, is that he can kiss his way up and down any side or edge or corner or face and it’s just as fulfilling as any other. Staying as far as he can from Rocky’s little SCnUBA (self-contained not underwater breathing apparatus, of course, and yes, Grace does think “skuh-noobuh” to himself with a small giggle) backpack and dorsal vent, Grace does just that. He kisses his way down, fingers splaying and tapping and drumming out little patterns as he does, learning which spots make Rocky react with extra fervor, learning how he likes it when Grace matches his own rhythm with the one Rocky is singing, something that’s more than random noise but not quite substantial enough to translate. He sounds a long, sweet whistle reminiscent of a sigh before he finally begins to speak again, starting with Grace’s very favorite word.
“Graaaaace, Grace Grace Grace. Yes Grace. Sweet good soft, good good, my good Grace, good Grace for Rocky,” he warbles. Grace hums back in response, matching his pitch as best he can. “Yes yes good Grace noise, more good noise please Grace, Rocky good Grace.”
It didn’t take long for Grace to work out that in some contexts, “Rocky Grace” is just that: Rocky and Grace. In other contexts - like, say, having a lapful of dripping Eridian - “Rocky Grace” is much different.
Possessive.
Rocky’s Grace.
Or, in this case, Rocky’s good Grace.
As he makes his way down toward the lower edge of Rocky’s carapace, to what some other Earth biologist might call his abdomen, Grace’s lips and tongue begin to tingle with an unfamiliar metallic sensation. There is no single human evolutionary reason for him to react this strongly to the taste of electrons, of metal, of copper, zinc, mercury, but all he can think is yes. Yes. God, yes. His breathing quickens, punctuated by a whine he can’t even remember to be embarrassed by. Especially not with the way Rocky reacts to it.
“Like like like, Grace know Rocky like Grace good noise, want to hear Grace noise! Yes! Want!” he quavers, leaning forward in some Eridian approximation of a headbutt on Grace’s shoulder. “Grace so good at tell Rocky that Grace feel good, feel pleasure, Grace so good that don’t need words, Rocky know just from Grace sound, Rocky love love know, want hear pleasure, love make Grace feel good.”
Two plus two is four, Grace reminds himself, shivering. And the cube root of eight is two.
“You do, Rock,” he mouths, muffled against Rocky’s body but knowing he hears it just fine. He runs his stubble along Rocky’s smooth side. “You do make Grace feel good.”
With Rocky still half-holding, half-seated in his lap, Grace starts to lean back ever so slightly, slowly and deliberately, pulling Rocky with him. He probably couldn’t actually pull Rocky like this if he tried, not any better than he could haul a labrador made of tungsten, but Rocky is smart and gets the message even if he doesn’t fully understand it.
Grace gets his own legs out from under him as he keeps walking Rocky up, finally laying all the way back and not giving a single care when his head connects with the hard carbon flooring, or about how embarrassingly obviously his dick is tenting his pants because there are simply much more important things happening right now.
Rocky hesitates where he stands over Grace’s chest, one hand opening and closing as if unsure even as Grace’s hands continue to pull him up from behind. Grace huffs.
“C’mon, Rock, baby. Please.” Baby?, he thinks. Where did that come from? “Don’t play with me. Not right now. Not today. Be–” his voice cracks. “Be good for me, okay? Make me feel good?”
Rocky trills, high and sharp, almost as if distressed. No… not distressed, Grace thinks.
“Rocky wants, yes yes yes,” he tremors. “Must be good. Good for Grace, strong Grace, can do anything. Have anything.”
He scrambles the rest of the way up to Grace’s head, still clicking his fingers nervously but also shaking in that little way Grace has come to know so well lately. He stops just short, almost tilting down like he’s trying to look directly at Grace with eyes he doesn’t have. It’s still endearing.
“But…” he chitters apprehensively. “When Grace try Eridian food, was poison. Poison for Grace! What if… question?”
Grace wraps an affectionate hand around Rocky’s nearest arm.
“Y’know, on Earth, it’s not polite to ask a magician to reveal their secrets. But that was the ‘snack,’ okay?” he finally admits with a slight laugh and squeeze of his hand. “It was a drug. Something to keep me healthy. To keep heavy metals from being absorbed into my body. That’s why it was important.”
I did the math! He thinks. I took the pills! And I want!
Grace hooks his other hand around another of his arms and tugs, nosing back up at the bottom-most edge of Rocky’s carapace before beginning to mouth at it gently.
“Grace want– Grace really want Rocky body, taste, want mouth on Rocky ♪♬♩, question?!” He breaks off into a noise that Grace has more or less mentally categorized as “oh,” a wordless chord that usually indicates surprise or understanding or new clarity. He imagines how it would actually sound as a word, long and drawn out and tight, a broken ohhhh…
Grace’s answer is wordless. He continues to kiss and skim with his tongue, kitten licks catching the first tiny drops of iridescent, star-silver wetness beading along Rocky’s ventral seam, feeling it slowly begin to ease open at Grace’s touch and tongue. It is quite possibly the hottest thing Grace has ever experienced, and the most beautiful, and he groans deep in his chest, leaning into one long, flat swipe of his tongue from back to front, end to end.
“Grace said ‘feels good when slick,’ ‘feels good when wet.’ … Rocky feels good when slick, wet, question?”
Grace pulls back just enough to catch his breath.
“Finally putting that perfect memory to good use, are you?”
Rocky adjusts his back legs slightly so that the one planted between Grace’s legs is pushing up against his dick through his pants, like a dare and a threat and an entreaty all at once.
Okay, fair. I probably deserved that, he thinks.
He continues to move this way and that, humming as he presses his face directly against Rocky’s vulnerable underside, continuing to tease his vent seam open. Once he’s fully spread, Grace leans back for a moment to admire his handiwork, shining from nose to chin with mercurial stardust. He lets go of one leg to reach up between them, running a finger along one side of the plating on either side of where Rocky has pulled himself open and reaches up toward his– his what? Because they still never got around to that Urban Dictionary lesson, and Grace has no idea what word or words Rocky would pick for his ♪♬♩, an Eridian word which Grace knows now by ear but would never be able to reproduce himself.
He briefly considers stopping to ask - hey, Rocky, are you more of a “pussy” kind of guy, or a “cunt” kind of guy, or maybe you just like “hole”? Let’s talk about the bizarre list of colloquialisms for “vagina” and you can tell me which one makes you feel all sexy and empowered! - but decides against it for the moment. Whatever. Grace supposes he doesn’t need a word for it right now because his mouth is going to be too busy to say it anyway.
Internally, though, in lockdown inside his own brain, it is simply a running thread of “This is real. Is this really happening? I’m really getting to do this again after half a decade? Sweet home Alabama, FINALLY. Don’t even care that it’s… well. Y’know. Holy grits, it’s worth it.”
Rocky continues to babble-sing above him, sometimes mixed with discernible words that Grace can pick out and sometimes just a jumble of harmonics, arpeggios ascending and descending in a way Grace can’t exactly decode but that seem anything but random.
To test his hypothesis, he tentatively runs his finger around the ultra-sensitive round muscle ringing Rocky’s entrance and earns himself another ohhh…! song.
“Empty, so empty! Hate empty feeling!” he shakes. “Need full full full where Grace touch. Grace touch softness but Rocky trust, touch ♪♬♩ only to feel good. Beautiful Grace, sweet Grace, safe Grace–”
“Sweet” Grace, however, refuses to spare him before delving back in, still teasing the far edge of Rocky’s softness with one crooked fingertip, nearly holding him open while licking up into him alongside it.
Rocky is bright and sharp and metallic on his tongue, like ozone, like the air before a lightning strike, like the sweet sting of raw, carpet burned skin after getting down on his knees in the supply closet a lifetime ago. It’s deep and mineral and makes him long surprisingly for Earth, for the stony, steely terroir of a good wine - the ghosts of deep elements pushed up into the planet’s crust by ancient volcanic eruption, deposited by the sweet flow of molten metal and stone, by rivulets of lava dripping out across its wilderness. It makes him long for the bike repair shop and summer thunderstorms and the Project’s fleet of military-grade cold metal 3D printers in the on-site fabrication lab.
But Rocky’s body is warm beneath his hands, and his most vulnerable self is exposed and open to a soft, gangly creature that went from stranger to starmate in a matter of daysweeksmonthsyears, and Grace does not take this for granted. He has gained some things, and he has lost others, but he would not trade any of what he has found for what he has left behind.
Rocky still has not stopped babbling, though his song sounds strained, high and tight.
“Rocky is good for Grace, question? Rocky feels like Grace hope, question? Rocky sound like Grace hope, feel good, sound good for Grace, question?”
Grace manages to catch an angle that’s just right as Rocky begs him, the moan it drags out of him reverberating up through every centimeter of Rocky’s core and Rocky shifts his weight, without losing contact, to free one hand to pet Grace’s hair, to pet him shakily before closing his fingers and tugging, pushing, pulling.
It’s that, plus the way that Grace has been rutting up against Rocky’s leg - feeling like a wretched dog, and loving it - that does it. He comes practically untouched, to no surprise of his own, but he realizes belatedly that that might have been good information to share with Rocky, who up until this point has only ever seen Grace get of specifically by touching himself (and fingering himself, that one time those several times, at Rocky’s own request) and probably didn’t have a particularly comprehensive or anticipatory frame of reference for “Things That Might Make Grace Come in His Pants.”
But Grace is singing those noises, the ones Rocky knows and chases, whimpering up into him, and it’s what seems to push Rocky over the edge with him. Grace groans pathetically at the way Rocky clenches around him, rhythmically, as if trying to pull Grace deeper and deeper, at the way he trembles while slick, slippery quicksilver drips down Grace’s fingers and face, leaving a lustrous trail gleaming down his jaw and settling into the hollow of his throat.
He still trembles, quieter now, as Grace withdraws his hand and tongue as slowly and gently as he can. He has no idea what Eridian overstimulation looks like (yet), and he’s not sure this is the moment when he wants to find out. Rocky releases his grip on Grace’s hair as he does, and Grace could swear it feels like the room is tilting. The sensation only lasts a split second until it’s replaced by a rush of cooler air over his face, a heavy limb thrown over his chest, and a large heap of shivering Eridian laying tangled next to him and cooing.
He doesn’t move much, but Grace knows from the gradually quieting singsong - something that doesn’t quite register for translation or with his own mental dictionary, which intrigues him, though that’s definitely a question or twelve for another time - that Rocky is still awake, so he’s content to let him lay there for a while, fingers softly drumming up and down the arms he can reach from where he’s (lovingly, he thinks) pinned.
Just as Grace feels himself getting drowsy, too, and notices how distinctly uncomfortable his boxers have become, the cycle filter on Rocky’s rebreather (“skuh-noobuh,” he mentally corrects himself) begins to chirp. The cartridges need to be recharged and re-pressurized, and that means Rocky needs to return to his own atmosphere for the next few hours, at least.
“C’mon, Rock– that’s it bud, let’s get you up. That’s it, you got it. There we go,” he coaxes, getting back up on his own five legs and shuffling over to the airlock with him. “I got you.”
Rocky stops them briefly to drag one of the sheets off Grace’s bed without comment or explanation, allowing it to trail behind him while somehow avoiding getting his feet tangled together. The sight reminds Grace of a little kid dragging their blanket behind them on their way to bed, and it makes his chest tighten in a funny way that he can’t quite name.
Rocky finally stumbles into the airlock, sleepy sleepy sleepy, and Grace makes sure he’s got all of his hands, arms, feet, legs, and bed sheets safely inside before initiating the re-pressurization cycle for him. His hands itch to be the ones to help Rocky out of his little backpack and heatsink harness. To be the ones to tuck him into the bed they can’t share. He makes his way back to his own bed instead, up against the corner that lets them lay in their approximation of side-by-side.
Rocky toddles over a short time later, after the airlock finishes cycling, and plops down at the same spot on the other side of the barrier, arranging the bed sheet around him like he’s making his own cozy little nest. He doesn’t actually need a blanket, of course, but this one is Grace’s, and it reminds him of Grace, and therefore he has taken it.
“Grace watch Rocky sleep, question?” he asks, sleepy and almost shy, sounding much smaller than usual.
Like you need to ask, Grace thinks.
“Of course I’ll watch you sleep, Rock. I’m right here. I’ve got you,” he says.
Rocky trills softly in response and tucks himself in deeper.
Grace gets up briefly to wipe down his hands and arms - surprisingly easy clean-up, which actually shouldn’t surprise him, given what he knows about Eridian biology - and dispense himself a bottle of the same water he’s been drinking for the better part of a decade. He dims the lights and settles back in with the book he was reading earlier.
Somehow, life already feels different. As if it’s already split into before touching Rocky and after touching Rocky, just like it was that day in the Blip-to-Mary tunnel when every memory started automatically being logged with before meeting Rocky or after meeting Rocky.
Grace gets back up every so often for another bottle of water, or another dose of succimer - he used to laugh at the urban folklore about astronauts and their little potty time watches, and now here he is, an astronaut with his own little “don’t forget your cunnilingus pills!” watch. Mortifying. … But also kind of hot, he shrugs - or to switch out the depleted tablet for a freshly charged one.
Rocky sleeps for nearly fourteen hours, as close to sleeping in Grace’s sheets as he can get for now. He begins to stir around the start of Grace’s next “day” cycle, in what passes for his early morning aboard the Hail Mary. Grace throws back his third handful of succimer with a cup of what no longer really passes for coffee - except for the fact that it is liquid, and mostly brown - and smiles.