Chapter Text
They prepared for this. Sort of. Well - Rocky did. Well - they both did, but there were kind of maybe specific parts of this that Grace was not currently prepared for, and he felt bad about it, but that is also kind of fading beneath the overwhelming pressure of anxiety on his chest. Can anxiety kill you when you're already dying because you've stopped eating? He knows stress kills. This has gotta count as, like, double stress with the way he feels.
Rocky clings on the other side of the new xenonite airlock door he built, a great expanse of darkness behind him. A little bit of the light from the Hail Mary eeks its way across that chasm, glinting off the multi-faceted and whirling patterns of the xenonite space elevator car they'd docked with. Matching speed and altitude with the dang thing had probably shaved a couple years off of Grace's already dwindling life. He'd almost passed out in the pilot chair when it was done, not from fear (though there was a significant adrenaline come down) but just because rapidly falling asleep after a minimum amount of physical exertion was the kind of thing his body was doing these days. The coma slurry diet, though filled with all the nutrients Grace needs to survive, is far from what anyone would call appetizing or even edible. There's enough left in the Hail Mary for him to survive another year in space (thank you NASA redundancy regulations) but living and thriving are not the same things, are they? So maybe he'd stopped "eating" the proper amount of chalky, gooey coma juice after about a month on it. Maybe his ribs are showing, maybe he's cold all the time, maybe he's even exhausted from climbing out of his bunk most days. And maybe "maybe" is a bad way to describe it because all of that is actually, sadly, reality. They'd even reduced their acceleration over the last six months so it would be easier for him to move around.
"Rocky back soon, promise," Rocky says, pulling Grace's attention off the wall rivet he's been glaring at for the past couple seconds. There's no need for a translator between them now, nor for the extra simple-style speech Rocky is employing, but it's a habit they fall back on when one of them is stressed or distracted. Or when Grace is zoned out and confused, which is happening a lot these days.
"Don't rush on my behalf, Rock. Rushing means screw ups," Grace says.
"Rocky knows. Not stupid." Rocky is kind enough to leave out the 'not stupid like Grace' ending to that sentence he surely had in mind. His little hands tap together, interlocking and disconnecting as he watches Grace. The twitching matches the pace of Grace's heart. Augh.
"I'll be fine up here. I'm not gonna collapse into a soggy heap after a few days alone. It's time for us to get some personal space already, and- I mean Adrian has waited long enough to see you. I bet there's hundreds down there waiting and-" Grace is gesturing his hand too fast, forcing himself to grab some netting on the wall to stop his slow sideways spin. Hooray for being back in zero-g after four years of easy, peaceful gravity (It's not really zero-g at geostationary orbit of course, but if he thinks too much about how he's technically continually falling towards Erid right now, he's going to vomit for a third time today).
Rocky wiggles his claws, then swings in closer to the airlock glass, tapping on it. Grace floats forward too. Stops himself with a palm against the warm xenonite, and taps back.
"I'll be fine," Grace says again. "Go home and warn them about the gross, leaky space blob you brought home. I'll see you when they're good and prepared for how disgusting I am."
Rocky says nothing, but Grace begins to feel a low vibration through the glass, channeled into his chest. It fills up his lungs and all those shadowy little cavities inside him that have been consuming his brain like black holes. A little squeeze around his heart. It's still racing right now, despite how easy the jokes are coming. Rocky can hear it. Can see it as a trembling pulse through Grace's veins like the beating of a hammer on metal. Literal waves of trepidation. This low, calm rumbling is exactly what he does every time he sees Grace's anxiety spike. Kind of a hug from the inside.
Grace swallows through the lump in his throat to quietly say, "Stop stalling." He pushes back off the glass. "Go give Adrian a big old earthling hug for me, then come back and tell me all about it."
Rocky stays on the wall a little longer, fingers curled against the glass, until he uses all his legs to kick back and float into the dark. The walls behind him glitter like stars where the xenonite's colors merge and scatter. A space walk of its own kind.
"Grace will eat." Decidedly not a question.
"Yes yes, I'll eat and everything. Sheesh, go already!"
Rocky latches on to the far wall, now nothing more than a few hints of mercury scars and pale-blue markings. He tilts backwards like he's looking straight at Grace (poor guy is going to have so many weird habits to explain), then plucks his fingers against an array of metal control strings. In front of their clear xenonite airlock, a set of opaque doors twist closed. The Hail Mary shudders as the elevator disconnects its brakes from the core cable. It can't fall or rise while they're in geostationary orbit, but a magnetic pull system will begin to drag it back down into Erid's gravity. Just a black box drifting away. At least as it leaves, taking Grace's only company with it, he's given a beautiful view of the half-lit clouds of Erid through the empty floor. Blue and white swirls, canyons between them cut by sharp black shadows as the star slowly sets. The camera views are nice, but nothing beats seeing it with your own eyes.
Grace had said it was lucky that the eridians left the elevator car up at the docking station they launched Blip-A from, but to Rocky it wasn't even a question if it would be there. When Blip-A returned, how else could they quickly get back down to Erid to share what they learned? ("Quick" is funny description for it, considering the travel time between spaceship dock and Erid's surface was around fifteen hours.) So the eridians had left the elevator up at the top for all these years because of hope. Is hope what the people back on earth had felt for the past twenty years, sitting at their desks and listening for the radio call of the beetles coming back home with an answer? Kept all the satellites and listening stations running, just in case?
He... needs to not be thinking about that right now. Not while he's floating alone up here. Thinking of earth always leads back to his last memories of it, and having a nightmare up here, with Rocky so far away... Grace shudders.
Focusing on breathing to slow down the spike in his heartbeat manages to distract Grace from crying for a minute before he gives up and lets it overwhelm him. He takes his glasses off before the scattering tears get caught on them and leave marks he can't get off. This is only a handful of days, right? Fifteen hours travel time down the elevator. A day or two on the surface, then back up to Grace. The two of them have been stuck together four years, no breaks, no escape from each other. This moment should be a breath of fresh air, to finally have real privacy again!
Maybe "privacy" and "me time" were not actually what he'd been craving at all.
"This is your meal ration alert, Doctor Grace," Mary chirps helpfully from above.
"Ah, shi- oot."
It's easier to skip out on his "meals" when Rocky isn't around to nag him, so that's one thing to put under "Pros of being alone in the space ship".
Work is a good distraction. The problem is that's been true for the entire four years Rocky and Grace have spent on their space road trip. All the really good, distracting problems have been solved or outlined to death. Plans for the xenonite travel ball that will get Grace down to Erid, some food synthesizing ideas, even plans on how to seed taumoeba into the orbit of Threeworld (in case their fly-by seeding hadn't worked.) Rocky insisted Adrian would want to design the official biodome for Grace, but they'd created a mock-up of a temporary one for him to live in while the big one got built. Even all the parts of the Hail Mary they planned to dismantle or copy were tagged and manifested. The only thing left for Grace to do is to pack his things into the xenonite boxes Rocky had made. Since Grace's travel ball was, well, just a giant ball, all the delicate earth items had to be stored away to keep them from melting in Erid's atmosphere of oh-my-god degrees.
Packing only takes an hour to do.
Grace tries cleaning next. Snatches forgotten wrappers and wayward crumbs out of the air, mumbling apologies to Mary for mistreating her like this. He throws a little polishing and disinfecting in there for fun, until he gets bored of it and lets the rag drift away. So next is a movie up in the mental health room, anything he hasn't seen before. The action scenes of car jumps and gunfire annoy him. He ends up hooking his legs through the walkway ladder, floating and braid the tattered elastic band on his pants instead of watching the movie. Two more hours down.
"It's time for your nutrient intake, Doctor Grace." Mary says.
Grace cringes. "You really can't word that in a less disgusting way? Like, I don't know- it's slurppin' time or- ugh, no, never mind. Disregard that. Made myself sick saying that."
Mary lets him float and not eat for a minute before she comes back with another helpful reminder. "It's been twenty hours since your last full meal."
"What, don't the crumbs count?" he mutters. (He didn't actually eat them, but he thought about it pretty hard.)
Grace sighs and pulls himself down to the lab fridge he keeps prepped slurry meals in. The cold isn't necessary, but if they're cold he can pretend for a second that it's a nice, pulpy glass of lemonade before reality hits him. This time he manages about three good swallows before he gags. It's a bad one, too. Almost brings it all back up, viscous stew sitting at the back of his throat that he washes down with water. The effort makes his stomach hurt, so he puts the rest of the slurry away again. Better to have something inside him than nothing at all, right? If he drinks enough water, it'll fill him up and get rid of the hunger pains.
Eating leads to what it always does- sleep. Sleep leads to pulling himself down into the bedroom and strapping himself onto his bed, quilt wrapped around him like he's a mummy. Above him is the empty shell of xenonite where Rocky would normally watch from. A slightly off-kilter refraction of light fills it now. Empty. Yup. Gonna close his eyes and pretend that's not what it's like. Gonna pretend the gentle sounds of Mary's electronics whirring is the sound of Rocky musing quietly to himself, at just the right tempo for Grace to feel it in his finger tips. Gonna do all that and sleep and feel better.
When he wakes, Mary tells him he slept for half an hour. That makes him grind his teeth and tear up bit, but then he is up and floating, and floating into the lab, and after spinning there in the half-light of the Hail Mary's approximation of "night time", Ryland Grace claps his hands and gets to work. Doing, again, everything he'd done before. Just a little slower, and with a little less to show for it. With a headache starting to knock at the back of his eyes.
The next sleep gets him through an hour. The one after that gets him fifteen minutes before he's too frustrated to keep trying. Maybe it's the cold that keeps him up. He puts two layers of socks on his feet and another on his hands, cocooning himself in every blanket. When that doesn't work he tests if it's sound instead. Headphones for silence (doesn't work), music for not silence (also doesn't work.) Lights brighter, lights lower. He - this one is embarrassing - he even tries playing clips of Rocky's voice from the translation laptop. None of it makes his monkey brain chill out.
He's a human and he doesn't need someone to watch him sleep. He's a human in a spaceship and nothing here is trying to eat him, or has ever tried to eat him. He's malnourished and exhausted all the time and sleep is the best thing ever, now could his body just agree with him and let him gosh darn rest? But reason can't defeat instinct. Beating his head into his whiteboard where he's written "I am a regular guy and I can sleep for a regular amount of time," doesn't fix it either.
Grace drags his quilt and a warmed up packed of water he's pretending is tea with him into the airlock, strapping himself to a wall. This time he brings season two of Ancient Aliens up on his laptop, something so stupid he's sure it can put him to sleep. And he floats there - watching Erid turn beneath him through that gaping doorway - and he waits. Unfortunately he also thinks.
Hundreds of miles below him right now is another planet. That should be exciting, and it is, but is also comes with some stark realities to face. Gravity on Erid is twice as heavy as what he's evolved to withstand, in an atmosphere hot enough to crisp his flesh in seconds and suffocate him in a breath. Broiled Ryland Grace for dinner. He and Rocky had worked very hard to plan around those realities, but there is one last hurdle on Grace's mind: He isn't physically or mentally fit any more. Worse than that - he's actively deteriorating. No body fat to cushion his organs, no muscles to help him fight the weight of Erid, anxiety popping up over every mild problem (including being apart from his partner for a few days apparently). He's looked up the results of malnutrition a hundred times now. Knows all about how it can soften your bones and destroy your immune system. Are there eridian diseases he's going to catch? Is the gravity going to snap his newly crappified bones the second he tries to sit up? He might be looking at sixty years of laying down in a bed ahead of him, getting flipped like a pancake every day to avoid bed sores.
Ancient Aliens stopped playing five minutes ago. Grace sits with the laptop tethered to his legs that float out in the middle of the room, and stares blankly at the dark reflection of himself in the sleeping laptop screen. He looks ancient himself- hollowing out cheeks and sinking eyes. Even the stubble on his jaw looks tired and haggard somehow. And is that- is that a gray streak in his hair? Right, cool, never letting the screen go dark again. He slaps the touch pad so the laptop wakes.
All of those questions are making the assumption that he actually lives through descent and the following years. Dying on this journey - in the coming days, even - is not out of the question. Six months they'd been easing himself through his deterioration by traveling at one-g aboard the Hail Mary. A compromise they'd made for his softening bones and melting muscles strength. Band-aid on a festering wound.
Leaning his head back into the wall, Grace takes a long and shaky breath and tries to give the universe back the grief he's borrowing from the future.