Chapter Text
Rocky had never been happier than when the squishy, leaky and frankly gross human had entered his life. So happier, in fact, that he hadn’t thought twice before moving in the odd spaceship.
First of all, this was an alien. How many Eridians had met an alien?
Secondly, it was a scientific alien.
He could help Rocky fix the Astrophage issue.
Rocky would build tools, and Grace would know what to do. Except unlike Rocky, his memory sucked. He barely remembered where his tools were on a good day. Sometimes, Rocky wondered how Grace had survived the days before his arrival.
It was endlessly impressive how their species managed to fly.
Rocky was also glad he found the alien in time, because he seemed to also have lost his crewmates. It must have affected him a lot, because when they first met, he repeatedly asked whether Rocky could sense him.
Rocky would, in a way. Grace was both extremely noisy and silent. There was a sort of permanent buzzing noise around his location, like a dying eridian that never truly passed on the other side.
Sometimes, when he ’slept’, he disappeared from Rocky’s senses entirely. No matter how attentively he watched over his new friend, the human could just— vanish.
The first time, Rocky panicked. He searched the whole ship, strained his echolocalisation to the limit—
But only the usual purr of the engines and the creak of plates against plates returned to him.
Then, a few hours later, the background buzz returned and Grace was back. Sometimes he was still sleeping, where Rocky had been watching or somewhere else. Sometimes he was already awake and working in the lab.
Whenever Rocky tried to ask him about it, he confusedly answered that he had just been asleep. That the human body ’slew down’ while sleeping, thus perhaps muting itself to Rocky’s sense compared to the usual harsh beat and blood flow…
But Rocky had never heard any ’beating’ from Grace. Only buzzing.
Eventually, he simply gave up, only making sure to always note down when Grace disappeared, and how long it took him to come back. Just in case the pattern changed.
Just in case there was something to fix.
He didn’t want to be alone again.
The more time they spent together, the more Rocky grew worried about his roommate. Ever since he’d accessed the human memory machine, he kept finding more and more incoherences about what humans should be like and what humans were.
He’d tried to perceive Grace on his lightwavelenght-to-3D converter once. The ship walls appeared properly, and he could hear the vague buzz he associated to Grace in the same room as him… and yet nothing appeared on the converter.
He tried again. Nothing.
There was maybe a vague interference that appeared as a noisy polygonomial shape…
Rocky checked five times, the converter wasn’t broken. Which could only mean Grace did not directly interact with light.
It made no sense.
Humans used light to perceive each other. Most objects, generally speaking, all seemed to either emit or reject light. Yet Grace was as transparent as the Xenonite alloy Rocky used for their atmosphere separation wall.
Grace never seemed to understand his question when he asked. The translation echoed wrongly, or Grace assured him he also reflected life like any living being—
To be honest, Rocky did find a few ’transparent’ living beings from earth in the computer. But humans weren’t one of them.
He did gift Grace a mirror once, just to see how the human would react.
The mirror exploded.
Rocky had used polished xenonite. Unlike the human’s fragile glass, this was a material that could withstand the full power of an engine without breaking. And yet. Before Grace ever had a glance at it… it exploded.
Any other reflective surface Rocky tried to gift later on met the same fate.
Additioned with the ’sleeping disappearance’, Rocky could sense something was amiss. Since things had a tendency to break, explode or be ignored whenever he confronted Grace about it, he stealthily did more experiments outside the human awareness.
Grace, recently, had begun to learn Eridian. Rocky had easily taken to the English language— the vocabulary was small, the words followed a logical suite and it had been rather fast to commit most of it to memory. Still, his attempt to mimic Grace’s pronunciation had ended up in miserable failure.
Rocky didn’t have vocal cords. He couldn’t speak human. He could only rely on the human-memory-machine to do it for him.
Grace had struggled a lot more with the harmonic of Eridian. Even now when Rocky spoke his natural language, he barely managed to understand one concept out of the dozen included in the song.
He struggled to understand it… but he could speak it.
The first time Rocky heard a trill of messy messy messy i love this ship this human but so messy, he jumped and scanned the whole ship for a fellow Eridian.
There was none. Just him, Grace’s buzz, and the Hail Mary’s purrs.
Turns out, Grace had just been singing the latest song he could remember from Rocky, as a ’game’ while working.
… He may have been saying it a bit too much.
Humans had vocal cords. Eridians had organs.
The resulting tone, frequency range and intensity were different by nature, the same way xenonite could never be compared to the humans’ steel.
Yet without even knowing what he’d been saying, Grace had imitated a perfect eridian trill.
It was wrong.
Rocky was happy, Grace could speak Eridian!, but he also was scared.
Too many things were off. Too many things contradicted each others.
If it had just been information from Grace, Rocky would have concluded his friend was a bit crazy. It was fine. Not all Eridians took to space the same way, and getting a few shell plates loose didn’t mean you were less of a person. Grace had proven, again and again, that he was a clever partner and perfectly able to save Erid.
But there was the human-memory-machine.
And the closest thing he found corresponding to Grace… shouldn’t have existed.
Erid did have similar legends, about Eridians becoming still yet still singing into the caverns. Sometimes you would hear your departed sibling or your grandpa trill, and you’d cherish the sound in your core. You never answered.
Some stories, more chilling than others, warned off Eridians that dared to trill back about getting their voice or hearing stolen, being plunged forever in the dark. Others whispered of those echoes luring you to the boiling ocean until you lost yourself in their depths.
Some Eridians formed thrums to call upon old wisdom or calm the departed, but they were always cautious to call them in the form of another thrum rather than lone individual. Death, they said, did not like to be disturbed.
Entire caves had been closed off in the hope of giving the singing-stones rest.
Now, Rocky was pragmatic. He never truly believed in the existence of singing-stones. Erid was a planet filled with life, and it was all too easy to mistake the brush of scales against stone with the gentle rumble of a lulling parent.
Before their sun began dying, he would have also sworn the oceans would forever stay boiling and no eridian would ever put their five claws off the ground.
Yet the sun had turned cold and Rocky had flown into space.
Rocky was pragmatic. Because he was pragmatic, he couldn’t ignore it. Grace was an alien. Rocky had never known another human to compare. Yet the informations he was given were clear.
From what Rocky could assess after his weeks of observation, if humans were like a ship, Grace looked like… the echo of one.
A singing-stone.
Death did not like to be disturbed. Rocky… Rocky couldn’t tell Grace, because Grace would never hear him.
Because if Grace heard him, he would vanish.
Selfishly, against all the legends’ teaching, against all he knew about singing-stones… Rocky didn’t want to lose his friend. As far as he was concerned, the human was real. He spoke, slept, wandered through the ship while clumsily knocking stuff around…
And Rocky… Rocky wanted Grace to stay.