Archive of Our Own

It surprised the crew when it turned out that Grace could sing. 

He'd always show up to karaoke night, but not to sing. He'd get a beer, he'd hum along, he'd talk to some people he knew, but singing wasn't the plan. He had work to do and it was nicer to work together than alone. He'd never gotten up on mic, and never really intended on it either.

Karaoke night was comforting, was all. There were a few good voices onboard; Ilyukhina could throw down on any pop song, and Ganbold the metallurgical engineer used to be in a thrash band and would hit some crazy scratchy falsettos on songs that didn't need it just to get a cheer. Mostly, though, everyone absolutely sucked, and that was how Ryland liked it. He'd been involved in kids' theater in some capacity or another ever since he started teaching, and it was nostalgic to hear someone happily butcher a song note by note.

It was early February, and the mercury was three degrees below what it should be in the Antarctic circle. Even with the heaters blasting in the rec room, it wasn't getting much above sixty degrees. Ryland hunched into his cardigan, regretting not putting on his thermals today just because they seemed lame, and he tilted his half-full beer this way and that on the bar countertop. Everything was the best you could get on the aircraft carrier— no rationing for Earth's best hope at survival— but the beer was watered down by what tasted like one-fifth. He wasn't sure if it was a Stratt thing or a military thing.

The room was half-full but filling fast, and the usual suspects were on YouTube lining up instrumental tracks. Ryland hopped off the bar stool and traded waves with everyone, looking over Ganbold's shoulder where the karaoke guys were setting things up on the couch. He winced.

"Gethsemane?"

"I thought you liked showtunes," said Jen, and Ryland tilted a hand. 

"'Mamma Mia' is a karaoke musical. 'Cats' is a karaoke musical. That's gonna shatter some glasses even in the right hands."

"'Cats', Jen mumbled to herself. "What did I hear about 'Cats'?

"That is the plan," Ganbold said. "Have you heard Ian Gillan, Deep Purple?"

"Oh, you're— okay, I'm in. You're the only man I trust with that G5, Ganbold. I trust you with my life."

Jen clicked her fingers. "That was it. Did you guys see that early Strattosphere newsletter where someone heard a guy crying his eyes out in the showers to the 'Cats' soundtrack?"

That had been Ryland, that had been one week into living here, and he'd thought he'd been quiet enough that he wouldn't be heard. It was an old, old habit and even living in a communal shower area couldn't kick it. He cleared his throat. "I think so."

"I cannot believe I have to add this," Ganbold grumbled at the laptop, adding a fifth song to the queue. "Look at this."

Everyone on the couch crowded in to look. Jen and Céline groaned, and Ryland wondered if he had any earplugs in a pocket somewhere.

"No," Céline said, looking down the signup sheet. "Who— I don't even know this person. 'Danny'? Do you know this person? Who would pick such a song for their first karaoke night?"

"Oh," Ryland said, leaning in at the sheet. "Danny Fallows? I saw him once, he's a programmer on the controls team."

"You have a freak's memory, Dr Grace," Céline said. "Thank you. Does this Danny Fallows have the whistle register and five-octave range of Mariah Carey?"

Danny Fallows seemed like the kind of guy who'd only heard the dulcet tones of men's rights podcasts, but Ryland didn't like to predict the worst out of people. "I guess we'll find out, right?"

Céline clucked her tongue at the sheet, scribbling something next to Fallows' name. "We at least have no 'Hey Jude' tonight. I'm sick of 'Hey Jude'. 'Nah nah nah na-na-na nah'. Repulsive. The worst Beatles song ever written."

Jen basically reared up in her seat. "What?"

As usual, Céline had started an argument that was going to finish up with drama on the internal gossip mailing list 'Strattosphere', which since its inception had been the constant bane of the security team. Ryland took himself back to his bar stool before he could become a part of it and sat down. The bartender CS Andy Solomon, who Grace was ninety percent sure was the guy running the mailing list, frowned over at the increasingly loud argument on the couch.

"What's got them in a twist?"

Ryland shrugged, going for a half-truth to test if he'd see it in his inbox tomorrow. "Someone's going for 'Emotions' by Mariah Carey."

"You guys all volunteered for this," Solomon said, "I'm just the poor schmuck in Navy Culinary that has to listen."

"Volunteered's kind of a strong word," Ryland said with a twinge of homesickness, tipping back his watered-down beer. 

The first two songs scheduled in were easy singalongs to warm up the crowd, and then the next few after that were untested newbies or obviously bad song choices that Ganbold clearly wanted to get out of the way. Ryland was busy trying to figure out a specific issue on whether any naturally deceased astrophage in the fuel tanks could cause a problem, and so he didn't notice the guy next to him at the bar until the chanting started up, and in his periphery he caught the guy downing an entire pint glass in one try. Ryland turned to watch, Danny Fallows' friends cheering obnoxiously loud over Xie trying to finish up 'Thank You For The Music' in the back.

Fallows slammed down the pint glass on the bartop as Xie put the mic back on the stand. "Right! Which one of you fuckers thinks they can sing?"

On the couch, the karaoke crew shared a glance, and Ryland felt the same way: they'd not had any genuinely annoying singers in a while. 

Everyone reacted differently to the whole "on a mission to save humanity" thing, but mostly it made people uncomfortably earnest with their song choices. There were a few onboard, though, that tried to put on a performance that nothing mattered and they didn't care. They'd bring that frantic false cynicism to every event on the ship, try to needle anyone who showed genuine emotion. Fallows, young and British with a tight shirt on, his friends jeering him onto the stage, was exactly that guy.

Jen rolled her eyes, fiddled with the laptop for slightly longer than needed, and then started the track. 

Immediately Ryland clocked what Danny hadn't yet: she was playing a video from a channel that didn't show the lyrics onscreen. Nobody on the karaoke crew would pick that channel by accident. He tried to find some schadenfreude from it, but he'd never been good at being that guy; he rubbed a hand over his face and braced for impact.

Danny started singing an entire bar early. He was bad. He was abysmally, unspeakably tone-deaf, and pretending like he didn't care. It got some laughs from his friends at first, but when the song changed under Danny's feet and he realised his mistake he started the song entirely over, and a heavy pall of awkwardness settled on the room. Jen and the karaoke crew whispered to one another, clearly taking some vicious glee from undercutting the interloper, and when Danny noticed they were mocking him his voice got even more strained. Danny stopped entirely when Mariah Carey would have hit a whistle note.

"But I like the way I feel, inside… fuck, christ. Uh."

Most of the room were trying to look anywhere but Danny, whose increasing anxiety felt like it was lethally contagious, and whose spreading sweat patches might actually be. Grace couldn't look away. This was tugging a very specific heartstring, and it was hard not to do anything about it.

He'd taught kids for years: the overconfident kid who gets stressed and starts crying the moment they're a lone voice singing a song was a tale old as time. The boys especially, who could be mortified by having to sing something that felt earnest and even more mortified by the other kids seeing their own emotions when they started to get stressed. Grace had a quick fix that worked better the faster he stepped in, which was to abruptly turn a solo into a group singalong— "awesome stuff, Joel! Get ready everyone, all together, one two three four—". Because it needed a quick reaction, watching Danny's whole persona crumble on stage was like watching a grenade with the pin out.

The second chorus and the second whistle note was getting closer and closer, Danny was death-gripping the mic and clearly on the verge of ditching, and Grace couldn't take it anymore.

"Feels like a dream," he shouted in from the back, cupping a hand around his mouth for the effect of someone joining in for fun and not mockery, giving it some volume and only wobbling a little on the first note, "when you touch me tenderly!"

Everyone turning to stare would usually be confronting, but in this context it was nothing worse than a class he needed to marshall. He knew where he could take everyone in to land, but it meant getting to the end of the verse.

"I don't know if you're for real," he sang, making it through a run of notes he'd not really been certain of hitting, waving his arms in a 'get ready' motion to the people he knew were sing-along-ers, "but I really like the way I feel— insiiiiiide!"

Sometimes kids liked hearing a self-knowingly bad performance, an invitation to be bad, but paradoxically it could actually be more nerve-settling for them to hear their teacher go for something full-bore and earnestly. It would raise a round of giggles either way, but seeing someone who's showing that something's okay as long as it looks silly versus truly not caring if something looks silly was a distinction Grace really cared about making to the kids. 

So he really, truly went for the infamous high note, belted as hard and as high and with as much energy as he could, though he had no talent for falsetto and half the people here were world-class experts in their field with Nobel prizes under their belt. He wasn't even vaguely close to the actual note but he was in tune, which was good enough.

It got an awkward laugh, but the good kind of awkward, the 'relieved someone's broken the tension' kind, and it got a few whoops from the people that knew him, and he knew he could land the plane. He gestured to Céline, best singer in the room, so she'd have no escape from joining in, and then Ilyukhina, whose star power usually corralled a room, and then he waved them into the chorus, going for it loud enough that even alone he'd fill the room, so less confident singers could mumble-sing into the undertow before picking up some confidence. Céline and Ilyukhina got in on it, thank god, and that put the room more at ease than if it was the random loner at the back, and now they had a singalong. Danny pushed on, quieter under the crowded drunken room of singers, but now no longer forgetting every other word. 

It was only when they got towards the end of the song and it was all the little riff-y bits that required more talent than Ryland had that his confidence started to falter. The room was back into karaoke mode, and he wasn't needed to keep the thing going, and while he was cool with singing along he was now uncomfortably aware that people were looking to him when the high notes came in. He backed off the riffs, sang the chorus instead, and thankfully karaoke Jesus himself Ganbold launched a series of attempts at hitting the G#7 whistle notes that got everyone's attention instead. 

The song ended, Danny basically launched himself away from the mic, and Ryland turned back to his laptop, trying not to make eye contact. There was a brief lull while Danny and his friends retreated as close to the door as possible and they awkwardly pretended nothing had happened, and Ryland refreshed a tab a couple times trying to look busy. No dice: Jen came over.

"Grace's got pipes," she whistled appreciatively, but there was an undercurrent of something startled in her voice. "Where have you been hiding that?"

"Oh, y'know. Not a singing-up-front guy," he said, going to drink from his beer and putting it back down when he realised it was empty. "Singalongs are more my speed."

"You never sing along," Jen said. "You don't even do 'Hey Jude'."

"I like 'Hey Jude'," Ryland said mildly. "I'm just working usually, that's all."

"Okay," Jen said, a confused line appearing between her eyebrows. "Well, put yourself on the list sometime, that wasn't half bad."

"Sure," he said. Jen cast him one more baffled look, grabbed a soda and went back to the front.

There truly wasn't anything more to it than what he'd said to Jen, but Ryland still felt like he'd lied to her somehow. It just wasn't his thing to watch someone do it alone— that was all.

Ryland blinked out of the new memory, still holding the 'Cats' shirt. He guessed that kind of answered that: he was unironically a 'Cats' fan. He mourned the vision of the cooler Ryland Grace he'd once believed in.

He put the shirt on anyway, because where he was headed nobody would know it was any cause for shame. Hell, he could tell Erid that 'Cats' was the greatest work of art produced by mankind.

He mused on this as he took the ladder to the cockpit, starting his morning checks. If Eridians had any interest or talent in music, hearing that humanity's best shot at it was 'Cats' might just disappoint them enough that they'd lose faith in the human race and start an interstellar war. Not likely, but nothing in the universe had a zero-odds chance. 

Rocky had been there when he woke up that morning, but had almost immediately rushed off after he woke. Not unusual: sometimes he'd put tasks on hold because he couldn't do them while watching Ryland. He called into the ship while he settled himself in the pilots' seat.

"It's a beautiful morning in space, and outside temperatures are a nice and balmy minus 455. It's day 192 of the flight, which makes it only… 1,478 short short days to Erid. All systems nominal apart from the control panel thing, and Mary?"

"Yes, Dr Grace?"

"Report fuel supply?"

"Fuel tanks have 1.877 million kilograms remaining."

"Thank you, Mary. So it's shaping up to be another lovely day in space, and I'd finally like to figure out how exactly an Eridian infinitive works if we get time after the control panel. Anything you've got on the to-do list?"

No reply. Grace fiddled with some menus and went down some daily safety checklists while he waited for Rocky to emerge or call back, and tapped the dead control panel switch a couple times after he finished that too. After three minutes, he frowned back at the hatchway.

"Hey, Rocky?"

Nothing. 

"Rocky?"

Nothing. Ryland spun to the control panel with ice running down his spine, flipping rapidly through the camera feeds. Nothing in Rocky's living space, nothing in the bedroom, the lab— there. He was in his ball in storage bay five, of all places, in the corner where the camera could only see a small wedge of his carapace from behind a container rack.

"Rocky, you okay down there?"

Still nothing. He didn't even move. Had he fallen asleep? It was one weird place to do it. He never slept in the ball. And he would have told Ryland.

Grace swung out of the chair, slid down the outside rungs of the ladder, and hoofed it in a panicky jog to storage bay five. Just before he got to the doorway, he heard Rocky making a sound, quieter than usual and almost too high to hear. If he was saying something, Ryland couldn't understand it at this register, and he did not like the sound of it. 

He nearly crashed into the doorframe rounding the corner, and Rocky shifted slightly when he came into the room, making another high sound that lowered with wobbly strain down three octaves lower to speak. He was holding himself strangely, legs wide and tense, like he was bracing against a gust of wind.

"I am fine, I am sorry, Grace. Yes. The list is fine. Did not say with enough sound. Human hearing is bad. Shall we begin the panel fix in three—"

Abruptly and mid-chord, Rocky's voice twisted to a horrible screech that peaked the mics on the translator, and rose and rose until it was above a pitch Ryland could hear. Grace bolted forwards as Rocky's legs spasmed and gave out under him, the ball rolling out of control until Grace stopped it. Rocky scrambled to regain his footing, his hands uncoordinated on the xenonite panels.

"Hey, hey," Grace said, his panic bringing out a gentle-teacher-voice that was kind of inappropriate when talking to someone five times older than you. "Hey, you're okay, pal, I'm here. What's happening?"

"I'm sorry," Rocky said again, finding a handhold to grip and leaning most of his weight on that leg. "Will be fine in time period between one and three hours. Eridian problem. Help not needed. Went to private place. Private problem. I am not in danger."

"Bud, I'm sorry but I'm really going to need more than that. You look bad."

Rocky leant his entire carapace against the arm hanging onto the handhold, and Grace's arms trembled from holding the ball still. Rocky tapped one arm rapidly with another, a stressed habit he'd only seen a handful of times. 

"It is embarrassing. Not danger. I am not in danger," he repeated. While the translator didn't emphasise words, Ryland could hear Rocky stressing it in his multitonal voice: "Private Eridian problem."

That was pretty emphatic, and Grace would want Rocky to leave it be if he'd repeated something was private even half that much. Part of the whole 'living with an alien on a precarious journey that would test most human relationships' deal was knowing when to back off. "Okay, I got it. I'm not asking what it is anymore. What do you need? Can I get you anything, take you anywhere?"

Rocky wobbled inside the ball. "Back to quarters. The bedroom. If Grace promises not to come into quarters until I say."

"You need help getting there?"

"Yes. Slow, please. Please."

"You got it."

Rolling the ball slowly didn't even work out for half the trip down the corridor before Rocky simply couldn't get his legs under him anymore, warbling painfully in the ball and scrambling for purchase. He said something that the translator, with its limited ability to compensate for when Rocky used Eridian sentence structure or shifted octaves, couldn't pick up. Ryland, who had been working hard on not needing the translator anymore, managed to puzzle out about half of it.

"Gone [***] is not [***] all choices. Stupid [***] space hate space [***]. [***] [***] now. Happening now. [***]!"

"Something's happening?"

Rocky made a frustrated trill, sprawled inside the ball. "Yes." 

"Can I do anything?"

"Leave, please leave." 

"Okay, I'm leaving, I'll be really close by if—"

The second his hands were off the ball, Rocky spasmed again, and the whole thing rolled, sending Rocky tumbling sideways. Rocky made a series of panicked, pained screams that Grace never wanted to hear again as long as he lived, and he shot back to steady the ball. Rocky made another high sound and slammed the ball with a hand, dragging his carapace upright again. 

"[***]!"

"I can try and go get something to hold it still," Ryland said, and Rocky whined angrily.

"No. Pain much pain [***] no it is sensible you stay. If that happens again [***] [***]. Need to stay still. Please hold me still. I'm sorry. I'm sorry."

"It's okay, you're okay," Grace said, sitting down in the corridor, steadying the ball with his hands and hooking his leg around the ball on one side to try and make it even steadier. "Nothing to apologise for."

"All [***] of," Rocky said, trembling so hard that his whole voice was warbling with it.

"What's that?"

Rocky clearly had to work to get his voice under his control. "Made bad choice going in ball. Tried to find place Grace would not see. Stupid. No balance in ball. We are on small spaceship. Should have told you I needed privacy. Not smart. Feel stupid all over right now. Now we are both here. Worst [***]."

"Whatever's going on, it's painful?"

"Yes." Rocky shuddered, legs scrabbling, and Grace hung on tight. "Not meant to be. Is now. Is since Tau Ceti. Pain not normal for this, possible but not normal. Always embarrassing. With pain more embarrassing."

"Rocky, I think we're both going to be here for whatever this is."

"[***] [***] [***]." Rocky drummed the xenonite panel near Grace's left hand irritably. "You remember the Eridian life cycle question?"

"Yeah."

"It is—" Rocky had another full-body spasm and his voice went out of tune. "Talking is hard. Tell me what you remember."

Cradling a miserable, crumpled, in-pain alien inside a ball, who was clearly experiencing absolute mortification at his mere presence, Ryland had never felt less like explaining the reproductive cycle of said alien in his life. "Yeah, uh. Two Eridians lay eggs, cover them up, and then there's an exchange of genetic material between the two eggs and eventually one egg hatches. Right?"

"Yes." Rocky shuddered again. "Eridians produce eggs every [***]. Lay eggs either in mating or after one point five human years between cycles. Embarrassing Eridian culture act to lay egg alone. Very private."

Ryland stared. "You're laying an egg right now?"

Rocky's voice was so quiet Ryland almost couldn't hear him. "Do not ask me to say it." 

"Sorry. I'm sorry. That's… if it's any comfort, it's not like it means anything to me. There are only a few species on our planet that lay eggs so it's not got any…"

Ryland trailed off. He was going to say 'embarrassing connotations', but even if it's not your culture, you'd have to be heartless not to empathise with a friend who was this mortified. He was embarrassed on Rocky's behalf. 

Rocky shifted in the ball, slowly arranging his legs around him into less of a crumpled pose. "Forty-six years with no Adrian. No other Eridian. No gravity. No gravity most of all. Egg cycle is… wrong. Wrong wrong wrong. Hurts every time."

"We have gravity right now," Ryland said. "Does it help?"

Rocky made a noise: usually even wordless sounds from Rocky were still full chords, but instead he made a few scattered notes before speaking. "Possible it will help in time. Not a biologist but think that after years in gravity it could be better. Now it hurts more. Bad bad bad bad."

"I could stop the ship, put us back in zero-G."

Rocky taps a finger against the ball, considering. "No. Worse in different ways without gravity."

"How?"

"Grace, please," Rocky said. He shuddered again, more than he had ever done before, hard enough that the ball twitched even with Ryland bracing it. "You know the problem now."

"Okay, sorry. Again, if it helps, this is scientifically interesting to me more than embarrassing."

It was kind of true. All the way true for Rocky's sake.

"Not helpful. No. Helpful some. Sorry. It does help some. Please no talking now."

"Okay. I'm right here."

"I know," Rocky said quietly, a frustrated trill in his voice. He tensed again, shifting his weight slowly from arm to arm, and Ryland fought not to react when he saw Rocky's orifice, which before he'd only ever seen open to eat, spasm with the rest of Rocky's body and start to open, a clicky wet sound coming from it as it parted. He was pretty sure that was the only opening that Rocky had in his body, so…

Oh god. It's got to be rude to look. Grace stared at the ceiling, bracing the ball hard when Rocky spasmed again, burning his eyes on the fluorescents.

"Sorry," Rocky mumbled. "Sorry."

Rocky had told him to stop talking, so Ryland didn't say anything, but the want to do something was immense in him. Sitting around while someone's in immense pain in front of you and not even touching them for reassurance felt wrong on a lizard-brain level. 

He flipped through human scenarios he could use as an analogue. He wasn't even vaguely letting birth enter his head because he was stressed enough without thinking about how he was the only medical help for a species he barely knew anything about for five light years. Menstruation was the next most obvious, but usually didn't require someone actively helping. Food poisoning, maybe; holding someone's hair back while they throw up. That felt closer to what they were doing right now, and from Rocky's reaction it felt closer to the embarrassing nature of it. 

None of those were problems Ryland had ever really had, apart from immediately after the coma when he'd thrown up on the floor and gotten it all over his horrific post-coma hair and beard, and there hadn't exactly been anyone to help him then. Not that he would have wanted anyone to see or help.

The few times he'd held back someone's hair over the toilet bowl, though, he had… what had he done? He trawled his patchy memory, trying to force something to come up. 

Vague, scratchy memories of a woman that one second Ryland couldn't remember at all, and the next second came into focus as one of his best friends from undergrad. Lucy, who had the worst alcohol tolerance out of anyone he'd ever met and a bullheaded insistence to crush shots until she and Ryland were on the floor of some gross college dorm bathroom. 

They both did choir and… oh, was that why Ryland didn't like singing in groups anymore? Not for the first time, he cursed whatever Stratt had drugged him with, and grimaced back into the memory. They both did choir, and this one time when she threw up Lucy was crying at the same time and had snot and vomit coming out of her nose, and Ryland had rubbed her back and handed her toilet paper to blow her nose and he'd sung random songs the whole time: humming, whistling, occasionally rising to full defensive shout-singing when someone would pass by the bathroom door because Lucy hated being heard throwing up.

It had helped. It wasn't much, and she was still throwing up everything she'd eaten in the last decade, but after he started humming, the shaky sobs had petered out, and when he got a tiny shaky laugh out of her for singing 'We Wish You A Merry Christmas' when someone walked by mid-hurl, he kept doing dumb songs to make her smile. 

He wondered what Lucy was doing now. She would be relativistically twenty years older than him, and statistically speaking she'd be starving to death in an astrophage ice age. She hadn't believed in astrophage, some distant memory told him. He didn't want to look any closer at that memory.

Under his arms, the ball shook, and Rocky whined. 

"You're okay," Grace murmured: to Rocky or to Lucy, he wasn't sure. He went for the first song that came to mind. "Hey, Jude. Don't make it bad."

Rocky abruptly jolted underneath him, hard, a deliberate movement rather than a spasm, and Ryland startled into silence. He looked down before he could think better of it, looked sharply away when he saw what was happening, absolutely not, and Rocky made a miserable, wobbly trill.

"Sound question?! Sound question?!"

"Sorry," Grace said. "Sorry, it helps humans sometimes, I wasn't thinking."

"No, no, [***]! Grace can [***]!"

"Uh. New word. Sing?"

"Do you—" Rocky cut himself off, whining, legs scrabbling, and Grace pointedly did not look down. "Sing. Fine yes sing. New word. Please sing."

"You want me to?"

"Please, Grace, please please please. [***]. Did not know you could. Please."

"Don't make it bad," he sang, trying to keep his voice steady. "Take a sad song, and make it better."

Rocky shuddered in a way that didn't feel the same as before, shortly followed by a shudder that definitely did. Grace kept it up, held the ball tight, kept singing. From the brief and very upsetting glimpse he'd seen, Rocky was in what was probably the worst part of things now, and if this helped then at least he had something he could do to help. 

He was pretty good. It was kind of a surprise. Sure, he'd recalled one or two memories, but it was hard sometimes to reconcile a 'Ryland Grace' thing to him being Ryland Grace without evidence. Having his voice under his command and using it to sing was unlocking a part of him that felt definitively like Ryland Grace, and therefore that Ryland Grace was also him. 

The songs were easy, though. Same as the science: they were stored in different ways to memory recall, and he could summon up pretty much any song he wanted, and he could sing it pretty well. He knew that with confidence, like he knew the structure of astrophage, or how to use his arms. It was a part of him.

After he finished 'Hey Jude', petering out from the repeating chorus line, he listened. Rocky didn't sound like he was moving.

"You okay?"

"I am [***] an egg, Grace. How do you think I am question."

Ryland snorted despite himself, and Rocky made an annoyed three-chord trill, comfortingly clear and wobble-free.

"Apart from that, are you okay? You're kind of quiet."

"You can see I—" Rocky paused. "Can Grace see, question?"

"When my face is turned like this I can't see."

"Oh. Good. So you can… what can you hear question?"

"Uh." Just then, Rocky tensed again, stifling a few notes of sound, and there were a bunch of intense wet squelching noises. "Not much."

Rocky's voice was impressively monotone for a creature who spoke in chords. "Please keep singing."

"Yep. Yeah-huh. Was that song good? Something like that, something different?"

Rocky tapped the ball. Then paused. Then tapped the ball again. "Not normal Eridian act to do this while I… not normal. Nothing in Rocky's life is normal. Sing the same song again. I have not heard a song in a very long time."

That made his heart wrench. "Okay. Okay. Hey, Jude."

It was his turn to jump, because Rocky sang along. 

"Grace."

"Sorry! Hey, Jude. Don't make it bad."

Rocky couldn't stay with the song the whole time, he was— Ryland transposed the word 'throwing up' in his head for what was actually happening. But Rocky was actually, unambiguously singing The Beatles. Obviously he could, Grace chided himself: his whole vocal system was set up for music, this was just talking for an Eridian. Sometimes he would just make the single note of the melody, but mostly he added in entire chords, or even multiple chords at once, that sounded close to the melody. It was especially strange because it usually sounded good. It was like having a three piece band in a ball, if every member of the band was really into MIDI.

They got to the point in the song where it just repeated the same phrase endlessly, and Ryland started to quieten down the same way he'd done before, but Rocky made an insistent chirp and then, louder than before, repeated the phrase. Ryland kept singing, and Rocky did… something really, really weird, for an alien in the middle of a horrifically painful biological process who had never heard human music before. 

He started riffing on it.

Ryland kept going with the same 'nah nah nah na-na-na nah, Hey Jude', because he was many things but he could not improvise a new verse for a Beatles song. Rocky didn't seem to care if he was joining in. He played around with the repeating phrase, lilting different melodies and adding weird chords, building and building on the phrase like a jazz musician. Sometimes they seemed weird or not musical to Ryland's ear, but mostly it worked. It was so strange that something as specific and unlikely as the same musical structure for a pleasant-sounding song had developed between two species with so much similarity. A part of him wondered at how brains generate an understanding of music to begin with, how that could evolve in parallel, what biological reasons any creature had for music at all… 

Slowly, in the mindless repetition, Ryland started to get his ear in on what Rocky was doing. He wasn't just making sounds for the sake of it. They were words, in a strange tone that differed from how Rocky spoke normally, lilting and complex.

"[***] on its path [***], last rotating [***] a last [***], gone remembered and [***]..."

Rocky broke off, this time for a really long time, and Ryland stopped singing when Rocky's stifled trill began to increase to a pitch that vibrated his eardrums painfully, and then rose higher than he could hear.

"Rocky?"

He heard one of Rocky's hands move against the xenonite panels, but no more. He glanced down as much as he dared. Then, without consciously thinking about it, he glanced lower. He shot his head back up, swallowing bile down hard. 

"Oh, oh woah. Ougghh."

Rocky made an annoyed noise where he had finally crumpled limp on the floor. "Thank for looking."

"I didn't mean to."

"All Rocky's life, I loved engineering. I thought of so many ways it could take me. Fell in love with space. Fought for chance to go." He made another noise, a weird flicky trill. "Now live with alien and lay eggs in front of it like a [***]. Good plan Rocky."

Ryland snorted. "Yeah. Only 1,478 days 'til you're home, buddy."

"Three egg cycles minimum. Put me in airlock and push me outside." Rocky turned over, idly scraping a claw against the xenonite. "Grace say a word about any of this to any Eridian, and Grace not friend."

"I wouldn't dare."

"Word?"

"Dare. Uh. Literal meaning: I would not take that risk. Meaning in context: I would never do that because you're my friend."

"No good translation in Eridian. Will trust you to mean it." Rocky shifted as if to sit up, then made a pained noise and lay back down. "Not good of me to make Grace do any of that. Making strong words against Grace for no reason. I am embarrassed. I am sorry. You save my life, save a planet, and now you do this."

Ryland rubbed a thumb against the surface of the ball. "What's an Eridian phrase for the most important promise you can make?"

Rocky was silent for a moment. "[***] never sing [***] [***] without [***]. In this place too serious."

"New word. 'Vow'. The most important promise you can make. I vow I'll always help you, no matter what help you need. So no apologies needed."

Another strange shudder, like when Ryland first sang, passed through Rocky's body. "I do not know how this promise works for human. On Erid it is not said without death or [***] for an Eridian who breaks it. All help for any thing I will ever need is too strong a thing to promise."

Given that Ryland was, in a couple years, going to live on an alien planet for the rest of his life, he probably shouldn't promise anything in what seemed like a legally binding Eridian way: at least not without knowing what was worse than death. But… Rocky's warning didn't really land. They saved each other's lives and they're saving each other's planets. Rocky's smart, kind, trustworthy, and now he's starting to get the hang of Eridian, funny: and he's the best friend Grace has ever had. 

"It's not the same for a human. I don't care. I mean it in the Eridian way. I vow I'll always help you no matter what."

Rocky shivered again. "Not promise. Please."

"Why not?"

"Too much."

"Nope."

"Not on one alone Eridian who got lucky not to die. Grace saved Erid. Rocky was here. Rocky made sure Grace alive to fix. That is all. Good but not enough. Not worth the vow."

Grace pushed past any embarrassment it was going to cause to actively look at Rocky, even if it meant pretending not to see the egg lying on the ground next to him and all the weird liquids smeared everywhere, because this was serious. "Hey. No. No! You're the best engineer I've ever met. We couldn't have done any of what we did without you."

"Yes, you see best engineer with egg [***]," Rocky said with a harsh undertone hum to the sentence. He swiped down his carapace with a hand, trying to clean off some of the stuff on him, and then gave up with a frustrated flick of a claw. "Best engineer who let all crew die. Best engineer with no sing."

Oh woah. That was a lot. He wasn't even sure where to begin. "With no sing?"

"Sing. New word."

"I remember, but I don't get what it means here."

"Not the same word? Sing: sound and purpose. Home. Promise. Can always return. Will always change. Sing is part of vow. Sing is all of vow."

"I don't understand. I don't care. I'm vowing it and you can't stop me."

"Humans do not know the same way about vows as Eridians. Do not know sing but have sing. Not… not…" Rocky's voice was high and shivery. "This place and this time. Of all places and all times. I am confused. I do not know what to say."

"That's cool, I do. If I ever break that vow, Rocky, you can push me out the airlock without a spacesuit. I'm serious."

Rocky did not respond for a very long time. "If you move slow, you can roll ball to quarters now. Very slow."

It took a couple more weeks before Rocky even brought singing up again, and only because of Ryland's whole 'Cats' thing.

Because now Ryland remembered it, that was a whole thing. Holy hell was he a Cats fan. He'd stored the information in a less destructible part of his memory that Cats was embarrassing and lame, but now he had the actual memories to go along with it. Those memories had far, far too many days in them where Ryland would sit in the shower, usually drunk or crying or both, listening to 'Memory' on loop.

It scored low on his personal ranking of Ryland Grace Traits. It didn't mean he could get rid of it. He's a 'Cats' fan.

It was a quiet day on the Hail Mary, and they were using the downtime differently. Rocky, whose brain seemingly never shut off, was tinkering with the light-sight gun, trying to get some setting or another dialled in. Ryland, whose brain shut off readily and often, was trying to perfect how to juggle four balls instead of three.

Rocky made a surprised noise from the other side of the barrier. "Amaze!"

"What's that?"

"Grace has pattern on clothing."

Ryland glanced down at his shirt and dropped all of the hacky sacks at once. "Oh, yeah. It does."

"Meaning question?"

"Uh. Um. A song? Many songs in an order. The shirt pattern is a symbol that means those songs."

Rocky paused. "The pattern is song."

"It means the song, but it's not the song. It's kind of like a name for a song."

"Important song to wear it," Rocky intoned seriously. "Eridians wear songs also, on rare or important occasion. Like outfit for celebration."

Grace looked down at his 'Cats' shirt. "Yeah, uh, kinda."

Rocky started to say something, then stopped.

"What's that?"

"...Can you sing the song question?"

"Uhh. I… could? It's kind of…"

Rocky, who had just used Erid's first contact with an alien civilization to demand to hear 'Jellicle Cats', put down his light-sight gun and waited expectantly. Grace shifted from foot to foot.

"Grace question?"

"I can," he said. "It's just kind of embarrassing."

Rocky startled. "Oh. I'm sorry."

"Not embarrassing like that embarrassing," Grace said. "It's just not the kind of song you sing by yourself, I guess."

This Rocky seemed to get. "Important songs are not common to be songs sung alone. Understand."

"Sure."

"Could sing with Grace."

"You want to sing it with me?"

"Yes. Can."

"Uhhh." Rocky looked so excited. Oh, he couldn't get out of this, could he? "Okay, we can do that."

"Good good good." Rocky bounced on his legs a little. "I have wanted to sing with you again. Was surprised you could sing."

"I mean, not like you can. Do I just sound like I'm saying words really slowly?"

Rocky made an amused sound. "No. Half of word said very slowly. But sound not same. Human sound is like…"

Rocky paused, then emitted a really freaky noise kind of like a creaking door. 

"Oh, thanks."

"Not bad," Rocky said quickly. "You sound like a machine used to make song, [***]. Like singing with [***] played by Eridian. Sound is like home."

"You sound kind of like a synthesiser," Ryland said. "We use them to make music that we sing with. So it's like home for me too."

"Good. Amaze. Many things the same on very different planets. Now sing clothing song please."

Well, he'd distracted Rocky for some time, at least. "I want to say before I sing this, please don't judge all human songs on these songs. We have other ones."

"Will sing together after I hear. I cannot judge a song I am in."

"Hold onto that thought," Ryland mumbled. There were a small handful of Cats songs that weren't a complete disaster without musical accompaniment. Well, really there was one song. He'd never sung it, to his knowledge, sober or outside of the lower half of a shower cubicle. "Midnight… not a sound from the pavement…"

Weirdly, starting the song wasn't that hard. Once he'd launched in, he just had to keep going. The real thing that started to psyche him out, which was stupid to keep thinking about right now, was that he'd not had a normal emotional experience listening to this song in nearly twenty years, and now he had half a dozen more tonnes of baggage to add to it. Exhibit A: the song was called Memory. About a minute in, that hit him like a two by four between the eyes.

"Has the moon lost her memory? She is smiling alone," he sang, and it hit him in six different places at once, and the Pavlovian crying in the shower routine reared its head. Cats, he reminded himself, this is sung by a woman in a mascot costume, and it didn't help at all. He sniffled and after twenty more excruciating seconds he stopped singing, clearing his throat. He turned around and looked at the ceiling, which was a pointless move even if a human was there and was downright childish in front of an Eridian.

"Uh. So that's the song."

"Is Grace crying question?"

"No," he said. He swiped at his eyes. "Totally cool and calm. No crying."

"You're leaking."

"Yeah-huh."

"Okay. Is that all the song question?"

"No."

"Why did Grace stop question?"

"Because Grace is crying, shut up." Ryland turned back and got a hold on himself, taking a shaky breath.

"Knew Grace was crying." Rocky raised himself up in satisfaction. "Human emotion easy to see. So leaky."

Ryland cleared his throat, swung his arms back and forth, and tried to shake out the cold pickaxe currently digging into his chest. He was remembering more of himself every day. It was okay that he wasn't ever going to see a sunrise again, or another human, or Cats the musical. Those were all completely normal and fine and equally unimportant things.

"Grace."

"Yeah buddy."

"Shall we sing the song question?"

"Mmhm."

"Yes question?"

"Yes statement."

Rocky tilted, rocked this way and that as if trying to hear Ryland better. "If bad crying we can stop. Is this bad crying question?"

Ryland rubbed his eyes again. "Maybe. I don't know. Uh. Singing crying? We can sing it."

"I did not want to upset you," Rocky said, his voice gentling, crouching a little deeper into himself like he was trying to seem smaller. "I did not know how important the song was."

Ryland sighed, trying to think of a way to explain the layers of dumb human emotion going into this. "This song is very very unimportant. I just listen to it when I'm sad. It just… it's got some stuff in it that's kind of relevant to everything going on, is all."

"Oh. Oh! [***]. Had wondered if human singing did this."

"New word?"

"Yes. New word [***]. Truth song. Song that speaks about yourself."

"I mean, not exactly," Ryland said. "It's a made-up song about a woman who's a cat who's auditioning to go to cat heaven because she wants to die."

Rocky shifted, suddenly alert.

"I did not understand many words," he said in a low register, "but the words I understood were not good."

"No, none of that is real. It's not a song that's about a real thing," Ryland tried. "It just has things in it like talking about memory and things you'll never see again that are kind of a whole emotional thing for me right now. Does that make sense?"

"Yes, understand," Rocky said, calming. "Grace forgets life and moon forgets life. So it is a truth song. It does not have to be about a real thing to be real."

"Mmhm."

"Personal to ask for a truth song. I am sorry."

"We could sing something else," Ryland said from behind his hand, trying to get over the life-threatening mortification of crying in front of his friend while singing Memory acapella. It was only the thought that he really had seen Rocky do worse that made him emerge from behind his hand. "What kind of songs do Eridians sing together?"

"Many. When we sang before, what did that song mean?" 

Ryland opened his mouth, and Rocky cut in sharply before Ryland could answer.

"If it was a truth song for that time and place I do not want to know."

"It wasn't, it really wasn't. Do Eridians have songs for…?"

Rocky's tone was flat. "Eridians have many songs. You did not answer my question."

"I don't really know a lot about why the song exists," Ryland said; maybe he had known it once, and that memory was just buried and never to be seen again. "I just picked it because it's kind of… nice? Comforting. The sort of thing you'd sing to someone who's in pain, but it's also a song you could sing with someone because you're both happy."

Rocky turned a hand in the air, swirling it thoughtfully. "Not sure. Could be a [***]. Joined song. More important to be together than anything else, nothing can separate. Many Eridian songs like this. Some make laws. Some are love stories. Others are friendship. Is this right?"

"Wait, hang on. You have songs that are also laws?"

"Yes. Mate song is law." Rocky tapped the sigil on his arm that seemed to represent Adrian. "[***] song is law. Vow is law. Song is a promise. Truth song can be law as well sometimes."

"I guess it's kind of like a joined song," Ryland said cautiously, "but I'm not sure we think about singing the same way. Rocky, I've wanted to ask, when we talked about this last time you said "engineer with no sing", and—"

"—Rocky was sick and not thinking. Said many things that were sad," Rocky interrupted him, shifting uncomfortably. "I am not sad now."

"Okay, but what does it mean?"

Rocky stepped back a little from the barrier. "Sing is sound to both human and Eridian. Emotion to both human and Eridian. But not home? Not promise?"

"Uh. No? I don't think so."

"Eridian home is filled with song," Rocky said, a tremor coming into his voice. "I chose engineering home. Many engineers, all singing together to fix problems. Many voices fix a problem faster. An Eridian voice is not meant to sing alone." 

Because singing was talking too. They sing to work together. Ryland was starting to get the picture. "New word. Harmonize. In human language it means working together and it also means pitches that sound good as chords together."

"Word is harmonize. Yes. This is the way Erid homes work. Many hundreds in most homes. Decisions made with harmony. My last home was the ship, and I am the last voice." Rocky's voice had gained a persistent whistle. "That is what I meant by engineer with no sing. Wrong way to live. Wrong way to be Eridian."

Ryland sat down heavily in the human-shaped indent in the xenon barrier. Rocky came over and sat next to him, leaning against the barrier where Grace's shoulder rested. 

"You're not the last voice anymore," he said. "Neither of us are."

"Home of two," Rocky said. "Song of two."

"That's us. It's not the same for a human but if there's one thing we've got in common it's that singing makes you feel less alone."

Rocky hunched into himself against the barrier. "Sing something, please."

He hated that it came to mind, but as soon as it had, he knew it was the right choice.

"Okay. I think this one is a joined song."

"Good."

Ryland cleared his throat heavily. "Don't stop your crying, it's a sign of the times."

Like before, Rocky went weirdly still when listening to him sing. The only time he moved, when Ryland started having to reach for the high notes, was to press a hand against the barrier, near where Ryland's shoulder pressed against it. To hear him better? Maybe. He didn't know it all that well and he fumbled a few lyrics but it was overall an okay performance. It would probably get some awkward applause at karaoke night for being a little too earnest.

When he finished, Rocky shifted to stand up straight. "Again. Now we sing."

Even out of his mind with pain, Rocky had riffed on the Beatles like it was nothing. Grace started singing again, and it was like he'd been joined by a small, whistly symphony orchestra. He should have known Rocky would be a better singer now than before, and it shouldn't have surprised him that a species that does nearly everything in song would be better at it than a species who'd mostly do it badly into a crackly rec room microphone. It still blew him away. 

Rocky was incredible. It was weird to be singing the melody and feel like the rhythm guy, but that was exactly it: Rocky was using the simple one-note-at-a-time song a human could sing to build a whirring flow of sound on top, chords twining into each other, playing back and forth across the original structure. 'Sign of the Times' was a serviceable percussion line for an Eridian song.

Grace tried his best to figure out the words this time, but Rocky had been going slower before with less chords: he was lucky if he got one word in thirty. The few he did catch were simple: "and", "if", "never". The only complex word he managed to pick out of the flow was "understanding".

Rocky got his whole body into the song as well, swaying and shifting with the movement of the song, occasionally tapping a hand on the floor rhythmically. He clearly enjoyed phrases that repeated, he put the most emphasis on those: he would sing more chords than Grace had ever heard him use at once, adding another thing to a line every time it came back around. At the start the song was genuinely beautiful to a human ear: by the end, the sound was so overwhelming and busy that it had become an unpleasant yowling cacophony for Ryland. He got the feeling that he was missing out on some beautiful Eridian nuance, but it was also giving him a tension headache. Maybe noisecore guys with a kick for classical music might get into it.

He finished the song with his ears ringing and a sense that he'd like not to hear a full Eridian chorus line, but the waterworks had started up again maybe a little. Rocky kept singing a little longer, stretching each chord out until they were a low, deep vibration that Grace could feel against the xenonite. Then the vibration hitched, and hitched again, a strange sound like someone flipping a switch off, and Rocky sunk down into himself, voice wobbling into silence.

"Rocky?"

"Moment. Please, a moment." There was that hitch again.

"Okay."

Rocky was silent for a while except for those weird little sounds like he was hiccuping in song. Ryland wiped his eyes, then snorted.

"Are you crying?"

"Shut up." Rocky huddled lower, two legs coming up together in front like he was trying to block Grace's view.

"Because it sounds a little like you're crying."

"Grace shut up shut up."

"Rocky, you can see I'm crying!"

"Grace cries at everything!" Rocky's indignant voice skipped like a record midway through the sentence, and Ryland giggled despite himself. "No laughing!" 

"I'm sorry! You're happy crying too, right?"

"We can sing together. Yes I am happy crying." Rocky made one long single-note tone, a C5, and while Ryland didn't have any idea why Rocky was doing it, he hummed the same note. Rocky cut off abruptly with an unstoppable series of hiccupy wobbles. "It is more important than you know."

"I think I'm starting to get an idea, pal. If you were wondering, it sounds pretty good to a human even without understanding it."

"Oh. Good." Rocky shook himself off a little, like he was trying to pretend he was fine. "Glad."

"What did you sing?"

"Human song is about sadness and leaving, question? Sadness and leaving, but you are still together."

"Yeah, I think so."

"Rocky [***]. Match song to song. Together and happy. A new home is found. Grace joining song matched with Rocky truth song."

And he'd just dried up, too. Ryland sniffled and rubbed his eyes again, and Rocky made a frustrated, hitching trill. "Do you ever run out of liquid question?!"

"Just let it happen, Rocky. The whole song is about how it's okay to."

"Grace cry make Rocky cry. I am better than to cry at small song like this." He dropped back down next to Ryland and cried some more anyway. 

Ryland tipped his head against the grainy surface of the xenonite. "You and me, buddy."

It felt like every time they had to open the control panel to fix something, they'd just break something else. 'They' might be a strong word: he was breaking it, and Rocky would watch him shear wires and damage thermocouples with a world-class engineer's despair. Eventually, Rocky had begged to work on it himself by hand, and had spent two whole weeks iterating on a fully jointed xenonite suit just so he wouldn't have to watch Ryland do it again.

Which was fine, and Ryland's ego wasn't bruised at all. The upside was that Rocky felt more tangible than ever when he went into Grace's space, and Ryland just had to sit around and hold things when Rocky asked. On one of those days, bored of watching Rocky fix a problem he'd been bored with from the start, he nearly started doing something to pass the time without thinking. Then he grinned.

"Backwards Earth screws," Rocky muttered at the panel, screwing down a tiny wire to a board.

"Hey, wanna hear something?"

Rocky made a noncommittal sound. "Yes."

Grace licked his lips quickly, which got an involuntary noise of disgust from Rocky, and then he whistled. Rocky dropped the screwdriver, jumping like he'd been shot, but he didn't even seem annoyed about it. His hands splayed in shock.

"You can make Eridian sound question?!"

"Not super well. Humans have to learn it." He whistled "hello", note by note. Rocky tilted, sung back a few of the notes to himself thoughtfully, combined them into chords, and then jolted in recognition.

"Hello! Very good!"

"Thank you." He whistled 'thank you' as well, which took a little longer.

"Grace can sing and can speak Eridian. Slowest Eridian of any time, but can speak!"

"I'll stick to the translators, but it's a fun party trick."

Rocky picked up the screwdriver and went back to the panel. "When you meet another Eridian, make them speak like this first. First contact will be too important to Erid to not speak so slow, no matter how slow you spoke. Would be funny."

Grace snorted. "Oh, I'm definitely doing that. You ever get the feeling we're not the best examples of our planet?"

"Rocky knows this." It was said in the tone that Rocky used for a joke, but he pattered a hand anxiously against an arm when he said it. Ryland blinked.

"Hey. That was a joke. You're a pretty great example, Rocky."

"I know! Am joking also." The affect was unconvincing even in Eridian.

"Okay," Ryland said cautiously. "I don't wanna bring up memories of bad times, but you did say a few things a while back that makes me think you're not."

Rocky agitatedly put the screwdriver down and closed the panel. "It was a bad day."

"I know it, pal. And it was 'cause you were having a bad day that I didn't call you out on it too hard, but you gotta know you're wrong."

"Where is Rocky wrong question." Ryland opened his mouth, and Rocky waved it off. "Not needed. Evidence is here. I am alive and the crew is dead. I am going home and Grace is not. No more to discuss. I work to fix what I can."

Ryland's mouth went dry. "None of that's your fault."

Rocky rounded on him. "One Eridian in every place it happens. One."

"Yeah, and that one Eridian also figured out the astrophage predators, put the whole fishing trip together, saved my life twice. Without you, two planets are dead."

Rocky made a short hum like he was readying to say something, then cut himself off sharply. He paced away to the airlock. Grace rapped a fist on the floor, sitting up. "Hey!"

Rocky stiffened. "What question."

"I know the Eridian for promise. Remind me on the Eridian for vow."

"Oh, Grace, do not start this again." Rocky tapped a xenonite-covered fist agitatedly against the floor. "We do not sing the same way, you can promise and promise and it will not mean what you think it means."

"It's not your fault and that's a promise."

"That is not how it works!"

Grace paused, figuring it out in his head, and Rocky waved a frustrated hand and went for the airlock again. 

"It's not your fault and that's a promise," he sang. From a human standpoint, using words to sing Eridian music notes sounded kind of dumb, but it had the intended effect: Rocky stopped dead in his tracks as Grace spelled out 'promise' in Eridian.

"Grace," Rocky said shakily. 

"Am I doing it right now?"

Rocky shifted under the xenonite weight on his carapace, twisting uncomfortably in place.

Grace nodded. "That's what I thought. The Eridian for vow again please, Rocky."

For a long time, Ryland thought Rocky wasn't going to answer. Then, in a whisper-quiet voice: ""[***] never sing [***] [***] without [***]."

"You think I don't understand what I'm saying, so explain it."

"Formal song," Rocky said. "Formal words. Translation is that you will never sing the words after the vow and not mean it, or you will be killed or…" he trailed off. "New word. [***]. Leave all Eridians behind forever."

"Exile."

"If you do not mean a vow you will die or be exiled. That is the promise." Rocky shifted again. "You know how to sing to give comfort. You know how to sing for togetherness. But humans do not sing to promise to die. You most of all must not." He hunched down a little. "You already promised exile to me without a song."

"I'd do it again." It was cathartic to say something like that and know he meant it. He'd run once: he might do it again if he had his time over, he really didn't trust that he wouldn't. But he'd choose Rocky every time. "Even if it was you and only you it saved, I'd do it again. That won't change, whether I vow it or not, and right now you seem really confident I said it just to be nice and not because you're the most important Eridian that ever lived and my best friend for life, so I guess I gotta vow it."

Rocky paced in a tight circle. "[***]. You will sing the same vow you spoke before question?"

"I sure will be."

Rocky stamped the ground. "Condition. Sing together or not at all."

Ryland coughed in shock. "Um. That wasn't really what I—"

"Oh," Rocky said with a tone that was unsettlingly knowing. "Grace not like when vow made to him question?"

"C'mon, that's not the same thing." 

"It is the exact same. Song of two, home of two, vow of two. Together or not at all. Or does Grace want to argue he does not deserve it question?"

Ryland cleared his throat. "Is there an Eridian word for getting completely bent over?"

"Do not distract me. You only make big choices when you think you are not likely to be seen. If you are seen, you fight to leave. You will care and care and do amazing things, until it means Grace is seen to do it. Does Grace know this question?"

Grace felt a whole bunch of his life choices get a new concise label, and wasn't that a kick in the head. Weirdly, the only thing he could think of right now were a bunch of karaoke nights on the aircraft carrier, which was either the amnesia or the increasing panic. Nobody had ever told him this before and yet somehow an alien from another planet had broken down his whole persona to its component parts in less than ten months.

"Um."

"Yes. Rocky will make this vow knowing what it means. I will mean it. Accept this."

"Ummm."

"Rocky would prefer you make choice without leaking."

"Uh huh."

"Grace question?"

The weird part was, he didn't actually want to run. Maybe he wanted to cry a little, but he wasn't even doing that either. Rocky was right, but somehow, just now, he was sidestepping Grace's whole deal. He was going to say yes. He didn't know why this was so easy. He was agreeing to have someone vow a life debt to him.

"You're gonna have to sing it slow," Grace said hesitantly. Rocky trilled with genuine amusement.

"Yes yes yes. Good. Worst Eridian song ever."

It was. It really was. Grace sounded like a dying donkey as he tried to talk and sing simultaneously through a song he didn't know. Rocky only laughed at him once during their mutual vow to help each other in any circumstance, no matter the cost, and that was, he suspected, also not part of a typical Eridian truth song. But they sang it together, and that was pretty much all that mattered.

And afterwards, Ryland found a mic in storage and lined up the first of several years' worth of karaoke nights. They cleaned up on Mariah Carey.