Chapter Text
“Grace not sleep. Grace is angry stupid.”
“Thank you, Rocky, for your helpful analysis!” Grace called back, rolling his eyes dramatically. “Kind of hard to sleep right now after being relocated to another planet entirely, you know!”
“Then why Grace not sleep, question?”
He had no idea how to explain the concept of ‘being unnerved’ to Rocky without possibly sounding like he’d absolutely lost his mind. Grace took a quick look around his new room, settled somewhere deep within the Consolidation of Iron’s new lunar surface research station.
The room proved rather small, as many of the rooms on the station seemed to be. He’d transported as much of his stuff from the Hail Mary into this new room as he’d been able to - and allowed - the captains of the ship were incredibly strict on storage capacity, and they hadn’t especially been happy about Rocky's spatial needs. Even still, the couple of posters he had up, the little beanbag of Earth that he had placed securely on his nightstand alongside his glasses, and the gifts from Rocky felt like they just weren’t quite enough to make this place home.
The entire right side of the room had been repurposed as Rocky’s main sleeping area, the bunks having been taken out and replaced with structural supports for the glassy xenonite material that allowed Grace to see inside. Rocky had clambered over to the most clearly visible area of the construction, watching him in a manner that allowed Grace to breathe a sigh of relief.
“Why Grace not sleep, question?” Rocky asked again, tapping one of his feet against the transparent floor twice. Grace sighed, putting his head in his hands for a second.
“Just stressed, buddy,” he answered, which summed up about as much of the situation as it possibly could to the Eridian.
“Grace need to sleep,” Rocky whistled, annoyance obvious in his pitch. “Grace doing big science experiment soon. Being angry stupid will not help with big science experiment.”
“It’s not really an experiment,” Grace tried to explain, his own whistling tone lower than Rocky’s. “It’s more like… an examination. Like when we were observing things about each other and getting used to it.”
“Still science. Being angry stupid not helpful.”
“Yeah, I know.”
“Rocky can go with you to lab, question?”
“I think they said you’re allowed to come along,” Grace said. “Although the lab is full of xenobiologists who are probably going to lose their minds once they meet you.”
“Humans can lose their minds, question?”
“It's an expression.”
“Makes no sense, statement.”
Entirely fair. A lot of human expressions made no sense to Rocky, and plenty of Eridian ones still made no sense to Grace. Even still, he still kept trying to learn them, just as Rocky did for him.
“Alright, I think that’s about as comfortable as I can get this room to feel,” Grace announced, grabbing his lab coat off of the hook at the door and throwing it on. He tucked the little Earth beanbag into his pocket, for good luck, and picked up the old laptop with the translation program and pirated copies of every piece of knowledge in human existence to put under his arm. “Let’s go to the lab.”
Rocky let out a series of wordless, high-pitched whistles, skittering over to the entrance hatch of his section of the room and donning his xenonite suit. It had become a lot cleaner in recent years, almost meshing directly over the Eridian’s carapace, save for the vents he required to breathe. They were a little higher there. Aside from that, the glassy xenonite clearly allowed him to see Rocky within it, and remained mobile enough for him to move his three fingered hands with just as much expertise as ever.
-=-
The walk through the building hallways proved not to be as tightly packed as Grace had anticipated. Sure, there were still some people wandering around, and a couple of them shot Rocky confused looks, but Rocky apparently didn’t care about that. Instead, he inspected just about everything he could, talking to himself as he tried to work out the human engineering that went into making a building.
By the time they got to the lab, Rocky kept hounding Grace with questions about construction that he had no answers for. Grace was a scientist, not a construction worker, so he didn’t quite have all the answers that Rocky wanted.
“Okay, listen, listen!” Grace yelped through another disappointed bout of Rocky’s chittering. “When we’re done in the lab today, we can look on Wikipedia and through some old construction manuals to see if we can find anything about how this works, we good?”
“Fine fine fine,” Rocky whistled at him, obviously disappointed, and Grace sighed as he opened the door to the lab. “Grace needs to read more from human thinking machines than only science sometimes. Then Grace be less dumb about not science, maybe.”
“I regret teaching you what the human concept of sarcasm is,” Grace replied, and Rocky promptly tapped his ankle in the way someone might playfully smack someone else’s shoulder.
Grace rolled his eyes, looking up from Rocky to be greeted with quite the sight.
Two people in lab coats, a young man and woman, trying to corral a rather massive lifeform out of a corner. The mermaid guy looked frankly pissed off, baring a jaw full of razor-blade teeth and flaring gills along his neck and torso.
Everyone’s heads snapped back toward him and Rocky, and Grace cleared his throat awkwardly.
“Are we… interrupting something?” Grace asked, as politely as he could manage considering how dishevelled the other two scientists - and the mermaid guy - looked at that very moment.
“Interrupt? Interrupt what?” Rocky whistled in confusion. “Why are humans shoving other human into a corner? Are they bad human?”
“Rocky, we can’t assume that,” Grace chided, just as the pencil in the young woman’s mouth dropped to the ground at the sight of Rocky skittering around on the floor.
“You’re Dr. Grace!” she yelped, and he grinned sheepishly. “From the Hail Mary!”
“In the flesh,” he replied, to which all previous tension in the room completely melted away. “This a bad time, or…?”
“No, no, not at all!” the young man said quickly. He backed away from the merman he’d been harassing with his coworker, and said merman deflated for the most part aside from looking at Grace curiously. “So sorry, we were just having some trouble here-”
“Because I wasn’t letting you do a blood draw on me,” the merman snapped irritably. “I already said that your test sounds stupid.”
Neither scientist acknowledged the statement, instead brushing themselves off and getting their notes together. Grace noted a rather disproportionate amount of blood on the woman’s white lab coat, internally cringing at the realization that his own coat probably wouldn’t stay pristine for much longer.
“So sorry about that!” the young woman said, scooting around a couple of tables and bringing her data terminal with her. Grace still had no clue how to use the flat tablets - he’d stick to a pen and paper, thank you very much. She offered an ungloved hand, free of the excessive amounts of blood, for him to shake. “My name is Dr. Gwen Stacy, head of xenobiology at this station. That over there is Dr. Barry Drayson.”
“I’m sure you know my name, but I’m Ryland Grace,” he introduced quickly, shaking hands with both of the scientists as they approached. “Pilot and head scientist of the Hail Mary.”
“Rocky is head engineer of Hail Mary and Blip-A!” Rocky chimed in cheerfully, and both humans looked down in utter shock to see the alien. Grace could already see at least thirty gears turning in Stacy’s head, and Drayson’s brain doing a factory reset.
“Are you Rocky?” Stacy asked, and it was at that moment that Grace remembered that these two probably wouldn’t know what Rocky had just said.
“Oops, hang on, lemme just boot this up real quick,” he said quickly, opening his computer and reopening it on the translation program. Stacy and Drayson looked on in awe at the sight of the thousands of words in their vocabulary. He turned back to Rocky, making a quick motion with one hand. “Try now.”
“Rocky is head engineer of Hail Mary and Blip-A,” Rocky repeated, and this time, his synthetic voice came through on the computer. Stacy let out an excited squeak, while Drayson’s eyes went so wide that Grace could have sworn they were about to fall out of his head.
“Holy shit, this is amazing,” Stacy muttered, the grin on her face unyielding as Rocky skittered away into the lab. “I can’t believe I’m alive during the time where humans meet two species of aliens!”
“Stacy, chill,” Drayson advised, and she composed herself almost immediately. The young man turned to him, all previous excitement firmly packed away into professionalism. “It’s a pleasure to have you here, Dr. Grace. We’re happy to welcome you to the station’s science team.”
“It’s great to be here,” he answered, partly truthfully. This place seemed so unlike anywhere else, either on Erid or on Earth, and the additional bonus of other humans settled it a little bit more. “What’s happening right now?”
“Well-”
“Grace!”
His head snapped toward the merman, who was now also staring at him wide-eyed while Rocky skittered around him, curiously chirping questions. He didn’t seem as uncomfortable as before, even with Rocky practically trying to jump him.
“Oh my gosh, I’m so sorry,” he muttered quickly, darting across the room with the computer in hand. “Rocky!”
“Strange human!” Rocky declared. “Why this human have no arms below? Why this human have vents? Are you like Rocky?”
“Uh, not really,” the merman explained, and it was at that moment that Grace realized that the alien human spoke perfect English, alongside some kind of melodic tune that almost synthesized with Rocky’s voice. In fact, it picked up on the program as he looked over.
“Rocky, chill out, he’s just gotten done being cornered!” Grace called, and at that, his friend let out a series of disgruntled whistles before skittering around the lab. Drayson followed him with a yelp as he started trying to investigate things, and Grace put his head in his hands. “Oh boy.”
“I don’t think anyone considered the effects of having an alien in the lab, don’t worry,” Stacy said, coming up next to him. At that, the alien merman stiffened, glaring at her rather sourly.
“I definitely didn’t think it through,” Grace muttered. “It’s probably five percent less chaotic in zero gravity.”
“Dr. Ryland Grace, right?” the merman asked. He really had to stop just calling him ‘the merman.’ “From the Hail Mary mission?”
“Yep, that’s me,” Grace replied. “Really didn’t think fame would follow me to the end of the world.”
“Are you kidding?” the guy said, and even despite the obvious wariness, something in his eyes shone with admiration. “Your mission proved to be the pioneer behind the colonization of Mars.”
“It did do that,” Stacy agreed. After a moment, she turned to the fish guy, eyeing him severely. “Dr. Grace, this is one of the 14 Convicts of At-5, Simon Fisher. Simon, I believe you already know him, but this is Dr. Ryland Grace.”
“Just Grace is fine, really,” he said, offering out a hand to the newly-named Simon. He eyed it warily through the dark mop of wavy hair that decorated his head, the red of his eyes standing out sharply among the sterile whites of the lab. “Nice to meet you, Simon.”
Simon reached back, obviously confused by the show of polite interaction-
-and Grace promptly had a pair of nylon gloves tossed in his face.
“Grace being stupid!” Rocky chastised firmly “Grace always says to wear safety suits!”
Simon, much to his surprise, let out a snort of laughter as Grace grumbled something incomprehensible and put the gloves on. Rocky’s assessment was correct, as hilarious as he might look to the others now.
“Thank you, Rocky,” Drayson muttered, pinching the bridge of his nose. “Now, Simon, seriously, we need the blood draw.”
Simon immediately stiffened, lips curling to bare an array of sharp teeth. “I’d rather pull out my teeth than let a Consolidation member take my blood.”
“Dude, seriously, we need like, two samples,” Stacy argued sharply. “After that, we won’t bother you for a blood test.”
“You’re not making me do it.”
“Grace do it.”
The entire room stopped at Rocky’s request, and his eyes shot open wide. “Wait, what?”
“Grace and Rocky only saved by Iron at recent,” Rocky pointed out, the trilling sounds filling the lab with a unique kind of music. The digital voice followed along after the fact, although Grace very well knew what he had said before the program could catch up. “Angry human does not want Iron doing the science experiment, question? Rocky Grace not of Iron. Grace do it.”
“Maybe you need to go to sleep, Rocky,” Grace objected, but much to his surprise, he noticed Simon relax marginally. Not by much, but just barely.
“We need it for health assessments,” Drayson explained at Grace’s confusion. “We want to make sure that whatever’s in the Carmine Sea that allows them to stay alive, it’s going to keep them that way. We’re trying to check for potential pathogens; bacteria, viruses, or smaller lifeforms.”
“Nothing else like blood types?” Grace asked. After hearing of a moon that had oceans of blood, he’d spent weeks agonizing over what possible blood types could be allowing such a thing to remain in place.
“That was the first thing we analyzed, with the help of some of the other blood-sirens,” Stacy said quickly. “Our current theory is that it’s an entirely new one.”
“Lab rat over here,” Simon interjected quickly. “Before you devolve into your nerd talk, can I put forward how I feel about it?”
“Of course,” Grace said, just as fast. He had zero experience in phlebotomy, which proved a problem for everyone else in the room.
Simon shrank back as all eyes turned to him, long tail flicking across the ground as he watched them. Grace’s eye caught on the fin, made of some gelatinous material and shaped like the maple leaves of Earth.
“Grace can do it,” Simon said, clearly uneasy. “But nobody else touches me. That’s what the other blood-siren volunteered for.”
“Buddy, I don’t have any experience in doing blood draws,” he answered, and Simon stiffened. “I mean, I can sit around, but I’m molecular biology, not phlebotomy.”
“Sitting’s fine,” Simon answered, tail hitting the wall sharply. He didn’t sound ‘fine’ by any means, if Grace had anything to say about it. “Just get it over with.”
In an instant, Grace’s mind transported itself back to his time on Earth from years ago. During the vaccination days at his junior high school, some kids had been absolutely terrified of the needles, insisting that they didn’t want any help or begging for someone to sit with them. Grace had always been a popular teacher to help keep the kids calm, just by keeping them distracted.
Sometimes, even distractions wouldn’t quite work, and kids freaked out around the needles anyway. They’d needed to be held still while getting their injections, because they’d try to run away.
Simon clearly didn’t enjoy the idea of the needle, backing himself into a corner and threatening his new coworkers to avoid it.
Okay then. Let’s handle it in a different way.
“I can sit with you if that makes it easier,” Grace offered, much to everyone's surprise. “Rocky and I are great company - we can keep your mind off the needle.”
“Are you sure?” Stacy asked. “A lot of blood-sirens can get twitchy when we do stuff like this.”
“Eh, we’ll be fine,” Grace said. “Just gotta… not get drenched in blood.”
“I’m afraid that’s going to be impossible,” Drayson said dryly. “If you’ve got a lab coat or clothes you value over these ones, I’d say reserve an outfit for blood-siren handling.”
“You say that like we’re going to drown you in it,” Simon snipped as Grace stepped across the absolutely drenched crimson floor. Rocky followed quickly.”
“I wouldn't be surprised if you tried.”
“The volunteer almost managed it once,” Stacy said, entirely too lightheartedly for Grace’s sanity. “I spooked him down near the beach and he tossed me in.”
“He did what?”
“Rocky thinks volunteer bad bad,” the Eridian declared. “Drowning science is bad bad bad.”
“And what about things that live in the blood?”
“Want to see first, then Rocky will know, statement.”
“Be nice,” Grace said, tapping the xenonite suit with one finger and ignoring the sheer heat blistering off the material. He looked around slowly, before sighing and kneeling on the floor next to Simon.
“Do you want a chair?” Stacy asked.
“It’s floor,” Grace replied. “I’ll be fine.”
Simon watched the other scientists, wariness obvious in everything about the man. Up close, Grace could see how much of his skin had become desaturated along the arm and ventral side, with teeth jutting from every part of Simon’s mouth and his jaw obviously split down the middle somehow. Two pairs of gills lined each side of his torso and neck, closed at the moment to presumably use lungs instead of the passing over method fish would use. The skin lower down the body morphed into an almost bark-like texture, with fins shaped like maple leaves decorating it and the fluke a gelatinous mimic of the tree down almost to the placement of veins.
“This is so interesting,” he said, and Simon’s attention snapped away from where the other two were probably preparing needles. A sour look remained on his face, obviously uneasy with the others. “You’re human, right?”
“Not really,” Simon grumbled. “According to the COI or the blood ocean.”
“I dunno,” Grace said in reply. “You seem a lot like a normal guy to me.”
At that, Simon’s sour look turned confused. “You sound awfully sure about that, considering you’re talking to a guy who got convicted of destroying a space station.”
Oh, yikes. That sounded bad, actually. Grace resisted the urge to make a face, instead trying to focus on the parts of this that didn’t sound insane.
“Did Simon destroy space station, question?” Rocky asked. Nevermind, apparently they were jumping right into this.
Simon stiffened, but shook his head. “Got framed.”
“But you are not in a frame, question?”
“Another expression, Rocky.”
“Sounds weird weird weird.”
“It means that he didn’t actually do what they accused him of,” Grace explained. “When someone else did something bad and they’re putting someone else forward to take blame for it.”
“Bad thing to do,” Rocky trilled, much lower than usual. Grace hadn’t heard him angry in a long while. “Bad bad bad bad.”
“Wow, four bads,” Grace said. Simon nodded, but his head snapped to the side as Stacy and Drayson approached with a rolling table. “Okay, no, no, Simon, look at us.”
“I still don’t want to do this,” Simon hissed, and okay, shit, this was already starting to go poorly.
“No, Simon, look at me, man,” Grace insisted, and at his sharper tone, Simon actually did look over at him. Grace put on his glasses, which he’d forgotten were hanging under his head, trying to at least get the impression that he might be an authority here. “Don’t watch what they’re doing, okay?”
“How am I supposed to not!?” Simon snapped. “They’re gonna stab me!”
“Grace tell Simon about Earth,” Rocky suddenly suggested. “Grace told Rocky about Earth sometimes when feeling sad sad sad, statement.”
“You… You know about Earth?” Simon asked, awestruck enough to ignore Drayson and Stacy scooting a couple feet closer.
“Genius idea, Rocky,” Grace said. “What do you know about Earth, Simon?”
A moment passed, before Simon’s shaking voice scraped out of his throat. “Um… not much, really. I grew up on Eden. We were supposed to colonize Mars - I never got to go.”
At that moment, Grace’s entire brain snapped into his old teacher mode, and he gently pulled the Earth beanbag out of his pocket. Simon watched him warily while Rocky started doing jazz hands.
No way would he let that slide.
“Puppet show!” Rocky cheered.
“I don’t need a puppet show,” Simon said, a little stiffly as Drayson approached his tail. Grace nodded, tilting his head to the side, but held up the blue and green ball anyway.
“Maybe not, but Rocky likes them,” Grace argued. “And Rocky likes when I explain it this way, right?”
“Much enjoy,” Rocky agreed without any hesitation. He scuttled over to Simon and plopped himself down right next to the base of his tail, much to Grace’s immediate worry. “Simon scared.”
“I’m not fucking scared,” Simon hissed.
“You’re a grown ass man cowering away from a basic blood draw,” Stacy pointed out.
Simon turned to look at them, but Grace snapped his fingers sharply to draw his attention back to him. Seeing the blood draw actually happen would probably end up with Simon freaking out even more.
“What do you actually know about Earth, Simon?” Grace asked again, holding the ball out to him.
“There was a lot of water there,” Simon tried. “And… and a lot of trees. It’s where humans came from before we went to space.”
After a moment more, Simon shrugged. “That’s kind of all Eden taught me.”
“Are you serious?” Grace asked, dismay flooding through him. “The cradle of humankind, and they didn’t teach you anything about it? Even in the station full of trees?”
Another shake of his head, and at that, Grace snapped his head toward the other two scientists. “What about you two? What do you guys know about Earth?”
“Not as much as we’d like to,” Stacy admitted, much to Grace’s horror. “Drayson and I were station-born. We’ve never been.”
“Oho-kay,” Grace said, cracking his knuckles. Rocky let out an alarmed call, and Grace sighed quickly. “Sorry. How about this, Simon - I tell you what I know about Earth, and you don’t take off anyone’s heads today. Sound good?”
“...sure.”
“Okay! Well, first off, you’re right. Earth is where humans originated, and it was about 4.5 billion years old before it disappeared.” Grace tossed the beanbag up into the air, spinning it as he threw it. “We were the third planet in the solar system from the Sun, right in the habitable zone for our system. We had liquid water, landmasses and continents, and clouds when I lived over there.”
“Simon, can we get your arm?” Stacy asked softly. Simon stiffened again, but this time, blatantly refused to look over at her, all his focus on the beanbag in Grace’s hands. “This might hurt. Would you rather we did a countdown?”
“Don’t,” Simon hissed. “That’s worse.”
“Yeah, it never helped some of my kids,” Grace added. He turned back to Rocky and Simon, the latter of whom was staring at him curiously now. “Earth has a lot of natural history, but the main thing that allowed life to prosper there was the hydrogen molecules, which when bonded together, make H2O. Water, right?”
“Water very important,” Rocky added.
“Somewhere down in the depths of the primordial oceans were these little cells, single-celled organisms called amoebas, that could duplicate themselves by-”
“Mitosis?” Simon guessed, and he flinched as Stacy inserted the needle.
“Exactly!” Grace looked around, trying to find something of adequate size he could use as an example. “Right on the money, Simon.”
“What was Earth like?” Simon asked, an almost mournful tone in his voice. “When you lived there?”
“Well, the sky was blue, for one,” Grace said. He pointed toward the large blue patches on the beanbag, a spark of excitement coursing through him upon seeing that he’d fully captured Simon’s attention. “And so were the oceans. Not every large body of water was blue - that relied on the depths of the basin it was in. The land for the most part was green, because there was greenery pretty much everywhere except for certain climate regions, so you had these really impressive forests and grasslands and jungles depending on where you were.”
“And there were just… trees everywhere?” Simon asked.
“Grace has shown Rocky the light he heard on Earth,” Rocky said helpfully. “Eridians hear sound, humans hear light.”
“He means seeing,” Grace clarified. “But yeah. I could show Rocky stuff about Earth thanks to the Hail Mary’s little ‘don’t go crazy’ room they had on board. “And I’ve probably got videos on the laptop somewhere of what Earth would have looked like.”
Simon’s eyes were so wide, Grace could have sworn they were about to fall out. The blood-siren blinked at him, before his gaze turned back to them.
“Where’s Rocky from?” Simon asked. “They didn’t really tell us.”
“Rocky is from Erid!” he announced proudly. “Home planet belonged to the Eridani-40 star. Closer to Tau Ceti E than Sol.”
“You’re from really far away.”
“Yes, statement. Erid far from here now.”
“What was-”
“And that’s the draw!” Stacy announced suddenly, cutting through the conversations abruptly. Simon and Grace looked over to see her and Drayson organizing the blood vials they’d collected. “You’re done, Simon. That was better than the last couple of times.”
“Last time, Sebastian nearly took your face off,” Drayson argued. “I can name at least once for each siren that they tried to claw you over this.”
“I wonder why,” Simon said with an eye roll.
“You did great, man,” Grace offered, to which the other man huffed and grumbled something. Something that, much to Grace’s surprise, he caught enough of to understand.
“I’d rather learn about Earth than see my blood get stolen.”
“I think most people would rather learn about Earth than watch a blood draw,” Grace responded without thinking, standing up from his place on the floor and quietly cringing in dismay at the blood soaking the front of his jeans. These were going to be the new work pants, weren’t they? “It’s understandable.”
Simon stared at him a moment longer, before shaking himself out of whatever trance he’d been in and turning to Stacy.
“Is the way back to the beach open from here?” he asked, a little gruffly. “I think Rocky and Grace should see it.”
“Are you being nice without being asked?” Drayson joked, and Simon rolled his eyes.
“Are you enjoying possession of your ribs?” he shot back.
“Okay, let’s not squabble at each other,” Grace said quickly, getting to his feet. Rocky followed him, skittering away as the blood-siren moved. “If Simon wants to show me the moon beach, I’ll go with him.”
“Bad idea,” Rocky declared. “Don’t know what atmosphere is made of.”
“Same stuff as Earth,” Grace said, and Rocky let out an annoyed grumble. “You’ll have to keep the suit on.”
“Rocky thinks thin atmosphere bad bad.”
“We’ll be fine,” Simon said, turning around as Stacy gestured them toward an opening in the far wall where more blood led. Grace followed as Simon moved over there, noting the way that the man used both arms to haul himself and his tail along. It couldn’t be comfortable to do that, right?
“Lead the way,” Grace said. Simon obliged, and led them to the beachside exit.
-=-
The moment they left the lab, Simon turned to Grace. Not in the possibly hostile display he’d been expecting, but instead with some kind of expression of… gratefulness.
The beach outside, as expected lay in total darkness, illuminated only by overhead floodlights from the station and a few lamps that lit the pathway down. Rocky immediately trilled as they stopped.
“Why stop? Beach is further down, question?”
“How did you understand what I was saying?” Simon asked. “When I was singing instead of speaking out loud?”
“Is that what that was?” Grace asked, curiosity burning to life in his mind as realizations flipped themselves over in his head. “The musical notes? It would make sense, considering that Rocky’s language is similar to what I’m assuming your music would be, so maybe I picked up on enough of it to understand what you were saying. Not wholly, but the general gist, you know?”
Simon blinked in surprise, his lower jaw shifting open and closed for a moment, before nodding.
“Simon speaks like Rocky,” Rocky supplied helpfully. “Easy for us to understand. Grace has thinking machine that can say what Rocky says in human language.”
“That’s how you translated for him, right?” Simon asked.
“Yep, pretty much. The software’s at least twenty years old at this point, but it works for what I needed it to do.”
“Grace use thinking machine with Simon,” Rocky suggested. “Grace can understand both after that.”
“Rocky, you’ve been giving me a lot of crazy suggestions today,” Grace yelped, nearly stumbling off the cliff as Rocky skittered in front of them. “And that’s a new one.”
“Easier to do science if Simon can speak like ♩♪♭♫♪♩, statement. Easier with Rocky to do science when you could understand Eridian, statement question?”
“You make a good point, but I don’t know how it would work!”
“Same way that thinking machine worked for Rocky, statement. Grace is tired stupid.”
Simon, who had been mostly quiet up to this point, let out a rumbling noise that stopped them both in their tracks. Grace jumped at the sound - nearly off the side of the cliff.
He let out a yelp, just as Simon grabbed him and hauled him back onto the pathway. He could fit Grace’s entire arm in one hand, which proved a lot more helpful for dragging someone away from a cliff’s edge than some might think.
“Shit, are you-”
“And this,” Grace shouted to the open air, “is why we install safety railings!”
“Grace not hurt!?” Rocky chirped anxiously, trying to scuttle around to check on him. “Yes yes yes, install safety bars!”
“Okay, how about we make sure that you’re not about to croak from a heart attack at the bottom instead of standing up here,” Simon said quickly, and that prompted all three of them down to the beach in a matter of minutes.
Grace shook himself out as his feet touched down on the surprisingly fine-grained beach, with only the occasional rock jutting out from the sandy grains as little landmarks. The beach lay tucked away inside a cove, with the two cliffs on either side creating almost something of a safe space between the rest of the moon’s surface and this little divot into the sea. At the beach’s edge, red waves lapped at the white dust, staining the sand down near it a dusty crimson from where the ocean seemed to rise its highest.
“Grace should be banned from tall places,” Rocky declared firmly. “Grace keeps doing bad stupid things.”
“Okay, in my defense, there weren’t any safety railings!” he objected, meanwhile Rocky let out a disgruntled call.
“I spooked you,” Simon objected. “That was my fault.”
“Bad Simon,” Rocky chastised. He poked the blood-siren sharply. “Scaring Grace into danger is bad bad bad. Only once, though, so you are only bad Simon, statement.”
“I’m only… what?”
“Only one ‘bad’,” Grace explained. “The number of times Rocky repeats a word is how intense the emotion or feeling he’s trying to get across is. He just means that that was an accident.”
“Accident still bad.”
“He only gave you one ‘bad’ for this, so you’re just a bit rude,” Grace added. “Apparently, scaring me into danger is three bads.”
“Didn’t he give four for someone trying to frame me?”
“Yeah. I’ve only ever heard him give four one other time.”
Simon sighed, before lowering himself to be prone with the beach. Rocky watched him cautiously, letting out trills of annoyance.
“Sorry,” Simon said, in that more musical tone that Grace had heard up at the lab. “For scaring him.”
“Simon saying sorry is okay,” Rocky said.
“Could I make that up to you two somehow?” Simon asked, still obviously wary. “No blood tests, though.”
“Wouldn’t ask that of you,” Grace replied. “And seriously, it was an accident. It’s fine.”
“Grace translate Simon language!” Rocky said at the same time. “Then Grace can know how to speak more!”
“I’m also not gonna ask you to do that-”
Simon sighed, drawing his tail closer and staring out past them toward the ocean. Grace didn’t entirely recognize the look on his face, but he could understand some form of longing when he saw it.
“If it’s not too much to ask,” Simon said softly, “could you teach me more about Earth? If I do the translation thing, I want to know about what it used to be like.”
That request single-handedly snapped Grace’s entire brain into focus. Simon wanted him to teach him about Earth.
Teaching was absolutely something Grace could do.
“I can teach you about Earth for sure,” Grace said, clapping Simon on the shoulder as he got up. The other man flinched sharply, and he drew his hand back instantly. “If you’re alright with coming back up to the lab a few more times, or I could come down here.”
Coming out to the beach, while not his favourite option, seemed better for Simon than going up to the lab every time. The guy clearly wasn’t comfortable up there, and even here, he seemed maybe 5% more at ease than up in Grace’s world.
Plus, the whole ‘lack of heat from the sun’ thing made anywhere outside the buildings installed by the COI pretty darn cold. Simon and Rocky gave off heat, but that didn’t fix the whole ‘being cold’ problem.
“The beach is easier,” Simon said, and Grace quietly cursed himself for pondering for too long about it. “Unless you’re gonna freeze your ass off.”
“I’m perfectly capable of not freezing my butt off, thank you.”
“Grace lies,” Rocky added, unhelpfully this time. “Grace gets cold very easily. Rocky sits with him like a heater.”
Simon actually snorted, a smile crossing the blood-siren’s face. Or at least, as much of it as could smile - the more toothy side of his face looked a little more menacing.
“I guess I’ll see you around, then,” Simon said, hauling himself toward the waves of crimson.
“I’ll be at the lab for a bit helping analyze samples,” Grace said as the other guy slipped into the ocean.
“Grace will not be doing any big science until he does sleep first,” Rocky objected. “I watch Grace sleep.”
Well, that put an end to that argument. The phrase ‘I watch ---- sleep’ was pretty final, in their books.
Grace and Rocky turned up to the beach, walking up to the research station once more. Even so, Grace couldn’t stop himself from glancing back down at the beach, and could have sworn he caught glinting eyes watching him from the waves.