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Somehow, Rocky had taken Grace’s decision to turn back around harder than he had.
Do not get him wrong, Grace’s fragile little brain and heart had had their fair share of spirals after it had truly sunken in that he would never see another human ever again. That he’d never go back to living in normal healthy gravity, he’d never feel the Sun, bright and steady (hopefully, please, please), on his skin, never hear his kids yelling for the lava beanbag, never taste another Twizzler, never get hugged by anyone ever again.
He’d made peace with it. Sorta. Not entirely, as he still woke up in a cold sweat sometimes, but after the initial shock at least his waking hours were now mostly calm. Deep down, there was this…he was loathe to call it relief, but something had untied itself in his chest when it had clicked that he wouldn’t have to return to Earth. Why the ever loving fudge he felt that why, he had no clue. The fear of death was still very prevalent – it was the main theme of his nightmares after all – but he couldn’t deny the strange solace he felt at the prospect of living out his (probably short amount of) days on Erid. He’d chalked it up to his zero regret about coming back to save Rocky and his planet, and the fact that now his best friend could return home and be reunited with his mate and live a long and happy life.
He’d said as much to Rocky, who had kept assuring him over and over that all of Erid would come together to build him the best Earth habitat and they’d figure out his food situation and do everything within their power to make sure he would be as comfortable as he could be. After the last time he’d claimed to have made peace with a tragic situation and had flat out lied, Rocky was understandably sceptical. This time though, he at least partially meant it, and he’d tried explaining it to him, but Rocky wouldn’t have it.
After admitting his feelings of loss regarding things like sunlight, the beach, fog, bird songs, human touch, teaching, laughter and so on, and the calmness that was growing within him despite it, Rocky had made a few pained noises, clicked his claws together in thought and hesitation and social discomfort for almost a full minute before apologising and crawling off to go sulk.
That had been yesterday morning.
Grace had made multiple attempts to engage with Rocky as he sat huddled in a little corner, working on some project or other to keep himself busy. He would’ve liked to distract him with cultural, linguistic or architectural questions about Erid or perhaps another rewatch of Enola Holmes (Rocky liked it solely because of the soundtrack, humming and bobbing and making jazz hands along, it was always bound to cheer him up), but whenever he’d approached the spot Rocky was holed up in, he was screamed at to stay away because it isn’t ready, not look yet, go away. The only time he’d emerged from his hideout was yesterday evening to watch Grace sleep.
Whatever. At some point Rocky would get bored and come scuttling back to ask how the breeder tanks were doing or to ask Grace questions he already knew the answer to because he’d clocked that teaching him anything always made Grace feel just a tad lighter and was worth the redundancy of the conversation. Until then, Grace had decided to make some use of the relative peace and quiet and work on a project of his own.
The current state of said project was drooping eyes that had been glued to his laptop for hours, dry and unfocused and blinking comedically slowly. On three separate occasions he had reached for his dangling glasses to put them back on, only to realise that he was already wearing them and his vision was blurry purely due to a lack of sleep.
He hadn’t gotten this far into an all-nighter in a while now, what with his roommate being very adamant about him sleeping enough so he wouldn’t “become stupid”. And even though yesterday Rocky had showed up in the dormitory on time, today he was apparently as engrossed in his project as Grace was in his own and hadn’t looked at the time in quite a while.
While Grace still had no idea what the engineer was cooking up on the other side of the ship, he had decided to write up a detailed paper of the Taumoeba reproduction cycle. Rocky had of course noted down all the information needed so Eridian biologists could continue breeding them and save their planet, but with all the extra time on his hands now, he might as well expand his report to a proper paper, appendix and citations and all.
When he’d created a blank LaTeX document, the first thing he’d done was create a ref.bib file. It had made him pause for a moment, as he’d done it purely out of muscle memory from his uni days. As a middle school teacher, it was Word or good old pen and paper. He hadn’t touched the typesetting software in years until his Astrophage research. Since it had however been a very classified project where any type of publication had been entirely out of the question until after the Hail Mary was to be launched, proper citations hadn’t been a high priority. Communication with the handful of other scientists from various fields had basically been just plain text and pictures of their scribbled notes being sent back and forth on the internal server. He remembered regular progress reports being written using LaTeX, but it had often just been a title, date and a couple paragraphs with the occasional equation or plot. No fancy journal specific layout, no one caring about correct unit representation or axis labels, and no citations.
He knew human citations would mean absolutely nothing to Eridians unless he attached all the referenced papers as well, but with the goal of “writing a proper paper” solidified in his mind, he simply could not not include appropriate citations.
When he’d sat down several hours ago, he’d started by writing an actual honest to God introduction. Unlike many of his peers, he’d always liked writing the introduction first, not as some final chore that had to be checked off the list. The introduction was arguably the best part of the entire paper. It was a short blurb that basically said “please read me, I am interesting :)”, where you could just dump all the fun facts about the topic you were going to go into much too much detail about later.
Grace hadn’t written a real paper introduction since his time working at university, and he’d been giddy. Soon he’d had twelve tabs open, absorbing paper after article after semi untrustworthy news segment in order to find the perfect content for his Taumoeba intro. Since there would be no Referee Number 3 commenting on his word choice in section 2.3.1 paragraph 6, he could go wild with the puns (that would most certainly get lost in translation for the Eridians anyways) and cool trivia – of course within professional boundaries.
Unfortunately, getting prematurely excited about his Taumoeba paper had caused him to go much too deep into the zone and slowly start to emerge about seven hours later, now with a glowing introduction and first section but barely into expanding the second section of his report, and finding himself unable to let go. He was at that point where a change in activity was necessary but that familiar blockage in his mind and his body kept him stuck to the chair. He wanted to continue, but he really wanted to stop. The flow was pretty much over, it would be perfectly acceptable to just continue tomorrow, but…
Grace hadn’t felt the sweet temptation of revenge sleep procrastination in a while now, and with Rocky busy, he could stay up. Use the night. Continue exploring and neatly formatting his paper and remembering what other type of asexual reproduction there was apart from fission, parthenogenesis, budding and sporogenesis.
He should sleep.
But he didn’t wanna sleep.
Pulling down his glasses and rubbing his eyes with one hand, he typed in “asexual” in the Wikipedia library search bar and clicked on the first link. Blinking several times in a semi successful attempt to get his eyes to focus, he scrolled down to where he knew the different types of reproduction would be listed (yes, it hadn’t been the first time visiting this page in his general research on Astrophage and Taumoeba and it certainly wasn’t going to be the last).
∨ Definition, identity and relationships
∨ Research
∨ Community
∨ Religion
Huh?
He scrolled back up, confused because he was pretty sure he’d clicked the right page.
Asexuality
This article is about humans who lack sexual attraction or interest in sexual activity. For the lack of romantic attraction, see Aromanticism. For the lack of a gender, see Agender. For other uses, see Asexual (disambiguation). Not to be confused with Asexual reproduction.
Grace blinked. It took a few seconds for the words his eyes were seeing to reach his brain, get absorbed and then processed. When the information arrived, the wheels started turning, but slowly and sluggishly and he wasn’t even sure in which direction they were turning.
There was absolutely an itch in his mind. Something about this was…
Despite having run out of coffee an unspeakable amount of days ago, he felt a similar sensation of energy returning to his system as if he’d just downed a double espresso.
He had to scratch this itch. He had to read more.
Tiredness- not gone, but impacting comprehension skills far less than before, Grace opened a new window that quickly filled up with another dozen or so tabs, this time his drive for research of an entirely different variety, Taumoeba and nostalgic paper writing long since forgotten. His heart was hammering in his chest with every sentence he read, every old dusty reddit post he dug up, every little comment or post he found in his downloaded internet library that made this long since suppressed ache deep within him resurface and feel...recognised.
He recognised himself in painfully many aspects of this.
‘There’s no way sexual attraction is real, y’all are just really committed to the bit.’
People- people felt that? They saw a pretty person and their body and brain went “I want to have sex with them”? That was a thing? He’d always thought that people met up, thought the other was fun and beautiful and comfortable to hang out with, and later down the line sexy times might happen. He of course knew that one-night-stands were a thing – which, for the record, he had never really understood – but thought that those were just a sped up version of dating where people who liked sex got together with someone else who was also in the mood for it. Not that he had ever particularly understood the appeal of sex, especially the “doing it with another person” aspect of it.
‘A 2012 study concluded that asexual people also might have difficulties in dealing with social stigma, their compulsion to have sex, or their partners not understanding them.’
Linda had thrown the “head in the clouds” argument at him on several occasions, but he hadn’t wanted to admit to Rocky that a larger reason for their relationship breaking apart had been her claiming that he was standoffish, not invested in them, that he didn’t care about her or her needs and that he was not taking the relationship seriously. Thoughtless, antisocial and selfish had been some of her favourite words to hurl his way towards the end of their relationship.
“Why are we even doing this anymore?” she’d asked, rhetorically and tired and resigned. “You obviously don’t love me.”
He’d begged her to stay, to explain to him what he’d been doing wrong, to listen so he could explain to her that she was wrong, that he did love her. He had loved her, so much, but maybe…maybe it hadn’t been the right kind of love.
‘Aromantic individuals are able to experience platonic love and may have committed friendships.’
Grace had loved watching the stars with Linda, walking hand in hand down the street, telling her all about any new cool thing he learned about while researching or reading a funny article online. All the things he’d loved doing with her, he might as well have done with a friend. For all intents and purposes, she had been his friend that he sometimes kissed. Although, he didn’t think he’d ever initiated a kiss with Linda, it had always come from her side. She in turn hadn’t ever initiated sex, but now that he thought about it, maybe she had and he had either missed or ignored her advances.
Grace had always known there was something off about him. Multiple things. All the other kids in elementary school had had a best friend or a friend group throughout the years, he’d been the only one who consistently hadn’t. Adults had always told him off, to stop fidgeting or to pay attention or to look them in the eye or to go play with the other kids, but don’t brag about your grades or they won’t like you.
But when he had gone to play with the other children, they’d called him all the names under the sun for daring to start a conversation about the cool new topic in their science class or about Doctor Who or simply for pointing out that the yellow ladybugs on the bushes on the far side of the playground weren’t toxic. In high school, it had shifted from cooties and weirdo to anal and gay (he remembered briefly considering if he was actually gay because he had never had a girlfriend by age sixteen, but half an hour of googling had convinced him otherwise).
University had been much better. More people liked engaging in conversation with him because they were all normal people who also liked numbers and science and sci-fi. And him not having much of a social life didn’t particularly stand out since STEM students generally only left their hunched positions at their desks on a quest for food and sleep. But still, many of his peers had been in and out of relationships, some had gotten engaged and married and a few had even produced their own offspring. When he’d met Linda in his second year, he’d thought he’d finally found it. Met a cute and funny girl who liked him back, check. Until that crumbled because he did relationships wrong, and then his career crumbled because he expressed his opinions wrong, and he accepted the fact that fundamentally there was something wrong with him and it was okay because he got a middle school teaching position and his kids never cared that he was a faulty human and that was enough.
‘Not broken.’
By now, tears had begun to run down his face. He made no attempts to wipe them off.
It was- it was okay to not want romance. To think it was weird and confusing and convoluted. To not want to get close to anyone sexually because- because it- because it was gross and scary and panic-inducing and holy- the other shoe just dropped.
The relief he felt at not having to return to Earth was because he wouldn’t be considered wrong anymore. He behaved weird? Duh, he was an alien. He didn’t have a mate? Well of course he didn’t, no other humans around.
Tears turned to quiet sobs until he found a line that made his heart skip a beat.
‘Are you saying my life matters less because I don’t conform to society’s heteronormative, child-centric ideals?’
It caused a flashback so vivid he almost fell out of his chair.
“You don’t even have a dog.”
He hadn’t been worthless, but he’d been considered worth less than others because he- because he was aroace. It didn’t matter how much he loved his students or the waves as they lapped against the shore or the twinkling stars or his planet, because he was also a human, a person. No, he was an orphan with no one to reproduce with and no pet because he didn’t get paid nearly enough to afford one, so he was expendable. No one cared that he was gone, because there was no one who cared enough to miss him.
He put his glasses on the table, pressing the palms of his hands into his eyes.
He was aroace. There was a word for it and there were other people like him and it was a thing and he was a chunk less defective than he’d previously thought. And while in the past he had been ostracised and ridiculed and sent away on a suicide mission to the depths of space for it (alright, the latter had included some other factors), it didn’t matter anymore because now he knew.
“Grace is leaking.”
Grace jumped at the automated voice he needed less and less these days, but still partially relied on, especially when he was this tired. He looked up to see Rocky in his ball, shifting his weight from one leg to the others and tilting his carapace in concern. Apparently he’d been too out of it to hear him approach.
“I-” was as far as he got before another sob tore from his throat, hands coming to cover his mouth.
“Grace is hurt, question?”
“N-no, I- I- I think I’m aroace,” he managed shakily before the lump in his throat cut him off. Rocky rumbled curiously.
“Need new word.”
“It’s-” He took a deep breath. Rocky wouldn’t care. He wouldn’t insist on him just needing more time to find someone or claim that there was no such thing. He’d listen. He wouldn’t care. Grace cleared his throat. “It’s short for aromantic and asexual. It’s- it’s when someone doesn’t- when they don’t feel romantic or sexual attraction to- to others. They don’t want a mate.”
“Ah yes,” Rocky said, casually, as if it were any other daily use piece of vocabulary, “we call this ♬ ♪ ♫.”
“W-what?” Grace said weakly, hands automatically reaching for the laptop to add the new word.
“Many Eridians are aroace, about a third,” Rocky continued. “Don’t want mate, this is needed for population stability. Same on Earth?”
Regardless of the presence of other humans, he wouldn’t have been a freak to the Eridians either way. It was normal to them. Heck, it was considered needed.
He slowly shook his head.
“Not common on Earth? Grace only find out now and is sad?”
“No, I-” he said, swallowing thickly, “I’m not sad. I’m- there’s a word. I didn’t used to know there was a word for what I was- what I am like. I thought- I thought I was just…damaged.”
Rocky bristled. “Not damaged! Why think that?!” Grace let out a wry laugh.
“Humans are very obsessed with sex and romance and reproduction. If you don’t have a partner and kids, they tend to consider you as…lesser.”
Rocky let out a string of overlapping sounds the translation software failed to pick up but Grace knew by now was a combination of intense disagreement and a whole bunch of curse words. He couldn’t help but let out a wet little chuckle.
“Humans stupid stupid stupid for making you think this,” the artificial voice continued to translate once the brief outburst had passed. “Grace not lesser, not damaged! Grace important. Grace best friend. Grace doesn’t need mate, Grace has Rocky.”
“Yeah, buddy, I do,” he said, voice wobbly, and put a hand on the xenonite ball. “Thanks. Thank you, I- I’m gonna need some more time to process all of this but…it means the world to me that you- you know.”
He went to lean in for a hug, but Rocky tilted back, the ball rolling a few feet away.
“Wait,” was all he said before tumbling away around the corner. Too tired and emotional to do much else than to accept the order, Grace slunk back into his seat.
A third of Eridians were aroace. There were millions and millions of five-legged rocky spider aliens that were just like him. It was an essential aspect of their species. It was normal.
Lack of sleep was catching up with him, as in the next ten or so minutes while he waited for Rocky to return, his thoughts didn’t do much else than circle between I’m aroace and I’m normal and I have Rocky.
By the time said little perfect alien came rolling back, Grace was absentmindedly nipping at and chewing on the skin on his fingers, needing something to distract him from…everything.
Only, the ball sounded off. No irregular clank-clank of the asymmetrical sides colliding with the floor, but rather…footsteps?
When Rocky rounded the corner, Grace’s breath hitched.
Instead of a ball, he was in a type of suit, similar to the one he’d made for Grace when he’d shown him the inside of his ship. The xenonite panes were much smaller and seemed more flexible than those of his clunky suit, but still sturdy enough to hold its shape and leave a margin of about an inch or two around Rocky’s exterior.
“Rocky made new suit,” he announced, two limbs raised for jazz hands, sounding both animated and a bit shy at the same time. “Grace say miss human touch. Rocky not human, but better for hug than ball?”
The tears were back, full force. Not even hesitating a second, Grace threw himself off his chair and down against his best friend, who caught him with a surprised chime. The thinner and more malleable xenonite allowed for more heat to seep through the material, and despite the still present sharp contours of the individual pieces making up the suit, as two of Rocky’s limbs came up to wrap around Grace, it felt perfect.
He was full on sobbing into Rocky’s suit now, shaking and clinging to him like a lifeline. Grace hadn’t been properly hugged in so, so long. It wasn’t until now when he actually got one that he realised how badly he’d missed them. His skin was on fire in the absolute best way possible, and Rocky’s adorable attempts at soothing him with “Words of comfort.” were enough for him to never ever want to let go.
He’d missed long warm hugs and cuddles after Linda had broken up with him. He used to think that unless he got into a new relationship, he wasn’t going to get them again.
And then there was Rocky, his best friend in the entire Universe, who worked for almost two days straight to build himself a suit for the sole purpose of offering his leaky space blob of a friend some improved human hug time.
The minutes stretched into what must’ve been close to an hour, Grace’s sobs and hiccups dwindling down until he was basically limp in Rocky’s arms. He snuggled closer against the warm xenonite, by now finding even the edges oddly comfortable, and made no effort to move out of Rocky’s hold when he felt his grip on consciousness beginning to wane.
Grace doesn’t need mate, his best friend’s voice rang in his mind as his breaths evened out and he drifted off. Grace has Rocky.