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Grace wonders about time loops sometimes.
It’s more of a passive wondering than anything scientific, and he absently thinks that must be for very good reason. Time is finicky with human beings. Rocky had been alone orbiting Tau Ceti for forty six years. Grace hadn’t even been conceived by the time that Rocky’s entire crew had died, and Rocky had been alone ever since. He can’t wrap his mind around that concept. It’s a fundamentally human limiter. Humans do not comprehend big spans. They are not capable of it.
Grace imagines waking, day after day after day, to an empty ship. He tries to imagine forty six years. He cannot. Stratt - and god, even the thought of her is a searing bolt to his mind, like her name is a smoking brand against all soft things - had spoken in detail about the long-term effects of cohabitating in confined spaces with other people. Namely, homicide. Hence the comas. But sometimes Grace wants to laugh at the idea that proximity could kill a person. How is solitude better? How, after years of Rocky and only Rocky, is he expected to believe his life would be safer alone?
Rocky is the wedge between reality and nothingness. Rocky is the bit between his teeth that reminds him he still has a jaw. Rocky is the hum of blood circulation and bone in a frequency Grace can only feel. Rocky is the space between his heartbeats and the air that fills his lungs. Rocky is the bruises on his calves and shins from when he stumbles into his overeager companion, which is happening more and more often. Rocky is proof Grace exists. No human words could encapsulate Rocky. Grace thinks, maybe, an Eridian thrum might get the feeling across, but that thought only leaves both of them yearning for Erid and Grace cannot bear the wanting.
Things have slowed, in a way. The universe has begun to haze at the edges. Grace has started to lose track of the movies they have watched. He knows this because he suggests a film and Rocky hums, indulgent, so polite, and fidgets through the entire thing. Eidetic memory. Of course. It should unnerve Grace that he’s losing track like this, but it’s like there’s a gap between the thought and the sensation. It does not reach.
(It’s the food. It’s always the food. He knows it’s about the food. Rocky does, too. Neither of them speak about it. Not yet. Not while he has coma slurry left, not when Mary has stopped offering the meal count unless Grace asks directly.)
Grace wakes to the same sounds, in the same place, to the same (ever-comforting) knowledge he is being watched over every single time he sleeps. He’s started dreaming less. The realization itches beneath his skin, crawling and uneasy, muttering things about conserving resources and slower processing. Grace elects to ignore it.
Grace wears the same clothes. He eats the same awful, chalky coma-slurry and the same horrific glob of Taumoeba. It always sticks to his teeth. It always sticks to his throat. He throws it up constantly now, much to Rocky’s chiding.
“Keep in body! Must save. Must conserve. Waste bad. Why waste from mouth orifice, question? Not efficient. Need water, need rest.”
Grace has no answers for Rocky. He wants to snap a little bit, but he knows he’s not actually mad at the Eridian. He isn’t sick on purpose. He forges his way through a conversation about diversity of diet and how humans aren’t made to eat the same thing constantly, how their bodies will rebel to force them to seek a wide array of nutrients. They tiptoe around the nutrients thing. They’ve set aside several days’ worth of supplements, coma slurry, and - this one keeps Grace up at night, really - a single pack of the real food. It isn’t for him to eat. It’s for the Eridians to study. To replicate.
(Sometimes, when Rocky is asleep and functionally dead to the world, Grace closes his eyes and revels in the idea of sneaking to the back of the ship and squeezing the packet into his gullet. He won’t do it. But he thinks about it the same way he thinks about Ilyukhina’s heroin and Yáo’s handgun; forbidden and guilty and desperate not to dwell on for too long at once.)
Grace does not watch the same stars. It is one of the few scarce blessings left. But space is dark and empty and, well, space. It blurs too. Grace cannot track time by the stars. He can ask Mary, sure, and Rocky seems to know at any given point how many days left until they reach Erid.
It’s not enough.
(Is not enough, Rocky had said once about his time with Adrian, and Grace had to let that feeling widen his mouth into a grin instead of tearing his heart to shreds. Had to stop himself from lunging for that xenonite ball, wrapping himself around what of Rocky he could. Had to hold back the sob building in his chest because he was going to die out here and it wasn’t enough, not enough, but Grace had no business thinking things like that.)
(It wasn’t enough.)
He gets the day wrong. Grace says, mindlessly, “Two hundred and eighty four days left,” and he hears Rocky pause and make a chuffing sound of amused confusion.
“Two hundred sixty six,” Rocky corrects, and Grace’s hands still. He moves them a moment later, quickly regrasping the bit of xenonite he’d been fiddling with and clearing his throat.
“You’re right, bud. Good… good catch.”
“... Grace not throw anything at Rocky,” Rocky hedges warily, and Grace laughs and everything is back to normal.
Kind of.
He asks Mary that evening what serving he’s on and, well– Rocky being right isn’t unexpected at all, but finding out Grace is wrong leaves him unsettled. It shouldn’t, right? It’s just time. He’s had plenty of days in the classroom mixing up his Fridays and his Wednesdays, or waking on a Saturday and only remembering he hasn’t got a room full of kids to teach by the time he’s got one foot already out the door. Grace fudges his timing up all the time. This is nothing to care about, right?
But it just keeps happening. He’s been teetering on the lamest excuse for not telling Rocky for a while now (isn’t it a good thing the days are passing faster than he realizes?) but it’s getting worse. Sometimes he thinks a day or so has passed yet it’s only been a few hours. Sometimes he wakes up and swears he’s seen this side of the galaxy before. Sometimes - the worst of all, really - Grace dreams about waking up and going about his day, and when he wakes up for real, he’s not sure which one was the dream.
Grace is losing track of time.
He feels like things are repeating, yet too much is passing at once. Grace is living the same cycles over and over and over. Is he forgetting them too? He feels stuck in a loop.
And that’s the problem, that old loop. Time passes. Grace just has no proof of it.
Well, not fully.
Grace is ashamed of it, even if he can’t put into words why. But the one thing that helps the most is looking in the mirror. Things like hair and nails grow too quickly to be any solid evidence, and once Grace cuts them, they grow right back. They’re almost counterproductive. What Grace appreciates, guilt-soaked and nauseous and tired, is the sight of his stomach.
Grace knew from the moment the Taumoeba escaped that he was going to turn around and save Rocky and starve to death from it. Heck, he knew before that. He knew from fishing and from tunnels and xenonite balls and sleeping guarded each cycle and being unable to sleep without it. Part of Grace thinks he knew from the second time Grace even visited the tunnel, when Rocky had reconstructed the dang thing to give him a wall he could see through; not because Rocky knew he could see through it or it was any benefit to Rocky, but simply because Grace had seemed to like it best. Had pressed his squishy face and hands to that little bit of xenonite and Rocky had undone the whole thing just because it garnered his attention.
Maybe Grace was fated to turn around. An Orpheus that did not turn back to Eurydice was not an Orpheus and could never be. Maybe Grace, with his Beetles and his blue dot and his beanbag and his kids, was Eurydice too to turn back and willingly starve for a planet he would die before ever seeing.
Grace could count his ribs. Well. And that, alone, was some proof that time was passing. He was slimming. His hip bones had begun to jut at his waistline as his pants had less fat to hold to. His face had become slimmer - not hollow, not yet, but closer - and his hands less steady. His vision blackened often when he stood.
That he was declining was counterintuitively some of the most grounding proof Grace had that he even still existed.
The scars from Rocky and his atmosphere, too, helped. Early on, they were much more helpful than the thinness. Grace could track the stages of healing. He did not need the plain words from Mary or the uncertain hum from Rocky to know time was passing. All he had to do was look down.
Time passing meant healing, though, and by the time (ha) that their dear ship was within a few months of Erid, Grace’s scars had somewhat settled. They’d change over the next few years, but progression had slowed. Most of the work was finished.
The issue was that Grace needed a balance. He needed something impermanent, something that would change, but not something that could be fully erased. Not something he’d replace in a matter of weeks like his fingernails, nor something slow and irreversible like the widening emptiness in the hollows between his bones.
Grace’s answer came with one hundred and fifty-one days left to Erid while Rocky was asleep. Grace was testing a new filament for the 3D printer (he’d figure out xenonite in that thing if it killed him) when the sharp end of the coiled wire sliced into the soft palm of his hand. He hissed, automatically bringing his hand up to his mouth and sucking at the coppery taste, before sheepishly dropping his hand to his lap. Rocky would be horrified (disgusted, really) at the habit, and probably decently dismayed at his ever-growing lack of coordination.
(It’s still about the food. He’s clumsier now, tired more easily, sleeping more often. Foggy and bleary and tired and slow. He’s been making mistakes more and more often. Grace knows he worries Rocky, okay? It upsets him. What kind of person is Grace if he forces Rocky to worry about him all the time? So… better if Rocky just… doesn’t witness it.)
With Grace’s health, with the state he’s been living in, it takes the bleeding too long to stop. It’s sluggish and slow and doesn’t scab over for hours. And Grace, with a pit in his stomach from something other than hunger, feels something click.
It was horrifically, blessedly simple. Tally marks. Half an inch long - shorter than even the crescent mark left by a nail, really - and not deep enough to do any damage, but not too shallow to heal in a matter of days. He doesn’t want to think about how it sounds to any other being. Rocky’s going to hate him for it. It’s not self-harm. It isn’t. Not– no. Right? It doesn’t count. He’s doing it for… for a benefit. For–
Sugar honey iced tea, Grace knows what he’s doing. His reasoning is clinical, the emotionality detached. He gets no rush of pleasure from the sensation. He keeps his mind far, far away from the whispers about what he deserves. It’s not about… depression, or anything like that. Grace just has the best possible answer right here at his fingertips.
And it helps. That’s the worst part, what curdles deep in his gut, what eats him alive when Rocky sleeps. It’s only when Rocky sleeps that Grace can sit down and thread his fingers through his hair and acknowledge just how messed up this all is. But it’s working. Grace wakes up and he spots the mark on his palm (which Rocky and Armando had both fussed over and Grace had barely escaped treatment) and he has this quiet, settled feeling, because time is passing for him too.
There isn’t regularity to it. That’s the point. Grace doesn’t schedule the tallymarks past the if Rocky is asleep requirement. Sometimes he needs the marker more and sometimes he doesn’t. It’s the only passage of time Grace can actually control. He doesn’t like to contemplate the volumes this speaks about his mental health. He’s precise and blank the entire time. There is no relief from the pain, no feeling of ecstasy or deservingness or anything he needs to fear. There is just quiet, soft relief, in the control he gets back.
Rocky might be catching on. Maybe. Grace isn’t sure. He just gets the feeling Rocky is hovering more than normal. Rocky’s little taps that let him see the space increase in frequency. Grace is being monitored, checked on. He had to… calibrate Armando, a bit, to ignore that specific spot on his hand. It isn’t Grace’s forte, though, and any prying from Rocky will probably get the exact command repeated right to him.
They’ve been in a lot of odd stalemates in the last few weeks, though. They’re within seventy days of Erid and things are… strange. They argue less and less. Grace speaks less. Grace sleeps more. Grace–
Well, to put it plainly, Grace is starving to death and Rocky is nearly tearing himself apart watching it happen. Grace’s emotions are horribly far from his control. He gets this awful feeling in his stomach when he doesn’t see Rocky’s ball or hear Rocky’s tapping or feel the gentle thud of the xenonite ball against his calves. He can’t sleep without Rocky watching anymore, not remotely. Rocky’s begun to sing him to sleep. Grace has begun to spend more and more nights slumped against Rocky’s ball instead of in his bed. Rocky presses right up against him and it’s as close as either of them will get to being held.
Rocky voices concerns and Grace’s dismissals are growing slurred and tired and weak. He’s getting worse at being reassuring. He spends more and more hours curled at Rocky’s ball as the Eridian works, too blurred at the edges to do more than rest. He doesn’t bother making it to his bed very often anymore. He feels like his lungs are being torn from his chest any time Rocky rolls more than a few feet from him. He chokes down Taumoeba at Rocky’s command. He decides to amend his tallymarks to fit six, five upright before the slash, because it is Eridian and Rocky and even if this is only for practical purposes, there is something in having a little bit of Erid etched in his skin.
(Grace does not think about the heroin or the gun anymore. He thinks, instead, about entering Rocky’s atmosphere one last time. About dropping to his knees and being enveloped in Rocky’s arms and dying held warm.)
Maybe this is co-dependency. Maybe it is something worse. The word love feels too simple. Rocky could have Grace’s soul if he asked for it. Grace would tear his beating heart out of his chest. He thinks Rocky might do his equivalent of the same.
Rocky sure doesn’t seem to like letting Grace stray too far either. He gets snappy and bossy and sharp, but Grace can hear the undercurrent of nervousness in Rocky’s singing. The closer they get to Erid, the more time Grace spends sprawled across Rocky’s ball. He wonders vaguely if he’s seeking the heat, but he knows that he seeks Rocky far more than any human need. Rocky supersedes it all.
It’s with his back hunched against Rocky’s ball and a scalpel in Grace’s fingers that he presses a quick diagonal across the five strikes on his hand. Six, now, each tally in various states of healing. Fifty six days to Erid. He’s got three full meals worth of coma slurry left, but he’s been stretching it to quarters for weeks, so twelve days before he’s got to survive on Taumoeba and Taumoeba alone.
A bead of blood - he clots less and less easily, but he’s adjusted shallower to reduce the danger - drips down the ball of Grace’s thumb and he sticks it in his mouth. The metallic coppery taste makes him dizzy. It’s better than the Taumoeba sludge, though, so he sucks the wound idly before wiping it on his pants. He’ll… sterilize it soon. Sterilizing the small cut means getting up means leaving Rocky and Grace just can’t bring himself to do so. He’ll have to, of course, but–
“... Grace.”
Grace is a statue. He is ivory. He is still. He does not breathe. He does not blink, even as wetness pools in his eyes (and he knows Rocky can hear the wetness but he can’t really control that one, so, bygones) and blurs his vision.
This worries Rocky, unfortunately. “Breathe, Grace. Breathe please.”
Grace sucks in a breath and chokes on the next, and then clears his throat and tips his head back and pretends nothing at all is wrong.
“Yeah, bud?” he asks, resting the back of his head on the ball to stare blankly at the ceiling. His eyes are still welling. His fingers are shaking. He doesn’t know why he feels like he’s in trouble, like he’s an emotional pivotal mess and Rocky’s simple act of noticing is enough to undo him. “You, uh– aren’t you supposed to be asleep?”
A long silence before Rocky replies. He’s quieter than usual. A bit like he’s talking to a feral animal. “Rocky pretend sleep. Grace keep getting hurt while Rocky asleep. Rocky… check.”
Well. Figures. Grace swallows, still coppery, and offers no more than a small hum of acknowledgement. He’s not sure he can trust his voice right now. Even the hum wavers in the middle.
“... Grace hurt self, question?”
Ah. There it is. Eridians sure are direct about things that are really, really hard to answer. Grace has excuses - he has reasons - and he’s got them right on the tip of his tongue, ready to blab out and smooth over, but instead his body betrays him and he just hiccups.
“Grace… wanting…” Rocky begins, soft and uncertain, but Grace can hear the strain of pure fear beneath it all. Grace stops him quickly, shaking his head, his hair brushing against the ball in gentle shushing motions.
“No, no, um– I’m not… trying to do anything like that, Rock, don’t worry.” Grace’s voice rasps on the way out. He tries to smile. It crumples. He’s shaking, he realizes, and the thought feels very far away. He can feel Rocky shift. He doesn’t know how he’s going to get through this explanation. Rocky’s growing more and more restless, but he’s still waiting for Grace to speak.
“Humans, we… we’re really sensitive to time? We have, like, really weird biology when it comes to days and nights. And seasons. People who can’t keep track of time usually… go a bit crazy. We have calendars and clocks and lights that simulate day and night, back on Earth, but people don’t do too well when they don’t see it for themselves.” Grace’s eyes are burning. He wets his lips with the little moisture left in his mouth. He’s lightheaded and trembling and he doesn’t understand what about this is so hard to admit. He can’t look at Rocky. He casts his gaze as high as it can go, trying to fend back the wet heat building by his eyelids.
“Needed some way to keep track,” Grace whispers, eyes closing as his voice cracks on the very last word. His eyes well even more. Rocky is uncharacteristically, awfully silent. Even as a couple of tears spill out across his cheeks and plop on the surface of Rocky’s ball, he gives no sign of movement. “Sorry,” Grace adds in a weak, lame little whisper, shame burning low in his chest.
“Understand,” comes back the quiet whisper a few moments later. Grace doesn’t know why this makes him choke. Rocky’s fingers shift and Grace pushes himself onto one aching hip to be able to see his alien, cheek smushed into the glass. “Rocky understand.”
“Sorry,” Grace gasps. He reaches around the ball, fingers scrabbling to curl around the seams. His sternum aches. He wants Rocky closer. He wants a real hug. This is the best he will get. Rocky must not hate him completely (and Rocky must understand far more than he should) because he presses up against the barrier too. Grace cannot quite swallow down a sob. It comes out ragged and sharp-edged and wet and Rocky lets out a high, sympathetic mournful sound.
“Is okay, is okay,” Rocky soothes, almost cooing. “Rocky fix. Rocky fix fix fix. Grace okay. Grace breathe. Grace okay.”
“Okay.” It’s the last coherent word he can get out before Grace is sobbing in full, lurching to press as close to Rocky’s ball as possible. Rocky’s letting out some low sound that trembles his bones and warms his lungs and Grace knows it's an Eridian lullaby and he’s too far gone to feel the humiliation at being sung something for a baby. He wants to apologize again, properly this time, but Grace doesn’t even make it past the first consonant before Rocky is shushing him and rocking the ball lightly into his forehead.
“Rocky fix. No sorry. Grace stop, statement. Grace promise to stop, statement.”
“Okay,” Grace sobs again. He hiccups and nearly gags and doesn’t care how pathetic he is being because Rocky’s singing again and when Rocky says he’ll fix something, it’ll be fixed. Grace can’t comprehend how. He doesn’t want to think about what solution Rocky will find, what alternative exists to keeping Grace sane enough to know time is passing, but he doesn’t need to anymore. Rocky is here. Rocky is singing to him. Rocky will fix it.
Slowly, the vibrating hum of Rocky’s song that Grace can feel in his very bones lulls him calmer. He sniffles and wipes his face, leaning heavily into the xenonite ball for support.
“Sorry, buddy,” Grace admits hoarsely, “I think I need you a little too much, these days.”
“Rocky need need need Grace,” Rocky says vehemently, with such force that Grace’s breath is stolen right from his body. “Grace come to Erid. Grace heal. Rocky fix. Rocky need Grace forever. Rocky…”
Grace lets out that quiet little sigh of settling that comes after a big cry. He’s so tired. He’s so hungry. His face aches from the surface of the ball. He doesn’t care one bit.
“Rocky want.”
Oh.
That’s a correction, all right.
“Yeah, Rock,” Grace whispers, and splays his uninjured hand out against the barrier. Rocky lifts one arm and spreads his fingers to match. “Me too.”
“Grace live to Erid. Grace survive trip. Grace Rocky both need, both want. No more hurt. Rocky fix. Promise, question?”
“... Promise.” Grace’s voice creaks, but does not break. He’s slow and syrupy now, cried out and hollow and sore, but something feels lighter. He breathes a little easier. His hand doesn’t ache so bad. He doesn’t even realize he’s slumped down until he starts to slip, landing with a soft thump on the floor. Rocky rolls closer, pressing the seams of the ball against Grace’s ribs. Grace tucks his face against the xenonite and Rocky curls up to meet him.
“Grace sleep,” Rocky trills with a softness that warms Grace’s chest and brings that dang dampness straight back to his eyes. “Rocky watch. Rocky fix. Rocky sing to sleep, question?”
“Yeah. Please,” Grace breathes. His eyelids are already drooping. He’s vaguely aware of Mary dimming the overhead lights. He’ll wake up sore and achy from sleeping on the floor, but right now he’s warm and safe and cared for. He needs Rocky. He wants him, too. Grace understands. Tired and sluggish, Grace lifts the bad hand and taps three little taps against the xenonite ball. Rocky extends a finger and gives his own three-tap reply.
Grace is pretty sure it means, I love you.
He’s never needed to ask.