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Grace never believed that the trip to Erid was going to be easy. There were always going to be obstacles and trials, no matter how optimistic he was about spending the newfound free time with his best friend. He’d thought that the food rationing would be the biggest problem - and it is a problem, to be sure - but in focusing so strongly on what would be happening to his body, he neglected to consider everything that would happen to his mind.
Maybe, in some part, this was a purposeful choice. He might’ve thought that if you don’t think about a psychological problem, then it’s less likely to affect you. Out of sight, out of mind. Maybe it was simply down to a lack of self-awareness, or it could’ve been due to the fact that the physical problems are more within his field of expertise. To Grace, locating and rationing potential food sources is a far more workable problem with his science knowledge than figuring out what’s going wrong with his head.
The problem he’s currently facing could be rooted in any of those causes. Maybe more than one. Maybe all of them. But knowing where the problem may have started doesn’t solve it in the moment.
It’s a simple oversight, the kind Grace makes all the time. He’s in the lab trying to cut open a cardboard box when his hand suddenly slips. He flinches away from the switchblade, avoiding getting cut by it, but ends up with a different cut on the back of his hand from the rough edge of the cardboard.
A little bit of blood wells up from the scratch, but not very much. It barely needs a bandage. What he’s currently doing is more important than that, so he resolves to ignore it until later. He doesn’t need anything to take away from his focus right now.
This box, one of many that he’s found in the ship’s storage, contains seeds that are probably supposed to be backup for the plants that are growing in the lab. There will likely be some problems with space and soil supply, and not all of these plants are even edible, but he he plays his cards right with them he might be able to buy himself some extra time with the food situation.
As he’s pulling out the little bags and cataloguing what he’s got, Rocky approaches from within the xenonite tunnel. “What is Grace doing, question?”
Grace sighs lightly. It’s nice to have Rocky around, but he’s already decided that he doesn’t want anything distracting him. Whenever he puts his attention on the food problem, he feels like there’s a ticking timer over his head, and distractions feel more and more like they’re sapping that time away. “Trying to see if I can grow more plants… or change the ones that are growing.” He puts a little tone of dismissal in his voice, returning his attention to the seeds.
“Grace’s hand is leaking. Texture is different.” Sure enough, he looks down at his hand and notices that there’s still a bit of blood oozing from it. Most of it has dried and scabbed over, leaving flakes across his skin.
“It’s not a big deal. I’ll clean it later.”
Rocky doesn’t seem to like that, which isn’t surprising considering how sensitive he is about matters of Grace’s health. “Open skin in lab leads to infection. Should clean and cover now.” He’s also unlocked an even wider range of concerns by spending so much time on the laptop. Any little thing that happens to Grace could be fatal somehow. It’s nice to be worried over, and it’s really nice that Rocky is so kind to him about it, but it can feel… smothering, sometimes.
“I’m busy right now,” he says shortly, trying not to leave room for argument.
Rocky makes a huffing noise. He’s fully displeased now, Grace can tell. “Stubborn human. Seeds will still be there after Grace comes back. No reason to take risk.”
Irritation creeps in as Grace tries to maintain focus on the task he’s doing. He clenches his fist, feeling the damaged skin stretch a little bit. The stinging pain eases some of the tension, but not by much. “I’m trying to focus. This is important.” He’s hoping that his clipped sentences will send the message that he really doesn’t want to be bothered right now.
“Food problem will not matter if Grace dies early from being careless,” Rocky retorts. That may be true, but Grace can’t help but feel like it’s uncalled for at this moment. It’s just a scratch on his hand, it’s not like he’s bleeding to death. “Grace always focusing too hard, neglecting self. Sitting with injury for no reason.”
“If I don’t figure this out, I will die,” Grace snaps. He’s not yelling yet, but it’s a near thing. “I don’t have time to worry over every little cut. The longer I delay, the closer I get to running out of food. Just let me focus.”
Rocky seems to shrink back a little, but stubborn as he is, he continues to argue. “Time will run shorter if Grace takes poor care of self. Food is not gone yet, can be fixed later. Skin is broken now, should be fixed now.” His point isn’t unreasonable, but the fact that he’s still pushing back makes Grace’s irritation rise up into full-on anger.
He only shouts one sentence, but one sentence is enough to do a world of damage. “Why do you have to be so paranoid?!”
Rocky actually flinches - both because Grace raised his voice so loud and because of the horrible words he used that voice to say. Grace regrets it immediately, but out of some lingering sense of spite or stubbornness, he doesn’t say anything to apologize or take it back. It hangs in the air for a terrible moment before Rocky scuttles away to a different room without saying a single word back to Grace.
Grace stays seated in the lab chair, unmoving, but his focus doesn’t return back to the seeds. For a long while, he simply stares at the table, replaying the conversation and wondering why it had to go that way. It was wrong of him to shout, and his words weren’t exactly fair either, but was it really so wrong for him to want to be left to focus on something important?
Almost an hour later, Grace still sits in the lab. The seeds are right where he left them, and there’s more blood on his hand now. He’d bothered the scab before it could truly close, so now there’s extra smears going down the back of his hand. It makes it look worse than it is.
He knows he’s always had a bit of a temper, but only on rare occasions does he let himself take it out on another person. Ever since the ‘staggering waste of carbon’ incident and becoming a teacher, he’s done a lot of work to ensure that if he has to direct his anger at something, it’s at least an inanimate object and ideally not in front of an impressionable audience.
But the ship has started to make him unbelievably antsy. Every day he grows more aware of how trapped he is, how small the space is. Everything is the same no matter how many times he looks at it. The big panels in the video room help a little, but when push comes to shove, he knows that he’s always in the same confined area. A big image of a beach can’t truly trick his mind into thinking it’s somewhere nicer.
It stands to reason that, at some point, this trapped feeling would manifest into anger. And it also stands to reason that, with nowhere to go, this anger would eventually flare out at the nearest target. The target that’s always within reach, the one that always stays with him because he also can’t leave the ship.
Now the anger turns inward.
Rocky doesn’t deserve that. He’s done nothing but be kind to you and this is what you give him? Why does he even bother with you when you’re this much of a burden? Why should he try to save you when you inevitably run out of food? He should just let you die.
Those thoughts aren’t fair, and Grace knows that the moment they cross his mind, but the new target’s been chosen and the flames keep burning, fueled by the rising guilt. He slams a fist down on the lab table, and the jolt that runs down his arm releases some excess energy, but it doesn’t stem the source.
You should’ve known that you’d become insufferable. You hurt him when he was just trying to help you. And the worst part is that he’ll probably forgive you for it when you know you don’t deserve it.
He shakes his head to try and clear it. He’s got two options now: either go clean up his hand or stay here and keep looking at the seeds. Somehow, they both feel like admitting defeat, just in different ways.
With a heavy sigh, he stands up and heads to the sink.
–
Cleaning and bandaging his hand takes longer than he’d like. He keeps zoning out in the middle of doing it, leaving the water running for too long and failing to tighten the bandage properly. The argument runs through his mind over and over, and it keeps bringing him to the same, obvious conclusion.
It was his own fault, no doubt about it. Rocky is stubborn, and sometimes he pushes too hard, but he wasn’t wrong about what he was saying. He worries because he just doesn’t want to go through losing yet another crewmate, especially not now that he and Grace have grown so close. And instead of understanding that, Grace yelled at him and called him paranoid, of all things.
Instead of returning to the lab, Grace decides that it’s late enough for him to just go to bed. He’s exhausted, his head hurts, and maybe if he sleeps well tonight he’ll wake up feeling less irritable. Maybe he’ll wake up feeling more ready to apologize instead of pretending the fight didn’t happen, which is what he’d prefer to do.
You want to pretend it didn’t happen? You’re as much of a coward as ever. Avoiding everything that’s important because of your own selfish fears.
He begs his inner voice to stop berating him already so he can sleep, curling up in the blankets as tightly as he can.
At some point, when the lights are down and the room is still, he hears the sound of Rocky’s footsteps approaching. He’s not in his suit, though - he’s staying in the xenonite tunnels, just barely at the edge of the dormitory. This will be the first night in a long time that he doesn’t share the bed with Grace. It hurts a lot more than Grace thought it would, and of everything that’s happened today, this is the thing that finally brings him to the edge of tears.
There’s not any shame in crying. He does it all the time. But if he does it now, he’ll be making Rocky feel guilty for no reason. It wouldn’t be fair. So he holds it back as best as he can. He tries to keep his breathing steady, keep his heart calm, keep his tears from falling.
You don’t get to cry about it. You don’t have the right.
He’s sure Rocky can still tell, but he can probably also tell that Grace is holding back, so he stays quiet. The silence fills the room, an unwelcome guest, but neither of them are willing to break it.
Grace barely sleeps the whole night, and Rocky doesn’t say a word.
–
The next morning, Grace feels every consequence of a bad night. His head aches, he’s nauseous, his body is sore. The anger from yesterday has subsided, but in its place, there’s a bone-deep fatigue, both mental and physical. Rocky stays long enough to make sure that Grace is fully awake, but shuffles away immediately after.
Grace would like to apologize sooner rather than later, but he doesn’t know if Rocky wants to talk to him yet. It certainly doesn't seem like he wants to. Only a few moments pass before Grace starts to hear the sound of Rocky tinkering with whatever project he's working on this time, and somehow, through some kind of instinctive best friend telepathy, he can tell that the sounds are saying ‘don't disturb me’.
Spitefully, he thinks that he could go be an annoyance in retaliation for yesterday, but that thought only lasts a split second. That, like many of the other thoughts Grace has had over the last twenty-four hours, wouldn't be fair.
Maybe he should just stay in bed. It's not really good practice for maintaining a decent state of mental health, but the idea of doing anything seems insurmountable right now. Everything, physical and mental, just feels bad. The reasonable part of his brain says that getting up would help solve this problem, even though it seems hard. But the unreasonable part of his brain is on a winning streak right now, and it doesn't intend on giving in just yet, so he stays right where he is.
For a couple of hours, Grace does nothing but stare at the dormitory's wall. The negative thoughts have taken a break for now, but as a consequence, his mind is clouded by an almost oppressive silence. He zones out completely, thinking of nothing at all, and doesn't register anything until his name is called.
“Grace.”
A rush of anxiety breaks through the fog, and Grace wishes he'd been present enough to catch Rocky's tone. Is he still mad? Are we still fighting? He also wishes that he wasn't so useless when it comes to relationships. But neither of those things can be fixed right now, and Rocky has officially entered the room. His body language seems anxious and closed-off, and he once again stays near the walls instead of coming any closer.
“Grace… watch me sleep, question?”
Immediately, Grace feels his heart break. Rocky's hesitance to speak to him hurts enough already, but the question he asked just drives the knife even deeper. Rocky hasn't asked Grace to watch him sleep since before they left for Erid, because he hasn't needed to ask. It's just been assumed between the two of them that they would do this for each other. And now, Grace has apparently been horrible enough that Rocky can no longer make that assumption.
Don't cry, don't cry, don't cry. He can feel as terrible as he wants, but that can wait until Rocky's asleep. Rocky shouldn't have to hear it. “Yeah, of - of course. Of course I will,” Grace stutters, trying and failing to smile reassuringly. Rocky must have waited until the last moment to come and ask, because he goes quiet and still only seconds later.
It feels like the walls are closing in as Grace finally breaks down, crying and crying without an end in sight. The restlessness that's plagued him for weeks now seems to explode outwards; his body won't stop shaking and he suddenly feels desperate to get out. But out isn't anywhere, out is the vastness of space, out is instant death. Even if he went out in the EVA suit, he would still need to be tethered to the ship, leashed like an animal. He can’t run anywhere, can’t breathe in the wide open air, can’t see a view that’s not projected on a screen.
He lets out a scream. He pulls at his hair. He paces back and forth in the dormitory for what feels like hours, around and around, sometimes hitting the walls with his fists as he passes by. He can feel bruises forming on his knuckles, skin breaking, blood gathering underneath his fingernails, and he doesn’t care for any of it. Each sting of pain is both relieving and maddening at once. The buildup of frantic energy in his chest just won’t go away, no matter what he does.
Grace spares a thought for the thing that had triggered this meltdown in the first place. Rocky. The disagreement they’d had. Grace lashing out unfairly. Is it going to be like this for the rest of the trip? Will he always be irritated, a lit fuse ready to go off? How many times will he explode before Rocky decides that being his friend just isn’t worth all the trouble?
Every single one of his muscles is tense as he finally slides down to the ground, legs sore from all the pacing. He asks hoarsely for the time, and Mary tells him that he had, in fact, been pacing for several hours. No matter how much he strains himself, no matter what he hits or how hard he hits it, he can’t get that awful buzzing feeling to stop.
The air feels thin. Grace knows, intellectually, that he’s not running out of oxygen. But if that’s true, then why’s it so hard to breathe?
–
Deep down, Rocky's always known that they can't fix every single one of Grace's problems, no matter how much they'd like to. Grace is dealing with a situation that no human ever has before, a situation that he is woefully unequipped to handle. He's quite literally not built for this.
So, this type of reaction is not surprising. Isolated and trapped in a space far too small, Grace becomes stressed, irritable, over-sensitive. The only solace there is that the thinking machine says it's normal for humans to feel that way, so at least Grace is still within expected parameters for his species, in a manner of speaking. In a much more real sense, though, Grace is already very far outside of expected parameters for his species, and the consequences of that are really starting to show.
And Rocky can't fix that. There are ways that they can help, but there's nothing they can do about the underlying issue. So they worry, anxieties singing in their mind on repeat, and they try as hard as they can to focus on the things they can fix.
But Grace is just like them. Stubborn. He mirrors Rocky in all the qualities they both love and hate to see mirrored. It's why they get along with him so well, and it's also why this whole argument even had to happen.
All they'd wanted was for Grace to treat the wound on his hand. There was absolutely no reason for him to leave it the way it was, and even though it seemed small, it could easily end up getting infected. Maybe they were being a little overbearing - a tendency that they just can't seem to curb where Grace is concerned - but they'd thought that they were being perfectly sensible and that Grace was being needlessly careless.
“Why do you have to be so paranoid?!”
Grace seemed to regret it the moment it left his mouth, but he didn't say another word, not to apologize or to take it back. There were a thousand things that Rocky could've said to counter it, to argue their own point. They could've let it go, too, or even stopped to ask if Grace was okay since the yelling was so out of character for him.
They didn't do any of that. Instead, they retreated, wanting to deal quietly with the hurt that the statement had caused. It wasn't fair of Grace to lash out at them when he knows very well why Rocky is always so concerned about him. It wasn't fair of him to say something so cruel, and so loudly, too. Why doesn’t he get how important it is to take care of himself? Why does he have to be so flippant about how own health when losing him might break Rocky’s spirit for good?
So maybe it also wasn't fair of Rocky to keep their distance from Grace without saying anything when the night came. And maybe it also wasn't fair of them to let him lie in his bed the way he did, half-awake and trying not to cry all night. They still watched him, of course, but they could admit to themself that they could’ve handled the whole thing a little better.
But maybe that was just the way that things had to go. Unfair for them both. Neither of them could bring themselves to address anything with the other, and so everything stayed horribly stagnant, anything they could've said hanging in the stifling air.
However, in the morning, Rocky worries that Grace still won't be feeling fair, and it’s their turn to sleep. They decide that, just in case, it's better for them to ask if he'll watch. Just to make certain that Grace isn't so stubborn that he'll completely ignore their shared commitment. It’s less important for him culturally, they’re aware, so they feel a need to check in on it. They haven't needed to verbalize this request in a while, so they hesitate a little, speaking it out awkwardly. “Grace… watch me sleep, question?”
Grace looks devastated at the words. “Yeah, of - of course. Of course I will.” He sounds so sad, and his smile is so obviously fake. Rocky knows what Grace looks like when he’s feeling guilty - that emotion seems to be a constant companion, especially when he talks about his initial refusal to leave Earth - and that expression is framed perfectly on his face right now. Seeing it, the proper approach becomes clear in Rocky’s mind.
The question was never whether or not things between them could be fixed. It has to be fixable, that’s non-negotiable. As they keep telling Grace, they’ll always fix anything they can and even some of the things they can’t. That’s just what they do. And now that they can see more clearly how Grace is feeling, the necessary steps in the repair process come into greater focus.
This repair won’t be so hard, they think, because all of the foundations are still there and holding strong. They care for each other, and they work around each other’s social customs, and they feel sad when they hurt each other. This fight is just a crack in the surface of an otherwise solid structure, and patching it up will be easy with the right material and a precise touch.
Rocky would love to share this realization with Grace, but they’ve already put off their rest for too long, leaving them no time to do so before they fall asleep.
–
Grace isn’t exactly thinking clearly about the passage of time, so when he hears Rocky start to wake up, he thinks it could’ve been either seconds or hours since he slid down to the floor. He’s got his head between his knees and his eyes squeezed tightly shut.
“... Grace, what is wrong, question?”
Rocky still sounds hesitant, and Grace doesn’t know what to do with that. He feels like he’s guilt-tripping Rocky with this breakdown he’s having, but it’s not like he can just stop having it. He can’t find the right words to describe everything that’s off with him, but things definitely aren’t right, that he can say for sure. Breathing’s wrong, heartbeat’s wrong, thoughts are wrong. Hands, legs, head, everything hurts. The manic energy in his chest still has nowhere to go.
Rocky lets out some notes that are too quiet for the translator and walks away in the direction of the airlock. All Grace can do while he waits for Rocky to return is try and fail to get himself back under control. He feels like nothing but a big tangle of bad feelings, and there’s no way for him to fix it, and he can’t breathe.
He hears the sound of Rocky walking closer, the xenonite suit tapping against the floor. Is he really going to go out of his way to help Grace yet again when all he’s done is be rude and unfair? When Grace is clearly still unstable and wouldn’t trust himself to string together a proper sentence?
Rocky doesn’t say anything, he just comes up to Grace’s side and lays an arm around his shoulders. The chords he’s humming don’t mean anything, but they’re familiar, something Grace has learned to recognize as comfort vocalizations, like a hush or a wordless lullaby. The vibration of it feels nice against Grace’s back, and he can feel it sapping away the frantic buzzing in his body. “I’m sorry,” he says once the ability to form words returns to him. “I shouldn’t’ve called you paranoid. I don’t think that. I get why you worry.”
“I know. Was hurt, at first, but Grace is just acting like trapped animal acts.” Grace could take offense to the ‘animal’ comparison, but Rocky’s not exactly wrong. That’s what he is, isn’t he? An animal rattling against the bars of a cage? “Stress is expected. Rocky cannot fix that feeling, cannot bring air or space or freedom to the ship, but can still be here when Grace needs. Is not enough, but will do anyway, until we reach Erid and even after. Grace may be trapped, but never alone.”
Grace takes a deep breath, then another, then another. He wants to ask why Rocky still puts up with him, why he’s being so kind and forgiving, but he doesn’t get a chance to before the answer hits him.
Some of it is friendship, some of it is love, but the thing that Grace has come to realize is that they are now, for better or for worse, completely and fully intertwined. There’s no ‘Grace’ without ‘Rocky’, and there’s no ‘Rocky’ without ‘Grace’. No wonder Rocky is so quick to forgive; in his mind, the pain of harsh words pales in comparison to the potential agony of loss. And how can Grace blame him? He feels the exact same way. He, too, would forgive Rocky for just about any transgression if it meant they’d still be together the next day.
Knowing that, the full picture starts to come together in Grace’s mind. “I’ll be more careful. I just… I’m sorry I’m being so difficult. Sometimes I’ll be unreasonable. But when you’re concerned about me, I’ll listen better.”
Rocky shifts, leaning in for a full embrace, and Grace finally feels himself fully relax. This, or something like it, will almost certainly happen again in the future. But more than ever, Grace is sure that he won’t be alone. Not just because Rocky promised it, but because he knows neither of them could ever willingly disentangle themselves from this bond.
If the worst thing I can do to you is die, then I’ll worry about myself as much as you worry about me.