time travel au of grace going back in time to the vatt after living his life on erid are so fun. i need this guy to be extremely weird. i need him to eat everything in sight, snacking 24/7. he's hugging co-workers that don't even like him and whose names he can't remember. to speak of can't remember, he's forgotten about how other humans smell, and keeps actively sniffing carl like a badly socialized daschhund. he's touching grass and crying about it. he keeps breaking into yáo and ilyukhina's rooms to watch them sleep and hover like a glemlin. ilyukhina socks him in the face while half-asleep. he's so normal about the touch of another human being he ends up sobbing while she squints at him, half making fun of him and half worried - it's not as if it was that strong of a punch. he's able to speak english still only because he's been teaching it to eridian linguists for ages. but the thing is, his sound control is way off after decades assimilating to eridian sonority, so he ends up whispering, and yelling, and vocalizing his speech on different levels, sort of life he's got damaged hearing. which he does have now, as far as he's concerned, after going without his cochlear implants to hear eridian soundwaves for the first time in ages. because a good percentage of his body was replaced with a xenonite exo-skeleton and implanted assistive technology over the years (built by rocky, naturally), so he's winning at dysphoria as if dysphoria were a competition. he's forgotten about knocking. he's forgotten what it's like not to be a world-saving alien living in an extremely controlled environment, and keeps getting whiplash from being treated casually, and not like a revered figure, and then feeling like an ass about it. also notices for once the amount of authority granted to him on the project, from sheer familiarity with authority. was it always like this? he keeps getting headaches because of being unused to even this weak sunlight, but he does still keep going outside whenever he can. guzzles different drinks like it's the last time he's going to be drinking vending machine fanta, and cries about that too. keeps hiding away to do it, however, because seeing people eat at the cafeteria turns his stomach. but he is in considerably less in pain than usual, though, and his coordination is somewhat better without all the brain damage, so there's a plus! he does still move like an old man. he thinks like an old man. or, rather, an old hybrid creature - not human entirely, never wholly eridian, but some in-between mingling. he misses rocky and adrian more than it should be possible, more than the mechanized limbs, more than anything. but it is an old soul's thinking; it's a missing that is filled over, overbrimming with faith. the last thing he remembers it being watched by them, as their thrum sang through his bones. they were harmonized with the failing of his organs; they were together, in-togetherness, in a way that lingers and fortifies him and means he is never quite alone.
he looks at stratt, and can't believe how very much more alone than him she is.
