Grace is a teacher. He knew about all the memes and he enjoyed making jokes and being funny. I can only imagine that when he sent the beatles back he had a video labeled watch first and it's just a Rick roll and then they move to the video labeled watch second and he starts talking and they're like ok finally information and then he's like we saved the planet celebration time and they just hear never gonna give you up playing in the background while he's explaining about taumeoba. The first one was all him, the second however was rockys doing. Stratt is by far the most amused by this everyone else is questioning why they sent grace on this mission.
i need to personally thank whoever invented the phrase Rocky mate bad as hell statement because it has permanently altered the way I think. Rocky mate bad as hell statement REAL.
Jack feels eyes on him as he reaches into the fridge for a carton of milk. When he shuts the door and turns around, Deanna Campbell is standing there.
Mary’s mom.
He hadn’t even heard her come in.
Dean was named after her, but she feels nothing like him. All day yesterday, she’d bounced between easy laughter and casual affection, handing out beers and thumping people on the back hard enough to make them stumble. Then, without warning, something in her expression would flatten, all the warmth draining away as her gaze swept around the room and over all the people in it.
He’d noticed it most around Cas—the frostiness in her voice, and the way her eyes seemed to skate, assessing. At times, she seemed even more suspicious of Cas than the Apocalypse World hunters had been, and they’d fought angels.
The same chill is in her eyes now. He tries for a smile.
Up close, she looks less like Mary. Her hair is the same color, cut short and bouncy, like Scully on The X-Files. But where Mary’s face is broad and dimpled, Deanna’s is narrower, thinner through the cheeks. More delicate at first glance, but whenever she fixes her attention on something, the delicate impression vanishes, and all Jack sees are the sharp lines underneath.
“Uhm, hi. Deanna?”
A smile blooms across her face, wide and lazy, but there’s something just a little too deliberate about it, like she’s chosen to smile rather than simply feeling it. The only person Jack can think to compare it to is Lucifer.
“Hi,” she says. “Jack?”
“Uhm, yeah.” He shifts the carton of milk from one hand to the other, trying to think of something that will make leaving seem less rude. “Milk. Good for the, uh, bones. And it’s low-fat, too, so... Anyway, I should probably go find Bobby before he decides I need extra laps or something. Good talk!”
Before he can make the conversation any worse, he turns on his heel.
“Chocolate is better.”
“Huh?”
He glances back to find Deanna watching him with one eyebrow raised. “Chocolate milk,” she says. “I sent Samuel to buy some.”
A smile tugs at the corner of his mouth. “I like chocolate better, too, actually.”
“Everyone likes chocolate better.”
“Not Sam.”
“Your Sam doesn’t count as everyone.”
That gets a snort out of him.
Her eyes twinkle. “And anyway, low-fat milk isn't enough for a growing kid like you. That Bobby guy is going to wear you down to a nub with the way he was training you earlier.”
The smile slips from Jack's face, heat creeping up the back of his neck. “You were... watching me?”
“Oh, I just happened past,” she says, and he has the distinct feeling that’s a lie. “You have a little trouble with that, don't you? The knife, I mean. You’re actually better with the gun. Why not lean into that?”
Jack looks down at his hands.
An image flashes through his mind: Cas moving through a fight with a blade in his hand, quick and effortless, the knife seeming less like a weapon than an extension of himself, every movement graceful and certain.
“I...” He clears his throat. “It’s kind of a family thing. I guess.”
Deanna pulls a knife from her belt, and Jack is briefly surprised before feeling stupid for being surprised at all.
“Mary was better with a gun, too,” she says. “Then she got obsessed with blades. Must’ve been around twelve.” She winks at him, suddenly bright and animated, bobbing her head as she talks. “she was an awful student. Thought she knew everything. Couldn't take criticism, either. Every time she made a mistake, she’d hole up in her room for hours.”
She extends the knife toward him, her eyes glittering.
“Let’s see how you do for me.”
He takes the knife carefully and tries a few quick flourishes. His fingers immediately tangle themselves up, and he fumbles it so badly the blade slips free and clatters across the floor.
Jack closes his eyes for a second. When he opens them, Deanna is staring at him with a strange expression.
“You’re different than Mary.”
He huffs out a laugh. “You mean I suck even worse than she did?”
“No.”
She retrieves the knife before he can and slips it back into her belt. Then she's studying him again, and Jack gets the uncomfortable feeling she’s seeing something he can’t.
“The difference is that Mary never cared that much if she looked like an idiot.”
Jack shifts his weight. “I don’t care.”
Deanna raises an eyebrow.
“Okay,” he admits. “Maybe a little.”
A half-angel ought to be good at blades. Good like Cas.
“Here’s the thing, Jack. You're paying more attention to the technique than what you’re trying to do.”
“Isn’t that how you learn?”
“Not for someone like you.” She turns and yanks open the fridge. “That’s how you waste a lot of effort.”
She starts pulling vegetables out of the fridge and stacking them on the counter. Carrots. Celery. Onions. Enough to feed an army. The fridge had looked like this ever since she and Samuel arrived, suddenly crammed with fresh food and neatly labeled containers.
Jack isn’t quite sure what to make of her. A minute ago she's studying him like a suspect. Now she’s unloading vegetables on the table.
Maybe this is her way of ending the conversation.
He turns to go.
“Not so fast, Jack.” Another thunk—sack of potatoes. “You’re helping me.”
“Helping you?”
She drops a cutting board onto the counter.
“Yes. Cooking. My way.”
“Why?”
For the first time since she’d cornered him in the kitchen, the smile she gives him looks entirely genuine.
“Because you’re overthinking it. Practice will just make you worse. You don’t need to learn how to hold a blade.”
She reaches into the knife block, pulls out a chef’s knife, and sends it skidding across the counter way faster than he expects.
He catches it without thinking, the handle settling neatly into his palm. Easily. Gracefully, even.
Something warm flashes across Deanna’s face. “You just need something to do with it.”
mmm cant stop thinking about this post, specifically that grace is the only one who wants physical touch but that rocky engages in it for grace's sake. it's such an awesome lens to remember to view rocky's actions through because he really is bending over backwards to make grace comfortable.
i love rocky having no natural desire or drive for touch, and i love the thought of him developing one during the trip to erid. humans need touch and rocky will move heaven and earth to give grace whatever he needs.
i can see rocky coming to resent the xenonite barrier because the lack of direct contact hurts grace. getting frustrated with himself because he knows it's not rational and that grace is being stupid stupid whenever he bumps the panels and sighs that he wishes they weren't there. want grace rocky to die painful, question?! but even after he waves grace off he sits and ponders how to make the panels thinner, more flexible, pushing the limits of eridian technology.
i can see him starting to yearn for closeness so he can cure grace's "touch starvation." the form-fitting suit was built so nothing like what happened on adrian will ever happen again and so when the hail mary starts to complain about her old age he can patch her up. but of course the moment the suit's passed rocky's stress tests grace is throwing his arms around him and rocky has a long long long long long to-do list but he'd rather rip his carapace in half than end the hug a second before grace is full.
he doesn't care about touch. it does nothing for him and means nothing to him. touch is also the single most important problem he has to solve. eridians can make food, eridians can replicate earth, but eridians can never press their carapace against human flesh.
listening to grace waste away, listening to him curl up against the xenonite, listening to him trying to hide his tears as he warbles about how he wishes things were different makes him want to break through the airlock again.
touch has no significance to eridians, but rocky still scoots closer.
Listening to Andy Weir talk about eridians is so funny because fans are always talking about Rocky and Adrian as these “soft” adorable aliens but Weir won’t ever let us forget that their species are apex predators on their planet. Not like humans who became apex predators by inventing weapons, but natural top of the foodchain like lions or polar bears. So far I haven’t found an interview where Weir explains who ate eridians in the ancient past that caused them to watch over each other while they slept; another predator species or rivaling eridians.
Grace is joking around with a selectively violent creature that can rip his soft squishy body apart in an instant!
But it’s also a lot of fun to hear Weir talk about all the stuff he wants to include in a possible sequel, like the fact that eridians can have several conversations at once even with the same eridian. He imagine Rocky and Adrian bickering in one conversation while having a nice conversation at the same time that slowly turns into a fight and all of a sudden they’re yelling at each other in two conversations about different things.
He also says they have terrible spacial memory because they can see everything around them all the time thanks to their echo location so to them it’s crazy that humans can only see in one direction but still remember what’s behind them and even what the last room they were in looks like. Apparently eridians mostly just remember that the room exists and that it has the computer in it but if you asked them where the computer is placed in the room they’ll struggle to give a precise answer.
And Rocky got scared when Grace hugged him because eridians don’t have a concept of expressing affection with physical touch. To them it’s only neutral or violent because thanks to their hard shell they can’t really feel much. They only use it to move each other around or to break through their prey’s shell to get to the soft insides. So in their inter-species friendship only Grace would feel any desire to touch Rocky. It makes it very cute that Rocky joins in on Grace’s hugging ritual. It’s purely for Grace’s sake.
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