You may call me Archer (this one is constant and preferred), or you can refer to me based on my fictionkins! (Vani, Luci, and Ryland!)
I use they/them. I am okay with masculine terminology (guy, dude, king, man (as slang)), but please DO NOT use he/him for me! I am not a boy!! I simply am masc aligned!
I'm some form of fox alterhuman. Please please PLEASE call me a fox!!! I will scream/pos
I tend to reblog a LOT based on my current fixations, so you will know what I am interested in. If you're looking for my own original content, that will be posted under #Archer posting !
…okay so what if the problem with the taomeba never happened on the way back home. What if the radiation never got onto the Blip-A. What if Rocky ended up back on Erid, and Grace made it back to Earth. What if they missed each other desperately forever.
What if Grace made a lopsided crochet Rocky and cuddled it every night.
What if Rocky couldn’t stop making xenonite puppets of his alien friend.
What if I made myself cry, what about that? Huh? What then?
grace is the same man who wrote a paper and called a section ‘why the Goldilocks zone is for idiots’ (AND HE WAS FUCKING RIGHT) and called someone, a very high remarked scholar in the science field, a ‘staggering waste of carbon’… and also wanted to give stratt a piece of his mind for shipping him off to space
plus he literally threw shit during the astrophage experiments and when he found out abt the taumoeba leak
also more for book people, Dr. Lokken, their first interaction… was just them bitching abt possible evolution or astrophage and whether or not its possible that it could be connect to earth. :)))
anyways. Yes, grace can be a sopping wet cat. But he was also in academia which means you gotta stand by what you believe is right. And then he got shunned from it and became a school teacher who dealt with rowdy kids, kids who start fucking puberty (that shit is scary and an emotional ride), and then he was the second in command of the petrova task force.
Grace and Rocky, giving a tour of the Hail Mary to fascinated Eridian scientists and diplomats.
Pointing at things and explaining what they are and how the ship works, lots of awed and appreciative noises are made.
Until one of the visiting Eridians points out a specific item. “And that?”
It’s a strange, circular thing, a xenonite disk mounted upright on some sort of pivot so it can spin freely, but around the edges it has… spokes? Pegs? Sticking out of it, that hit against a stiff flap that would slow down the spinning.
It is also separated into sections decorated with crude etchings of a human and an Eridian.
“Ah,” Grace says.
“That,” Rocky says.
“That’s. Um.” Grace seems somewhat embarrassed. “That’s the sacrifice wheel.”
The Eridian visitors clearly do not know what to make of that. “We think we misunderstood Savior Grace’s word,” they say, apparently hoping this is a vocabulary mix-up. “Explain (question, polite)?”
“Didn’t misunderstand,” says Rocky, sounding very sheepish. “That is sacrifice wheel.”
“So. While we were on our way to Erid, we might have gotten… anxious about each other’s well-being,” Grace says, which everyone is already very aware is a wild understatement. “And, well, you heard what happened at Tau Ceti, and after. There were a lot of unexpected dangers for the whole trip that required a lot of, at least, attempted self-sacrifice to solve. We ended up almost dying for each other several times. And we had an argument about what we’d do if another crisis like that came up. And we couldn't agree.”
“Grace argued that Grace already was unlikely to survive long-term on Erid, so he should be the one to do any potential deadly but necessary maneuvers to make sure I was able to bring taumoeba back,” Rocky says.
“Which made sense.”
“Did not make sense! Grace already sacrificed so much for me and for Erid, wouldn’t be fair to make you do it again—“ Rocky cuts himself off with a huff. They have obviously had this conversation before. “So sacrifice wheel was compromise.”
“Yeah,” Grace says. He spins it to demonstrate; it whirls around in a blur and a rattle of the flap hitting the pegs, then eventually slows down, and stops—pointing at the segment depicting a very bad but very clear image of an Eridian. “Rocky made the wheel, I spin the wheel, and whoever it lands on, that’s who gets to sacrifice themself to save the other and the other person does not get to argue. This way, we wouldn’t waste time debating who does the self-sacrifice and who survives, it’s just a plain fifty-fifty chance. Or, eighteen-eighteen chance in base six. But the point is it could be either of us and we would have to accept the outcome.”
Rocky started fidgeting while Grace was explaining. When Grace finishes, proud of the equitable solution they came up with to allow them to die for each other fairly, Rocky says, “Now that we are back and we don’t need sacrifice wheel anymore… I have confession to make. About the wheel.”
“What about the wheel?”
Rocky doesn’t answer. Grace frowns, first confused, then suspicious, and spins the wheel again.
It lands on Rocky again.
He spins the wheel again, and again, and again, and it lands on Rocky every single time.
“Rocky!”
“I weighted the wheel,” Rocky admits.
“Rocky the whole point was that it was equal, that was why we even made it—“
“Never was necessary so doesn’t matter anymore!”
“But you WOULD have!”
“And you never noticed because you were hungry and cranky and distracted and so would have done bad job on heroic self-sacrifice anyway!”
“I would not! I would have done fine!”
(The Eridian scientists and diplomats are still here watching this btw. Slowly dawning on them that 1) these two are extremely not normal about each other 2) if Erid ever does another space mission they NEED to send a therapist aboard because this is what happens when they don’t)
Obsessed with Rocky being the equivalent of a middle aged man who's been stuck in outer space alone for fifty years, and when he finally finds someone else out there in the cosmos with him, who is it?
A weirdly tall, fleshy child that just so happens to be a science genius.
⋆˙⟡ 𝚃𝚑𝚎_𝙸𝚗𝚜𝚊𝚗𝚎_𝙰𝚛𝚝𝚒 @archerisinsane - Tumblr Blog | Tumgag
