bec | mid 20s | he/him | lover of bats, book hoards, and bad puns | fic writing sideblog is here-be-booker | here-be-bec on ao3 | here_be_bec on dreamwidth
grace like "okay buddy hear me out because you are nOT gonna like this. I gotta heat my food. It's the literal evolutionary basis of my people. We have two options."
love that Grace dresses business casual as a teacher, but when the astronauts are touring the place, he jas to cover his silly science shirt, implying that he thinks you need to dress appropriately to work at a middle school but not when working ina high tech lab on a high stakes international collaboration to save the world
written for the @juneofdoom day one prompt: unfair fight
warnings: descriptions of flashbacks and panic attacks
word count: 2303
read it on ao3 here.
When nightmares drive Grace to avoid sleep for far longer than he should do, Rocky decides to adopt a new strategy to help him.
Grace had known that eridians were strong. It was one thing to know that as a fact, however, and another thing entirely to experience first-hand.
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"Rocky!"
Grace was shouting the word before he was even really awake enough to realise what he was saying. Unfortunately, he was also not awake enough to have fully forgotten the motivation behind it, images of how his friend might ignite in his oxygen-rich atmosphere still lingering in his mind's eye.
"Rocky is here," the voice– the chords– came from somewhere next to him, finally doing the job that Grace's panicked wheezing hadn't been able to do and dispelling the nightmare for good. There were no wailing notes of pain behind them, no high-pitched screech; just the usual steady timbre that Grace would expect from the eridian.
Rocky was fine. There wasn't any emergency. Adrian was long behind them, and the two of them had survived.
Grace focused on that thought, struggling to wrestle back control of his breathing. It took him longer still to really comprehend where he was and what Rocky was up to, even after he had forced himself upright and blinked away the worst of the grogginess - he wasn't used to seeing the eridian running around outside of the ball, and certainly wasn't used to having him be able to get close enough to try and provide some kind of physical comfort.
Rocky, xenonite suit catching the lights above them, had huddled into his side, far closer and warmer than he had been able to when he had been restricted by the xenonite ball. It was nice. Grounding, even.
"Nightmare," Rocky stated once Grace had gotten his breath back, and Grace nodded despite the fact that the eridian wasn't really looking for clarification. By this point, it was not as uncommon an occurrence as it had been a few months ago when they'd started their journey towards Erid. In fact, nightmares had been making an increasingly regular appearance during the night-cycle that Grace had adopted.
Grace wasn't stupid, despite the recent accusations that Rocky had thrown at him for occasionally avoiding sleep. He knew that having increasingly dire nightmares was normal for someone who had been through as much as he had.
Knowing that fact didn't mean he had to like it, however, and soon he was pushing himself even further upright, bracing himself to swing his legs around and off of the bed– only to find himself faced with an immovable force.
Next to him, Rocky had shifted, placing a hand against Grace's shoulder.
"Grace only sleep for two hours," Rocky chimed. "Is not enough."
Grace grimaced, and shrugged off the touch. "I don't think I'm going to be getting any more sleep at the minute, bud," he said. "I need to stretch my legs. Get out of the way, would you?"
Rocky shifted, two of his other arms thudding against the bed in an agitated manner.
"Grace say this last night. And night before! No sleep bad bad bad for Grace."
The two of them stopped and stared at each other – or, rather, Grace frowned at Rocky, and Rocky tilted his carapace towards Grace in a manner that Grace had been interpreting as a hard stare.
Then, when Grace went to push himself up again regardless, Rocky stepped forwards into his space, taking full advantage of being free from the xenonite hamster ball.
The xenonite suit was a new addition, one that had gone through a few iterations already before Rocky had landed on the version he was using now. He'd insisted on making it, refining the design to something more form-fitting in case of emergency, despite Grace's best efforts to reassure him that their journey shouldn't pose any threats similar to what they had faced around Adrian. Not that Grace had been trying too hard, beyond trying to quiet his friend's anxieties – it gave Rocky no excuses not to help with chores like keeping the ship tidy, even if it did give him more opportunities to be a menace.
Grace still found it a little jarring to see his friend moving around in it, and stranger yet to have his friend use to get up in his face.
The two of them had celebrated its creation with a proper hug, which Grace had melted into and then promptly freaked out over. Since then, they'd been working up to maintaining closer and closer contact, Rocky obviously not trusting Grace's reassurances that he was going to be fine.
Until now, that was.
"Rocky!" Grace sputtered, left with no choice but to let the eridian push him further and further backwards until he was lying down flat again. "Hey, cut it out!"
Grace had known, intellectually, that eridians were strong. It was one thing to know that as a fact, however, and another thing entirely to experience firsthand.
Defiantly, he tried to wriggle down the bed and out from underneath Rocky, only for Rocky to immediately hook two of his arms under Grace's and haul him back up into place. Although, maybe 'hauled' was the wrong word to describe it, given how little effort the eridian put into moving him. Despite the gentle grip that Rocky kept on him, there was no chance of escaping it.
"Come on, Rocky," Grace groaned, "stop messing around! I'll go to sleep eventually, I promise. I'm just not tired right now."
"Grace also promise this two nights ago! Only few hours of sleep since then, not enough. Grace lie lie lie." Rocky tilted his carapace upwards, as if realising something, then chittered in a pitch that Grace had come to understand as laughter. "Now Grace lie! Lie down."
Grace sighed.
"Is joke!" Rocky clarified, all-too-pleased with himself, and disappointed at the lack of encouragement that Grace usually provided towards his efforts at human puns.
"Okay, okay, good one!" Grace forced himself to laugh, aware that he might be grinning a little too wide to be convincing. "I'm giving up now. No need to keep–"
Grace cut himself off, trying to pull himself up and away this time.
Even the element of surprise was of no help to him. In fact, he probably found himself the one more shocked out of the two of them, not truly expecting Rocky to keep up his antics for long. As it was, all Grace succeeded in doing in his second bid for freedom was getting himself wedged underneath Rocky's carapace, half stuck on his side, half with his arm trapped underneath him.
Rocky chittered. "Amuse amuse amuse! No problems, if Grace insists, Grace can sleep on front!" he chimed smugly.
Grace didn't bother with a response that time, given how stubborn he knew Rocky could be when he'd made up his mind about something. He settled on gritting his teeth, something that the eridian probably found more disturbing than any barbed words Grace might spit at him, trying to think of anything that might persuade Rocky to see reason.
Above him, the eridian shifted, moving more of his weight onto Grace's back as he seemed to take the human's silence as surrender. It was far from a crushing force, nothing more than a gentle pressure, but something about it still had Grace freezing up.
Grace swallowed. Rocky knew what he was doing, he reassured himself. In the eridian's own words Grace was a 'leaky space blob' - Rocky knew that Grace wasn't as sturdy as he was. But still, as he lay there, he could have sworn the weight above him was increasing even further. It was shifting from a gentle but steady pressure to something more crushing. Something truly inescapable.
Something that seemed to be making it harder and harder to breathe.
"Rocky," Grace managed to get out, "I don't think I can sleep like–"
Rocky made a gentle hissing sound, not dissimilar to white noise. It was the eridian equivalent of a 'shhhhhh'.
"Less talk, less worry, more sleep. Rocky protect."
Right, sleep. That was the whole purpose of this. But grace didn't feel particularly restful, nor did he feel particularly safe, no matter what his friend might insist upon.
In fact, he could feel… a chill?
That didn't make any sense. Rocky should have been an inescapable source of heat, and here he was suppressing a shiver.
Then, he went to clutch the bedsheets, intending to drag them closer towards himself, and found himself clutching at blades of grass.
Wheezing, he forced his head to the side and his gaze upwards, eyes gliding over the sight of a chain link fence and a stormy sky and settling on a faceless figure. That wasn't right either, he knew it wasn't, and yet in his confusion his brain couldn't summon up the answer to who he should be looking up at.
"Sleep," they commanded, but he didn't want to go to sleep. He didn't want to go to sleep, but they weren't going to give him any choice about it. He knew that with as much certainty as he knew that everything about this was wrong, wrong, wrong.
There were hands holding him down, pressing against his spine, his ribs. They'd caught him, and now they would never let him go.
He wouldn't be able to move them. He knew that with certainty, too. Enough so that he didn't even bother to try.
They were going to hold him down until he slept and slept and couldn't wake up even if he wanted to.
The ground beneath him was cold and hard… no. No, there was give to it, a softness that went beyond the texture of grass, but that didn't make any sense. Nothing made any sense.
Why did he have to sleep?
"Please…" he whispered. Whimpered, really, but panic now held him too firmly in its grip for him to care. "Please, I don't want to go. You're killing me. You'll be killing me. Please."
Discordant music chimed overhead, as nonsensical as everything else around him.
"I can't do it, I'm sorry. I don't want to go. I want to live. Please, please."
Desperation had driven him to fight against his breathlessness, but now that overtook him too, and his words failed him. In their place came tears, sobs that escaped between wheezes and distracted him from the fact that there was no longer any weight pressed against him at all.
The hands had disappeared. The grass, too.
There was a bed underneath him, he realised eventually, after exhaustion had slowed his panic to a stop. A bed underneath him, and above him…
Nobody.
Grace blinked. Slowly, he twisted himself around so he could face upwards, appreciating the fact that he could breathe a little easier again.
There was nobody there, he thought to himself, but there should be somebody, there should be–
"Rocky!"
Realisation had him shouting for his friend for the second time that day, sitting bolt upright and looking around the room. His room on the Hail Mary, he could remember, now. It was like he was coming out of a nightmare, except this one hadn't needed him sleeping to sneak up on him.
There was nowhere he was safe from them, then.
Movement caught his attention in the corner of the room before he could start to spiral again, and his gaze landed on his friend. The eridian was inching his way towards Grace, wariness apparent in every hesitant step.
"Grace?" he warbled, as unsteady in his vocalisations as he was in his movements.
"Rocky," Grace repeated himself, although this time out of relief rather than distress. "Rocky, hey, what happened?" He still felt a little distant from everything, a little shaken.
Rocky paused, hunched in on himself. "Apology, apology, apology," he said, maintaining a careful distance from Grace as he spoke. "Rocky hurt Grace. No understand how. Rocky much careful, Grace much precious. Rocky want help Grace with sleep, but Grace upset upset upset. Grace leak. Grace no make sense."
Grace leaned backwards into the pillows, absorbing everything that Rocky had told him and thinking back on what must have happened.
"I…" he began, then failed to summon the words or his courage to explain. "I'm sorry, bud. I must have surprised you. That was just a human thing, like a nightmare." He tried for a smile, but it came out far more wobbly than intended. "Just a silly human thing, that's all. An overreaction."
Rocky was smart. He'd want a better explanation than that, Grace knew. But maybe this time he'd grant Grace a little mercy.
On the floor beside him, Rocky shifted from arm to arm. "Not silly human thing," he finally came out with. "Scary human thing. Grace say Rocky killing him. Why?"
Why.
Well, there it was. No mercy for Grace this time. Rocky wasn't going to let this one go, even if he agreed to drop the topic for the moment.
"I was mistaken," Grace whispered. "I was confused. Sorry, Rocky. You… you reminded me of something bad that had happened to me on Earth, that's all. Something I'd rather not talk about, please."
Rocky uttered a mournful sound, leaning his carapace towards Grace. "Bad, bad, bad," he warbled. "Apology."
"Don't." Grace bit out. "You didn't do anything wrong. I was the one who–" He cut himself off, shaking his head. "Nothing. Let's just forget about it, okay?"
Carefully, Rocky pulled himself up onto the bed. He tapped the sheets twice, shifting from side to side. "Yes," he chimed quietly, almost beyond the range of Grace's hearing. For a moment, he looked as if he might want to settle against Grace's legs, before changing his mind and dropping onto the bed where he stood.
The space between the two of them was only a foot or so, but it felt further. Grace felt the urge to fill it, to shuffle closer, but found himself glued to the bed where he sat.
"I'm going to try and go back to sleep," he lied, and turned away.
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