Book Rocky is so, so chewy because he's this deeply logical genius who doesn't let his emotions make choices for him (or so he tells himself, because it ends up being very easy to find a cold hard reason to do most everything he does), and doesn't like to linger on what he's been through even though it keeps making its way into casual conversation, and is so blase about experiencing the closest thing to hell his home planet has probably ever heard of but also so clearly traumatized and terrified and haunted but there's still the mission, and there's still the possibility of getting home with a solution so he has to keep himself together and be level headed and calculating and he does that. he does that very well. But then there are moments, like Adrian and the oxygen and Grace missing their timings and the leak and the tunnel and realizing that one of them has to die, where it slips, and he breaks, and he can't make it make sense it a way that's detatched from him and his pain and his fear and his love, and he acts on them. And it nearly kills him every time, because he should know by now that space doesn't care about anything but logic, but he forgot that for a moment among the blaring alarms and the deafening pound of Grace's heartbeat and the searing smoking cold and the silence and the silence that was all he knew for so many years, and it doesn't matter that he's been holding everything together for decades, because one mistake is all it takes, one bad risk, one terrified impulse, to undo everything.
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