“This means… of Rocky, possessive. Of the speaker.”
“My.”
“Correct. But only for names.”
“So you’re calling me…?”
Rocky repeats the word: “My Grace. Yes.”
“Are there other Graces? Why do you need to specify?”
Rocky considers this, tapping his xenonite-encased claws idly against the floor.
“No other Grace,” Rocky says. “We just do this.”
“Like an honorific,” Grace guesses. “It goes before everyone’s name? Everyone you know?”
Rocky whirs in surprise. “No, no, no. Not at all.”
“Okay, then who? What makes me qualify?”
Rocky is silent for a moment.
“...Does this offend Grace?” he asks, voice lower.
Grace blinks. “No! I don’t think so. Is there a reason to be offended?”
“Good,” Rocky says, relieved. Grace is starting to recognize what Eridian relief sounds like. “No, no reason.”
“Who else do you call that?”
“You don’t have this on Earth?”
Grace considers. What for, friends? He couldn’t call Marissa “my Marissa.” That would be weird.
“I still don’t know what it means,” he settles on. “So I couldn’t tell you.”
Rocky groans in frustration. He’s a very impatient tutor. “We just say it.”
“Are you my Rocky?” Grace asks. He hits the two keys to make the my note.
“I don’t know!” Rocky says. “You decide this.”
“I decide? Who do you use it for?”
“You. Adrian. I will use it for my pebbles.”
Grace blinks. “So few?”
Rocky shifts. “I am… you do not have the word yet. Eridian who works alone often, not close to many other Eridians.”
“What, mechanical engineer?”
Rocky chitters with amusement. “Acceptable.”
“Is Adrian your only friend?”
Rocky draws back, like he’s taken offense. “I have friends. Coworkers. But different.”
So just Adrian. And him.
“This worries you,” Rocky says.
“Adrian is your mate,” Grace points out. “I’m not your mate.”
“Correct. You are not. You do not like to be a mate.”
Grace isn’t sure how to respond to that, so he ignores it.
“I’m your friend,” Grace says.
Rocky hesitates, for a second. “...Correct.”
“Like your coworkers.”
“No.”
Grace sighs, rubbing his hand across his face. Okay, maybe that’s fair. It’s not like he felt about any of his coworkers like he feels about Rocky.
“Best friend,” Grace amends. “You’re my best friend, too.”
Rocky hums. “Acceptable.”
“Just acceptable? Now you are offending me. Can you just explain?”
This makes Rocky fall silent for a minute longer than usual. Grace is half-ready to apologize and to say let’s move on and to retype his own name without the superfluous my.
“The Earth ‘best friend’ is not strong enough,” Rocky says finally. “It does not translate this way.”
Grace runs his fingers through his hair, a little nervous, for some reason. “Okay.”
“It is…” Rocky pauses. He has to pause more often, now that they’re not using the translator, to simplify his language. “It means that I am not Rocky without my Grace. You are part of… of the whole. When I wake up, I think of you. When I work. When I eat. When I think I am going to die.”
Rocky speaks slowly, but it’s still a lot of Eridian for Grace to grasp all at once. Even as he works out the sentences in his head, he can feel hot tears rising in his eyes.
“It means that when you are sick, I am sick,” Rocky continues. “And it means I will take care of you, because taking care of you is taking care of myself.”
Grace bunches up his sleeve, wiping it across his face, blinking furiously.
Rocky’s voice is soft. “So Grace is part of Rocky. Grace is like a cell. You see? My Grace.”
Grace is quiet, for a moment, trying to get himself together. When he speaks, his voice is shaky.
“...Oh.”
Rocky hums, pressing his carapace gently against Grace’s arm. “You are leaking. Does this make you sad?”
Grace shakes his head, sniffing, crossing his arms across his knees and resting his chin on his sleeves. “Not at all.”
“Good, good.”
“I feel like that,” Grace mumbles. “Just like that. Just exactly—exactly like that.”
“About your old mate?”
“Don’t act stupid. You know I’m talking about you.”
Rocky hums, burrowing closer. Grace curls one arm around his carapace. That’s not enough, so he leans over, dropping his head down so his forehead presses against the xenonite.
“My Rocky,” Grace whispers in English.
“My Grace,” Rocky echoes in Eridian. Grace can recognize the note at the start. He will add it when he plays Rocky’s name.
“How long have you called me that?” Grace asks. “Must’ve been a while. I didn’t notice it change.”
they were just trying to help, simon
this is my propaganda for feral simon. just woke up from what he thought was certain death, marked and marred by the thing that consumed him, has no understanding of what's going on... imprisoned by an alien species and deeply paranoid, desperate to regain some control over the world around him.
i also believe grace is allowed to be scary. the human who gave up humanity in favor of an alien race. fiercely protective of eridians and the space he carved out with them. deeply selfish and willing to do many things to protect what he has, the bravest of cowards, even if the guilt his actions will weigh on him later.
a deeply underrated part of the gay taylor swift conspiracy theories is that if they're right and she really has spent over a decade sending subliminal messages based on minute details for people to decode then she's uuuuuh. I mean she's insane. she's jigsaw. she's the riddler. her dad bought her career because if she didn't have music to distract her she would have started building deathtraps.
Something I don’t think I’ll ever be over, is how Yao and Ilyukhina died for nothing, and yet at the same time, *didn’t.*
Because they both volunteered to board the Project Hail Mary to search for a solution to astrophage, they were both willing to die in order to give the rest of humanity a fighting chance of making it.
And they both died before ever even seeing Tau Ceti.
And it feels so unfair, because they went all that way for nothing, they died without even getting to try and save the people they were going for.
So they died for nothing.
Except they DIDN’T.
Because their deaths saved Grace, and in turn, saved Rocky and Erid. Without the surplus coma slurry, Grace wouldn’t have been able to go back and take Rocky home, and Erid would have had a much harder time with astrophage.
This isn’t particularly coherent, but I can’t stop thinking about these two people who were willing to die for their world, died before getting the chance to fight for their species survival, and yet their deaths meant the sole survivor of their crew could save both their home, and another.
There’s just something so devastating about that to me.
Stratt is so much meaner in the book, when she tells Grace he's going on the mission, and I love it. It's so effective. Because Stratt isn't mean. Not to anyone else. She's brusque and ruthless, but she often chooses to be kind, when she can afford to be. She's not cruel.
Except in this one scene. She tears Grace apart, she lies to him to make it hurt more, because she's furious with him. Because he's disappointed her so profoundly. Because he couldn't do the right thing, and now she has to tear her heart out of her chest to do it for him. If he had only been brave enough to do the right thing, she could have said goodbye. Her last memory of her best friend could have been of somber solidarity, of pride in their shared purpose. But no. And now she has to live with the memory of him begging her for his life instead. She has to remember telling him no.
rocky always yells “enrichment for grace! enrichment for grace!” when he has a new invention to make the humans time more interesting on erid. grace, while appreciative, replies ‘I know I’m in a zoo enclosure but could we maybe not call it that? I feel like a bear getting thrown a pumpkin covered in peanut butter.’ rocky simply gives him a thumb, not wanting to explain that a significant amount of the population sees grace as the celebrity savior scientist who rocky keeps as a controversially young trophy wife and publicly lavishes in gifts
kianamaiart
theartofmadeline
ellievsbear
origamiaround
blakekathryn
