Imagine you are Adrian, you are childhood sweet hearts turned loving married couple with the smartest most handsome silliest eridian you know, the love of your life, tune to your melody, Rocky.
But Erid is dying, eridani is slowly dimming, thankfully your planet is insulated and you have time and heat to make enough astrophage to use as fuel to create your worlds first foray into the intergalactic (and space in GENERAL). Your beautiful silly smart mate is a renound engineer, so he volunteers to go into the unknown, where you can't even see because eco location renders you blind in deep space. He leaves but thankfully has company with the other 30~ eridians including his best friend whom you also cherish.
Years go by. Then more years go by. And more. Almost 50 years past and the entire planet hasn't heard back from the crew of the blip-a. Your partner has died in deep space, or at least that's what everyone tells you. They tell you to move on but you can't. You spend your days looking up into the deep space that took your Rocky from you. You mourn.
THEN BAM!!! ALIEN SPACE SHIP IN ORBIT???? HELLO??????? The incredulity of it almost stuns you, but then they tell you. They tell you Rocky is here, he came home. He was the only one to survive. Everyone else died beside him, and he was stuck for 47 years, alone, orbiting a foreign star, with nothing but psychological tormenting silence and the corpses of his crew.
But he came back to you, with an alien. An alien who is dying.
So much is happening and when you finally reunite with Rocky, he is changed. Different, burned broken carapace, strange grammatical structure, alien body language, traumatized, and completely unequivocally co dependent and attached to this tall lanky squishy dying alien.
So you do what you do best, you throw yourself into helping create a massive bio dome for the alien and find a solution for its starvation and slow death, and throughout it all slowly get to know Ryland Grace the alien, and see how much Rocky loves him, how he can't sleep without him, how Rocky always listens to his heart beat.
Maybe at first, if you admit it, you're even jealous.
But time passes, and you learn Grace is silly, and smart, and maybe a bit too leaky to be handsome but he sure can be cute.
And then you all fall in love and everything is great and they literally saved the universe and the alien lives with you now, also you might be a cradle robber but Grace says he's well within maturity for his species so honestly you're just not really gonna think about that rn.
Happened to my friend Adrian the Eridian once.