Work Text:
I wake with a choked gasp. I clutch at my sweat-soaked blankets, sucking in air, as everything slowly comes back to me. I’m safe. Rocky is safe. We’re aboard the Hail Mary in orbit above Erid. I was only dreaming. Dreaming about…
“Nightmare, question?”
I prop myself up on my elbows. Rocky is watching me from his corner of the Hail Mary. Dreams fascinate him. (Eridian sleep is deep and dreamless, which is probably for the best. Since they can’t wake up, they would be trapped within their dreams until their body finally returned to consciousness, many hours later.)
I scrub a hand over my face. “Yeah.”
“What happened in nightmare this time, question?”
“I don’t remember.”
“You moved in your sleep again. You made many distressed noises.”
“Did I say anything?”
I never used to sleep-talk, or at least I don’t think I did. It’s been years since I slept next to someone. Decades, by some counts. Rocky says I scream or moan words in my sleep more often than not, these days. Sometimes I mumble total nonsense. Sometimes I shout for help. And sometimes I call and plead for Rocky.
“No. Only distressed noises.”
“Okay. Good.” I sit upright, and almost topple back down as dizziness washes over me. My arms wobble under my own weight.
“Grace, question?”
“I’m okay. Just dehydrated.” I lay back down, slower this time. “Computer, water.”
Arms descend and the computer hands me a water pouch. The centrifuge is activated, so we have gravity, but for some reason, the computer has only been giving me pouches lately. It makes it easier to drink laying down, at least.
I curl in bed and take slow, steady sips. Rocky’s carapace is angled towards me, shifting slightly back and forth so he can take me in properly, even as three of his hands are busy fixing something I can’t see.
“How can I help, question?”
“Aw, Rocky. You don’t have to help me with my nightmares. They’re something all humans have to deal with.”
Rocky’s carapace lowers to the ground. I think he’d be glaring at me if he had a face. Or eyes. “You no have nightmares before.”
I should’ve known he’d see right through me. On Earth I never dreamt. When I woke on the Hail Mary, my sleep had been as deep and black as always. Then my memories returned to me. All of them. I think something in my brain broke, and now nightmares plague me constantly.
“I am here when you sleep,” Rocky says. “I watch you crying and calling for help. I watch you making sounds like someone hurting you. You think I like watching, question?”
“I’m sorry. You don’t have to stay and watch that.”
“You think I want abandon my hurting friend, question?”
I peek at Rocky over the edge of my bed. My body has felt weak, carved hollow, for a few days now. But now I really feel like garbage. “No. No… I’m sorry.”
“No more apologies. Tell me how humans help with nightmares.”
I sigh. “As a child, I crawled into my parent’s bed after a bad dream. Touch helps after a nightmare.”
Rocky carapace sinks lower to the ground. “My touch hurts you.”
I feel even worse. I suspect Eridians are a touch-y race, just like humans. They can’t see or smell, and they don’t seem to put much stock in taste at all. Sound and touch are their greatest and most important senses. (I haven’t told Rocky that humans can become emotionally and even physically distressed without touch. It’s not a conversation that would be fun for either of us.)
“Humans comfort each other by talking too,” I say, remember the soft, lilting sound of my mother’s voice, gone fuzzy with age. “My parent would sing to me sometimes.”
My eyes are growing heavy again. I don’t know why I’ve been so tired lately.
“Talk about what, question?”
“I don’t know. Anything. Just having a distraction is enough.” I press my face against my pillow, all the energy draining out of me at once. “Your voice… kind of sounds like singing, anyway.”
I fall asleep before I hear his reply.
Soldiers are dragging me out of Stratt’s trailer. I thrash in their grip, my legs kicking and feet skidding on loose gravel. I lose my balance and almost fall flat on my face. The soldiers haul me back up again.
“Stratt!” I call, trying to twist out of their hold. “Let me go. Please don’t do this. Please!”
I can see her shadow in the window of the trailer, standing vigil over me as I’m taken away. I scream for her, throat going raw, but the figure in the window is unmoving.
I try harder to yank my arms free, but the soldiers are too strong. It’s like being encased in xenonite. I’m carried further and further away from Stratt’s trailer, driven towards the Hail Mary. The airlock hangs open like a yawn. I claw at the hull, fingers numb. The Russian soldiers blur into Dimitir’s brilliant smile. His hands, big and speckled with sun-spots, drag me towards the Hail Mary’s hungry mouth. Then Dimitri becomes Lokken. Her delicate fingers are like knives in my ribs. Then she becomes Yao. And Ilyukhina. And my students, their faces blurring together, tiny palms relentless against my back.
My students shove me into the Hail Mary and then I tumble down, down, down into nothingness. I flail and reach out, but I’m spinning through empty space. No light or mass can reach me. I’m alone. I’m still falling and falling and--
I fall into my bed.
I blink hard up at the ceiling, heart in my throat. I had never been falling, I realise. Only the feeling of falling, waking me suddenly.
“Another nightmare, question?”
It’s Rocky. He’s by my bedside. Watching me.
“Memory,” I say.
“New word,” he notes. “Type of dream, question?”
I thought we’d shared the word ‘memory’ before. In the years since Tau Ceti and Erid, we shared childhood memories and wishes and fears. I think we did, anyway. My memory is not what it once was. Nothing about me is as sharp or strong as it once was.
Rocky deserves an explanation, but I can’t manage it right now. My brain feels loose in my skull, the world slow and heavy around me. I shiver and curl up tighter on my bed.
Rocky puts down what he has been working on. Without saying anything, he pulls himself onto the bed, the way I climbed into my mother’s bed when I was very little. He’s about the same size as I was when she told me to stop coming to her when I was scared.
This bed is cramped. It was only built for one human, and I’m too weak to shuffle over to make room for Rocky on the mattress, but he doesn’t seem to be bothered by this. He scuttles up the bed and then flops onto my chest, his many arms sprawled on either side of me. All the air goes out of me in a rush.
My hands fly up to steady him. Under my fingers, Rocky’s carapace is weirdly smooth, like volcanic rock, though its pitted and warped in places. The swirls and divots almost feel like scar tissue. I shiver, still cold all the way through, and cuddle closer to Rocky. With Rocky draped against me, his weight tethering me to the mattress, I feel calm for the first time in…
“I am heavy, question?”
Rocky shifts on top of me, as though to stand up. My fingers scramble at his carapace. “No. No, don’t--”
“Grace,” he says.
“Don’t go. Please don’t go, Rocky.”
“I am here, Grace. I stay with you.”
Everything hurts. The cold is making it hard to think again. The ceiling above me dissolves and reveals pockets of starry sky. But no, I realise it’s not space at all. It’s Taumoeba, dancing high above me. Taunting me. I press my face into Rocky’s carapace. The atmosphere is getting sucked out of the Hail Mary, and it’s so hard to breathe, and the world is spinning and spinning as we’re thrown out of orbit and into--
“Grace. Grace! Wake up!”
I open my eyes with a gasp. My lungs are burning. The scarred carapace under my cheek transforms into my sweat-soaked pillow. Rocky isn’t there. Was never there. Could never be there without killing himself.
“Grace,” Rocky says, as he had been saying for some time. “You awake now, question?”
I scrub a hand over my face. My palm comes away wet. “Yeah. Yes. I’m awake. Did I make sounds in my sleep again?” Rocky’s silence answers the question for me. “Sorry. What did it sound like?”
“Normal distressed noises, but worse. Worse worse worse. I always hear quiet noises when you are sleeping. Now, you sounded like…” Rocky pauses, considering. “You are dying again.”
I have spent years dying, starting all the way back when I first met Stratt (though I hadn’t known it at the time). The fear of it never really abated. And I have always been a coward. Maybe that is why my nightmares are so bad.
I’m still so cold. Rocky is rocking back and forth behind the division, in the way that meant he’s watching me closely. He’s abandoned his project in a chaotic mess behind him. If the centrifuge wasn’t engaged, it would be floated unrestrained through his atmosphere.
I find the strength to get out of bed. I manage the few staggering steps between my bed and the xenonite walls. My legs tremble beneath me. Now that I’m surviving primarily on Taumoeba, my body feels heavier and heavier, even though I’m rapidly losing weight.
“Stay in bed! You should rest.”
I shake my head. I couldn’t sleep even if I wanted to.
I collapse against the xenonite wall. Rocky’s atmosphere is many, many times hotter than mine, and the xenonite safely traps the heat within. It’s warm beneath my cheek, like sun-baked stone. I huddle against it, shaking.
“Grace,” Rocky says, voice gone oddly quiet. “You are sick, question?”
“Not sick,” I mumble. “’M just tired… tired tired tired.”
“Your nightmares are getting worse. I will call your medical team, question?”
Ugh, my medical team. While Erid scrambles to find a way for the Hail Mary to land planet-side without breaking up or being crushed by the atmosphere, a medical team has been assigned to watch over my worsening health. They don’t know much about human biology, but they’re doing their best, between Rocky’s reports and what information they can glean from my laptop.
I appreciate the help, but most days, they manage to be worse than Rocky. I’m beginning to wonder if all Eridians are total nags, or if I’m somehow bad enough to keep triggering this reaction.
“I’m fine.” I swallow. My mouth is dry and my tongue feels too big for my mouth. “Just… stay with me?”
Rocky presses a claw against the xenonite, just below my fingers. “Yes. I will watch you sleep.”
I nod, eyes slipping closed. My hand sags and then falls back to my lap. My arms are so numb that it almost feels like another person’s hand against my leg. The closest to real touch that I will get.
“I will stay with you,” Rocky continues. “Then will call medical team again. Eridian’s smartest scientists are focusing all attention on you. You will be okay, Grace.”
I find it harder and harder to pay attention and translate Rocky’s musical tones into English words. The unending melody of his voice makes me sink faster. The sweet rise and fall of his voice. The high and lows of Eridian speech. It’s beautiful.
My mother stopped singing to me when I was very little. I don’t remember the sound of her voice, only the safe, small feeling it invoked in me. I think it felt a lot like this.
“I will stay with you,” Rocky says again. “When you get better, I still stay with you. One day you will leave. You will go where I no follow. But for short period you are in my life, I stay with you and we will be safe together.”
Rocky talks and talks and I take in none of it. My body is numb and weightless, falling forward into the warm echo of Eridian’s atmosphere, drifting off to the melody of Rocky’s voice.