Work Text:
No, Rocky said later. Rocky not lie for the history books. If Grace kill self doing stupid shit like this, Rocky make sure everybody Erid know. Rocky build probe to send to Earth to tell all humanity: Dr Grace die from stupid preventable accident. Grace save Earth but turn out too stupid to live. Sad sad sad. Wait, if Grace die like this, Rocky WILL lie and tell everybody he die on toilet like Elvis. Earth will put this on Grace Wikipedia forever, because Grace not around to correct Rocky.
“Okay,” I said. “I think I’m… appropriately embarrassed already.”
Rocky made a noise of disagreement that sounded disturbingly like an airhorn. Rocky traumatized now, he said.
“You were traumatized already, man.”
Rocky extra traumatized, Grace fault.
Okay, maybe I deserved that.
.
In my defense, I wasn’t exactly at my best after three years and change in a spaceship that was never built to last this long, steadily making my way through a dwindling food supply.
I wasn’t yet in the throes of full on starvation, but I’d decided early on, at Rocky’s repeated insistence that Erid would be able to synthesize something I could eat, to slowly ramp up the ratio of taumoeba to coma slurry I was consuming. By that point, my diet was about 60:40, but I’d calculated that if I could get down to 80:20 for the last two months of our journey, I’d be able to sacrifice several gallons of slurry for the Eridians to isolate all thirteen essential vitamins. Yum.
(I also had a meager collection of three frozen breakfast burritos, two freeze-dried Russian soups, and two dehydrated veggie stirfries squirreled away behind a wall, like keeping them out of sight would stop me from thinking about them every single freaking day. Which it didn’t, obviously, but it was better than having to look at it.)
On my 60:40 ratio, I was functional but not exactly energetic. The lethargy set in basically as soon as I weaned myself off the real food, but having decreased even my coma slurry to less than half my diet, I was distracted, vaguely irritable, and exhausted even when I hadn’t done more than drag myself up the dormitory ladder to sit with Rocky while he worked.
For some reason, I had decided that the moment had come to do some housekeeping. We were about four months out from Erid then, and I knew that as soon as my body started shutting down from lack of B12 or whatever, I’d probably barely be able to drag myself up to the “bathroom”, let alone clean anything. And I didn’t want my hosts’ first impression of me to be a slob, especially not if they shared Rocky’s feelings on the matter. Rocky had been evasive about how typical his attitude about tidiness was -- I suspected that even by Eridian standards, he was a little bit of a type-A freak -- but this was my second chance at first contact, and I figured it couldn’t hurt.
Despite the total lack of dirt to track in from outside, the corners of my half of the Hail Mary had developed a thin layer of dust -- composed mostly, I’m sorry to say, of my own dead skin cells. It was gross, but only in the same mundane way that drinking my own recycled (and thoroughly filtered) pee was gross. As long as I didn’t think about it, it was basically okay.
While I tackled one corner per day, Rocky was doing his own frenetic Marie-Kondo-ing on his side of the partition. Anything xenonite objects deemed unnecessary would be recycled back into his main stash, ready to be reused as needed. Sometimes I think he was remaking the same stuff from scratch and then recycling it out of pure boredom. Of course, whenever he needed a break from that, he would pause to critique my cleaning.
Grace miss a spot, he said, pointing to my latest corner. I’d worked my way up to the lab by then. Still need cleaning. Thought lab was supposed to be clean and sterile.
I rolled my eyes so far into the back of my head that it almost gave me a headache. Possibly that was the deficiencies talking. “I’m not done, I just have to get something to clean it with.” I was wedged between a lab bench and the wall, where some taumoeba… waste had spilled over the top of the lab bench early in my experiments into how to make it easier to digest, and never been cleaned up. Not live taumoeba, just the poop. I’d been trying to figure out how to separate them for the sake of cleanliness and -- anyway, it had been a bad day, and while I'd cleaned the lab bench, I'd apparently forgotten to clean the wall in my eagerness to sponge myself down. I’d never wished for a shower more. In the months since, the waste had crusted itself to the textured metal of the wall and seemed completely resistant to scrubbing with a wet cloth. I needed something stronger.
I pushed myself to my feet, fighting the inevitable moment of dizziness, and went to rummage around in the cleaning supplies. Most of my equipment could be cleaned with detergent and water, but that obviously wasn’t going to cut it. At the very back of the shelf, I found what I was looking for: a spray bottle of Clorox.
Rocky coming over there to help clean, Rocky said, clunking around on the other side of the airlock. I knew he’d been working on various different suit designs, but none of them met with his approval yet to be tested in my atmosphere, and I sure didn’t want him to try until he was absolutely certain.
“Not sure how you’re planning to help, but sure,” I said. As I clambered back to the soiled wall and got to spritzing and scrubbing on my hands and knees, I barely registered the hint of warmth and slight scent of cat pee that often accompanied the hiss of the airlock. I was noseblind to it by now, like the seventh grade history teacher who thought no one knew that he smoked because he couldn’t smell it on his own clothes. Sorry I never got around to breaking the news to you, Mr. Morton, but we all knew.
Rocky provide moral support, Rocky said, bumping the ball against my feet. I couldn’t see him, shoved as I was into the narrow space between the bench and the wall, but it was kinda nice to know he was there.
The Clorox was working to break down the crust of waste, which was good because I was feeling dizzy again. It usually only happened when I stood up, but I had been at this longer than usual, so I decided that as soon as I finished and scrubbed myself off, I’d take a long nap. And maybe I was more claustrophobic than I realized, because I was kind of having trouble breathing back here.
Want to watch more Star Trek later, question? Rocky was asking. No more Deep Space Nine crap, Rocky want to start Voyager again. (Rocky and I have a… difference of opinion on our Star Trek series rankings.)
“Normally yes, but I -- I really don’t feel that great,” I said. I dropped my cleaning rag, which was originally some pants of Yao’s I sacrificed early on because they were too small for me to wear. “Uh -- I think I’m going to throw up.”
Rocky, to his credit, immediately backed up. I pushed myself out of my corner just in time to fumble for a 500 ml beaker and vomit into it. Great, at least I wouldn’t have to scrub the floor too. My head was spinning, and as much as I tried to take a deep breath, my chest wouldn’t cooperate. When I coughed, harsh and hacking, I saw Rocky jump about a foot inside his ball.
Grace! he trilled in alarm, rolling closer even though there was still a line of mucus connecting my mouth to the beaker as I gagged and I know he finds phlegm among the grossest of the fluids produced by the human body. What happening, what wrong, question? Hurt? Injured? Sick?
For a long moment, I couldn’t answer him. Even on hands and knees, the dizziness wasn’t getting better, and the more I fought for a breath, the more my chest began to hurt. Oh man, was I having a heart attack? I didn’t think heart attacks made you throw up.
“I -- I don’t --” I began stupidly, wheezing, and then I looked down at the spray bottle still clutched in my hand as I tried to stabilize myself on the floor. Oh my god.
My vision was beginning to swim, but I didn’t need to be able to see to know what the little text on the back of the bottle said. The active ingredient in Clorox is sodium hypochlorite. Bleach. Which everyone knows absolutely, positively, never should be mixed with ammonia.
I’m so stupid, I thought. I’ve just gassed myself. In the wrong concentration, chloramine gas can be deadly. If I was lucky, the ammonia released from the airlock combined with the generous spritzes of Clorox won’t have been enough to fill the entire ship, but I was too fuzzy to do the math. It’s literally chemistry 101, but I couldn’t think straight. The only thought I could formulate coherently was: I need to breathe.
Grace! Rocky was screaming, so high I could barely perceive the sounds. My own name was familiar enough to pick out even at that octave, but everything else was a jumble. Awake! Stay awake! Grace, what wrong, question? He sounded terrified.
On pure adrenaline, I staggered to my feet, barely catching myself on the lab bench. Chloramine gas is heavy, and once I was above the thickest concentration, I could fight in enough air to speak. “Rocky,” I coughed. “Ox -- I need oxygen. I--” My voice choked off. “I need -- up --”
I needed to get to the control room; the artificial gravity meant the gas wouldn't have reached there yet, at least not at this concentration. As if to punctuate this realization, I threw up again, on the floor this time instead of the beaker, but it was frankly the least of my worries.
Rocky, little genius that he is, understood enough of my gibberish to get the main gist: I needed out of here. Before I even finished heaving up taumoeba, he was scrambling around in his ball, herding me towards the ladder. I stumbled forwards, grabbed a rung, miscalculated because my eyes were swimming, and immediately lost my footing. I didn’t fall directly to the floor and crack my head open, but only because Rocky was right behind me. Instead, I landed hard, tailbone first, on his ball, and slumped of off it to the ground. He was still screaming when my vision went black. My last thought was: After all that, what a humiliating way to die.
.
As I woke up, I spontaneously recovered a childhood memory: I had asthma as a kid. Why did I remember this, you ask? Because my first instinct upon waking up flat on my back with my breath wheezing painfully through my tight, burning throat was to reach for an inhaler that I hadn’t used in over two decades. Possibly over three, depending on how you counted the relativity.
Grace awake, question? a familiar voice sang. Fingers carded through my hair, fingernails scraping comfortingly over my scalp. I pushed my head instinctively into the touch. Gosh, that felt so nice, even if my chest hurt. No one had petted my hair in -- I literally don’t know how long. Linda did, after sex, occasionally, but I don’t know if it ever occurred to me that I could ask for it outside of that. So it was very sweet of Rocky -- wait.
First of all, Rocky doesn’t have fingernails. Those were the pointy little tips of his claws. Second of all, how on earth was he touching me?
I forced my eyes open. The blinky lights of the control panel greeted me, all blurry without my glasses on but recognizable. A moment later, Rocky’s familiar carapace loomed above me, not encased by a ball, but by a glittering matrix of tiny little xenonite triangles about the size of my fingernails. (Yeah, that's a new measurement even by American standards, but I wasn't fully conscious yet.) I stared. Was this all some gas-induced hallucination?
“Rocky,” I rasped. My voice sounded weak and oddly muffled, even to my own ears. There was something on my face. I tried to reach for it, but my body felt oddly disconnected from my brain. It felt like I was wearing a KN-95. A moment later, my hand cooperated enough to reach up, but Rocky pushed it away, surprisingly gentle for all his strength.
No take off, he said firmly. Grace needs mask for at least ten more minutes. For safe air.
“What?” I asked, still muffled. A moment later, as my eyes focused, I realized that Rocky had deconstructed one of the extra EVA suits stored in the control room, which was lying, tattered, on the ground beside me, in order to get to the oxygen tank. This time, he let me lift my hand and feel my face. He’d hooked me up to the tube with some kind of makeshift xenonite mask over my face, complete with little straps behind my ears. It must have taken incredible delicacy to be able to get it on me -- as I stared hazily up at him, I realized that the new suit even had little gloves built in with even tinier planes of xenonite stretched over each of his claws.
“How -- what happened? How are you--?” I coughed pathetically. “You’re out of the ball, how--”
Rocky had to go back and get new suit experiment, no time for testing, he said, gingerly moving his limbs around. It seemed a little constricting, but it certainly afforded him more freedom than the ball. Could not get Grace up here without it. Grace unconscious. Bad.
I felt around for my glasses until Rocky took pity on me and put them in hand. I shoved them onto my face. “How long was I out?” My head was throbbing and every breath hurt all the way from the bottom of my lungs to my nasal cavity, but I didn't feel like I was actively dying anymore. My dry mouth also tasted like partially digested taumeoba, which was extremely unpleasant.
1,186 seconds. Not know… not know when Grace wake up. If Grace wake up.
I realized, abruptly, that he was quivering all over. “I'm okay,” I rasped. “You did good. You saved me.”
Rocky not chemist, he said. Could not ask Grace what happening, have to guess what help. Afraid guess wrong. Grace say bring up, give oxygen, but what if Grace wrong? Or Rocky not understand?
It could have been just like me and his soot-scabs all over again. I shook my head, then stopped when that made my head spin. “You did exactly the right thing,” I said. “It was the bleach in the cleaning spray that reacted with the trace amounts of ammonia from your atmosphere. Together, they create a gas that’s toxic for humans to breathe.” I tapped my new oxygen mask. “This was really smart.”
His little hands ghosted over my shoulders, hesitating, and then descended, feather-light. They went pat pat pat, so carefully, on my chest, my sternum, and one even descended to rest on my jaw, tapping gently over the bone. He was looking at my insides, I realized, detecting tiny vibrations through my bones and tissue, trying to reassure himself. Pat pat pat. I felt abruptly like crying, but my body didn't have the moisture to spare. He was touching me like a precious little thing, like a kid might want to touch a butterfly but be afraid to hurt it.
“Rocky,” I said, again, hoarsely. “I'm okay. I'm really sorry, I wasn't thinking.”
Grace never thinking, he said, but there was no bite in it. Understand, was accident. Sleep more. Rocky can handle. Grace rest.
Without my permission, my stinging eyes had already started to slide shut again. So, so delicately, Rocky eased my glasses off again.
.
He wasn’t quite as nice to me after I had woken up. After the chance to do some reading, during the course of which he realized that mixing ammonia and bleach is basically the number one household cleaning no-no, he gave me plenty of grief. But it was also Rocky, so he fixed everything anyway.
Rocky take care of problem, Rocky said, when I woke up again, somewhat more coherent than I’d been before. Was able to use environmental controls to flush out the air in the lab and dormitory after sealing us up here. Once cycle completes, should be safe to let air circulate again. Rocky have to look up poison control guidance. Not very helpful because Grace no have outside to go to, only ship.
Yeah. It’s pretty rare for ammonia and bleach to actually kill people on Earth, but it’s a whole different ballgame on an enclosed spaceship. If I hadn’t had Rocky’s quick thinking, or heck, even if Rocky had been stuck in the ball, I might have been totally screwed.
As it was, I wasn’t exactly in great shape, but I also wasn’t dead. I kind of expected recovering from gassing myself accidentally to be like recovering from that time I inhaled a bunch of ammonia on purpose. Well, not on purpose, but I knew what I was getting myself into. At least there were no burns this time.
The stinging in my eyes did go away after a long sleep, but my chest stayed tight and aching. Rocky, who had been unconscious during my recovery from the whole “exposure to each other’s atmospheres” incident, fretted over me incessantly. He was in his new suit almost all the time I was awake, although I was still so exhausted that that was only a couple hours a day.. On top of that, he was very anxious about me decreasing my coma slurry ratio even further, because he'd been reading all about the side effects of nutrient deficiencies, and one of them was the impact on the immune system, so I ended up burning through a lot more coma slurry than planned. We were going to be cutting it close.
After about two weeks, my breath started rattling in my chest on every inhale, which obviously wasn't great. I couldn't remember the last time I was this sick. If ever. After the first few years of teaching, constant exposure to the petri dish that is eighth grade had hardened my immune system. I got colds, but I had been pretty healthy overall. On the vat, we were all vaccinated up the wazoo and anyone who so much as sneezed had to work in quarantine for ten days. (Look, say what you will about Stratt, but if she'd been put in charge of the world during Covid, it would have been over in about three months.)
The day after that, I woke up to Rocky shaking me awake, which he almost never did. Grace, he was saying, frantic. Grace too warm. Armando say Grace temperature up to 102.1 Fahrenheit.
“Really?” I slurred eloquently. “I’m freezing…”
It felt like it, anyway. I was so cold. I wanted to press myself closer to the warmth of Rocky’s suit, but I was too weak even to sit up.
Armando diagnosed me with pneumonitis after my hacking cough stubbornly refused to go away. The fever and chills came and went, and came again. At some point, probably while feverish, I decided that I must be dying. That was frightening, but I was too exhausted to do anything about it. I was also too exhausted to feel hungry, and too exhausted to eat. It wasn’t nausea, exactly, just a deep apathy.
Rocky basically never left my side. He bullied me into drinking my coma slurry -- no longer diluted with taumeoba, because he’d decided I needed all the nutrients I could get -- and put damp cloths on my head. I honestly think he could have gotten some kind of nursing certification with all the experience he got. Some days, some weeks, I was well enough to get up and move around a little. Others -- the less said the better, frankly. I was really, really sick.
There was one really bad day when we were only about two weeks out from Erid. Rocky had established contact by then -- basically the only times he left my side were to climb up to the control room and radio back and forth with Erid. That day, though, he was crouching by my side on the narrow bunk, keeping me company while I faded in and out of consciousness. I think he’d put on Seinfeld for me, but I couldn’t really track the jokes, so it kind of felt like the laugh track was laughing at me.
Here Lies Ryland Grace, Who Survived Many of the Perils of Space… And Died From Something Both Inane and Unrelated.
Time for food, Rocky said.
“I can’t,” I said.
Can, Rocky said. So close now, almost home.
“Yeah, but,” I swallowed dryly. “Who knows how long it’s going to take to make anything I can eat? That’s not it, though, I’m just… I’m not hungry. I can’t.” Yeah, I knew it wasn’t rational, but that didn’t make the thought of food any more appealing. See also: body shutting down. “Rocky, I’m sorry, I just can’t.”
Rocky made a noise of frustration, and climbed down off the bed. Oh good, I thought. I’ve driven away my best friend and only companion.
He was gone for kind of a long time, long enough that I wondered if he had gone back to the control room. Just as my eyes were starting to close again, Rocky came back into view, moving very slowly. He was cradling something in two claws, and very carefully climbed back up beside me.
Eat, he said, lifting his object. It was steaming. And bright red.
“Wh--” I said, startled enough to take an interest. “Is that -- is that borscht?” I had hidden my small stash of real food away so well that even I had forgotten about it, in my current sorry state.
Yes, Rocky said. Beef and beet borscht. Rocky check label.
It smelled… amazing. My nose was so used to the mundane smells of the ship by now that my brain almost didn’t know how to parse what it was perceiving. It smelled sour, and sweet, and I could see chunks of rehydrated vegetables bobbing around in the broth. My mouth had started to water. I reached for it instinctively, but my hands were trembling. Rocky pulled it back slightly. I made an extremely embarrassing whining noise at the thought of him taking it out of my reach.
No spill, he scolded. Rocky will help.
He came a little closer, settling beside me. I was reclining, not all the way flat, but not sitting up either, so he braced one of his legs over my stomach, straddling me for balance without actually resting any weight on me.
Grace will eat now, question? he asked.
“Yes, Grace will eat,” I said impatiently.
Good. Open mouth. He gently picked up the spoon and stirred it around before scooping up some soup. He even made sure nothing was going to drip off the bottom of the spoon, wiping it on the edge of the bowl.
“Rocky, I can feed myself,” I said, but I could feel myself wavering. I think if he’d told me to eat it out of a dog bowl on the floor, I probably would have flung myself off the bed to make it happen.
Open, he insisted. You want airplane like for human baby, question?
“How do you even know about -- you know what, I don’t care.” I opened my mouth.
Rocky placed the spoonful of soup in it. It was the perfect temperature, piping hot but not burning. I swallowed too fast, and I could feel the heat of it all the way down my esophagus. I needed more. I opened my mouth again, and Rocky gave me another spoonful. It was the best thing I had ever tasted. I worried a slippery little piece of diced onion between my teeth before giving in and swallowing it too. It wasn’t just the taste -- it had been over a year since I’d eaten anything with texture.
Rocky paused after the third spoonful, probably because I was crying too hard to open my mouth again. “Isn’t this gross for you?” I asked wetly.
Hmm, yes, Rocky said. But good gross. Just keep eat.
Whatever, I couldn’t question it right now. He gave me more spoonfuls, until I was panting from forgetting to breathe in between bites.
Grace going to be okay, he said fiercely. Rocky promise. But Grace must promise to try.
“Okay,” I agreed. I really just wanted more soup. But also, I felt alive again. “I promise.”
Grace no allowed to give up, he said, and told me all about how I HAD to live or he would make sure every single person on both our planets would know how dumb I’d been if I let myself die from something like this. It would be on Wikipedia, which was pretty much the most serious threat to my reputation he could come up with. And then he let me lick the bowl afterwards.
.
After all that, though, Rocky was still secretly a softie. Because when I was being strapped down to the first-ever human size gurney on Erid inside what looked disturbingly like a coffin with a window of clear xenonite at the “head” end, I overheard the conversation he was having with my brand new team of doctors.
Excess fluid in Grace lungs, he told them. This is another symptom of Grace sickness, very scary human disease called chronic pnuemonitis. (Actually, he translated it as “human air sac swelling-with-liquid disease lasting a long time”, but close enough.) Happened because of incident where ammonia from Rocky atmosphere mixed with Grace chemical solution and created toxic gas that poison Grace. Grace can tolerate small amount of ammonia, so Rocky not know danger of reaction. Grace recover somewhat, but too weak still to heal completely.
The doctors were taking careful notes. They were being very tactful about it, but I think if not for the risk of my possible imminent death and Rocky’s subsequent freakout, they would have been pretty psyched about the chance to study me. What an unfortunate event, one of the smaller ones said sympathetically. We must take measures to ensure this does not occur again.
Absolutely, Rocky agreed. Rocky has notes about specific substances involved and has redesigned airlock to prevent cross-contamination. Will not happen again, ever.
Please, do not blame self, another doctor hold him. I think that was the lead doctor; they have what I can only describe as a certain benevolent condescension towards Rocky, where they're patronizing him but ultimately too competent not to get away with it. With two species new to each other, these kinds of accidents are bound to happen. No one could have known.
…Yes, Rocky said, after slightly too long a pause. I knew he was thinking about the many, many poison control sites that say things in big letters about what to NEVER EVER mix with bleach. But then he said, Very true. No one could have known.
So at least my reputation was safe.