Actyally

We can go home.

Chasing after him personally to bring him onto the project, to watching him run, having neither the heart to stop him personally nor the choice to let him go anymore.

Going from needing two coffees to function and heading straight to work, to sharing one cup each and simply being still for a moment, together.

From bringing him into rooms and making everyone there appreciate him, to leading the room that is fully aware he is their only saving grace.

From “Must be hard, having to ask everybody to… you know.”

“Actually, it isn’t.”

To... “Don’t make this harder, please.”

The first and last time he makes her smile, by acknowledging her intelligence, (and being snarky about it).

By being surprised that she knows he was fired for calling the leading scholar in his field a “staggering waste of carbon,” rather than for standing by what he said as he tried to imply. And years later by throwing the phrase, “You’re smart, you’ll figure it out,” right back at her.

look at my clutchmate dawgg, they are gonna get us fired from the biodome project

Rocky mocks Grace when he says that Rocky is distracting him by starting complex conversations while he's Trying To Do Science. "Human brain have to stop activity just because talking question? Useless! One track mind!"

Then Grace is on hour six of his "trying to recreate skittles" hyperfocus and Rocky is like What The Fuck. Statement.

Grace is joking around with a selectively violent creature that can rip his soft squishy body apart in an instant!

But it’s also a lot of fun to hear Weir talk about all the stuff he wants to include in a possible sequel, like the fact that eridians can have several conversations at once even with the same eridian. He imagine Rocky and Adrian bickering in one conversation while having a nice conversation at the same time that slowly turns into a fight and all of a sudden they’re yelling at each other in two conversations about different things.

He also says they have terrible spacial memory because they can see everything around them all the time thanks to their echo location so to them it’s crazy that humans can only see in one direction but still remember what’s behind them and even what the last room they were in looks like. Apparently eridians mostly just remember that the room exists and that it has the computer in it but if you asked them where the computer is placed in the room they’ll struggle to give a precise answer.

And Rocky got scared when Grace hugged him because eridians don’t have a concept of expressing affection with physical touch. To them it’s only neutral or violent because thanks to their hard shell they can’t really feel much. They only use it to move each other around or to break through their prey’s shell to get to the soft insides. So in their inter-species friendship only Grace would feel any desire to touch Rocky. It makes it very cute that Rocky joins in on Grace’s hugging ritual. It’s purely for Grace’s sake.