Bekka

“No,” his foster dad snaps. “It was already enough of an inconvenience bringing you here.”

no thoughts, just a six-year-old Andrew Minyard shrinking back into himself as tears sting in his eyes. A six-year-old Andrew Minyard learning not to want things.

no thoughts, just a twenty-year-old Nicky Hemmick leaving the doctor’s office with Andrew who probably has strep throat, but wouldn’t let the doctor get close enough to check. Drained from the day, Nicky stops at the McDonald’s drive thru and asks Andrew what he wants. Andrew snaps that he isn’t hungry. Nicky decides to buy him a Happy Meal as a way of avoiding food waste if Andrew truly isn’t hungry, but also so Andrew has something to eat if he actually is hungry.

!! TOBY SCRIBBLE !! :P

I wanted to do more perspective stuff and I actually really like how this came out ^3^

Alt below the cut <3

He knows of you vaguely as the apartment two doors down from his that's always toeing the line of some sort of noise complaint. two small kids, four and five respectively. Cute things he sometimes passes in the stairwell since the elevator broke.

"Ewwww!!! What is that!!"

Like now, for example. Arms full of grocery bags, ghost turns the corner to the next flight and finds the wee ones crouched in a corner pointing at something. You sit a few steps up, bags next to you and seemingly taking a breather from the multiple flights.

"Morning, Mr riley." You smile, exhausted. Ghost nods back, then curiously glances over the kid's shoulders when they beging loudly pondering.

"It's an alien!!" Your little girl says, poking at it. "Alien–"

"That's a proper millipede, innit." Ghost grunts above them. He knees down between the two, and lets the long insect crawl onto his hand, holding it up for your kids. "S' the flat face? An' the multiple legs on each segment? Millipede."

You daughter gasps in amazement at the same time your son asks "does it bite?"

"Only kids who don't do their chores." Ghost snorts, then holds it out and gently strokes a single finger along its back "you can pet it."

Which is how your tiny ones end up asking ghost what seems lile a hundred questions about millipedes, then centipedes, and bugs in general.

He answers each one, and after some time sets the bug back down and says "I'll show you more bugs if you help carry groceries in, yeah?"

While your kids grab one bag each, ghost insists on carrying the rest in addition to his own, has the audacity to glare at you when you reach for some.

That night, your kids beg to go to the library to pick out books about bugs, wanting to impress their new friend mr simon.

you can never get a clear listen to him. his primary sense node is covered in "hair" and the part that isn't is hidden by two crystals that refract sound waves in a pleasing but disorienting way. he covers his body in billowy cloth at all times. not snug and sensible and unobstructive like eridian coverings, but loose and layered, draped and flowing.

the most clear part of him are his internal organs. because yes, the alien's carapace isn't sound-proof. his single heart beats insistingly in his core, his lungs exchanging gas constantly, his long digestive tract always bubbling and contracting. his thorax is packed impossibly tight and it's all moving and singing.

and it shouldn't be possible, with how fragile he is, for that internal pressure to maintain. how does the thin membrane of his external organ (another horror that sends eridians reeling) keep it all contained? his "skin" is so easily pierced, cut, bruised, burnt, how does he not split open under his own mass?

when savior rocky first arrived home and described the environmental needs of his alien, the scientists thought he'd made a mistake in his frantic panic to get everything out. it isn't possible this being lives at such low atmospheric pressure, at half the gravity, and in a gas that's nearly double the weight of ammonia. in a gas so dangerous, so caustic. and if it does then how is it obligately terrestrial like rocky claims? shouldn't it fly or float instead? (and then to see it in the water, learning that it can float or sink at will.)

and this alien has come bearing gifts that will not only save your species but launch it into impossible heights of technological and intellectual advancement. he has discovered the solution to astrophage and bred it to thrive on threeworld and translated his instructions into eridian. he has given your people the complete sum of his people's knowledge, advanced in ways the eridians can't believe and behind in ways that seem ludicrous. and he has given his life for your people to have these things.

he knows how your solar system was formed. he knows how the universe started.

his name means beautiful and generous and relieving.

the eridians experiencing cosmic bliss.

of course grace is delighted! but it'd be very funny if rocky had just. a massively specific regional accent. and now grace has it too. all the eridians from that area are like OMG THE ALIEN IS ONE OF US - we're adopting it. that's an honorary member of the clan. listen to it. it might as well have grown up here.

...actually i'm gonna do it. fuck it. rocky is space scottish. to me. he's mine now, i'm taking him out to look at the kelpies and the falkirk wheel and climb up ben ledi. he can go fishing in a loch. and now grace's eridian accent is their equivalent of scots. he says stuff to adrian's family (posh motherfuckers) and theyre like 'i think it's trying to communicate with us..?' meanwhile adrian, well used to rocky's accent by now, is like 'it's giving you a compliment. be nice to my spouse's alien, please.'

and grace is trying so hard to not accidentally be sexist or assign gender roles to a monogendered species, so like, trying hard not to call someone he/him just because they like sports, or she/her just because they seem caring, or whatever. and he's having a hard time about it because he's like oh man why am I assigning the pronouns I'm assigning, i hope I'm not bringing any of my biases into this. just absolutely eating himself up over it

he tries to fix this by starting to roll a die, or throw darts at a dartboard, but his students immediately throw a fit because the point of the word-gifts is that they are specific, picked deliberately for them, right? and grace tries to explain gender bias and so on, but it becomes clear these kids could genuinely not give less of a shit, they just want to know what their AGAG (assigned gender at grace) is, alright? why is this so hard for him to understand??

eventually grace comes to the conclusion that he's on a different planet, and severely overthinking this, and that his kids really just are having fun--they really don't see the grace-given pronouns as categorization, he figures they see them as something more akin to astrology. or an eridian tiktok trend. when grace learns they call the assigning a word-gift he probably cries tbh

"teacher grace!!! what my pronoun question???"

"hmm. getting big they/them vibes off you"

They send someone to stop the experiment but Grace refuses cause they’re so far in already and well that would just ruin the data.