Boo

me: you see the thing is as far as i'm concerned this au only really works if rocky was eridian at some point and can be again, and his human form comes at the cost of some non-negligible degree of discomfort and vulnerability, like a little mermaid or selkie kind of situation. sacrificing bodily confidence and self-awareness and leaving yourself with no choice but to rely on someone else for support, even if it makes you worry that you're a hideous burden they can't wait be rid of fast enough. it's a bittersweet dilemma - in a human form, he and grace could actually touch, and rocky will never forget what that felt like (he literally couldn't if he tried), but it's a sensory nightmare otherwise - rocky won't be able to constantly reassure himself of grace's presence like he could as an eridian, and if he isn't totally blind, his vision is still poor and not a sense he's used to relying on - he'd probably give himself migraines from straining his eyes, as he'd initially have no muscle memory to rely on at all. he can return to his eridian form whenever he wants, of course, but now that he knows what it's like to be able to feel grace, that absence will always weigh on him.

and with absolutely heroic effort, ilya says something entirely boring and appropriate about concussions, can't be too careful but thankfully nothing to worry about this time, Hollander will be back in time to crush the Pamphlets, yada yada, because he is a good husband and respects Shane's boundaries, and then they're walking to the car to finally go home and Shane is holding an icepack and there are still a couple reporters milling about and some asshole yells "hey Hollander, you sure your head's okay?"

“If a society puts half its children into short skirts and warns them not to move in ways that reveal their panties, while putting the other half into jeans and overalls and encouraging them to climb trees, play ball, and participate in other vigorous outdoor games; if later, during adolescence, the children who have been wearing trousers are urged to “eat like growing boys,” while the children in skirts are warned to watch their weight and not get fat; if the half in jeans runs around in sneakers or boots, while the half in skirts totters about on spike heels, then these two groups of people will be biologically as well as socially different. Their muscles will be different, as will their reflexes, posture, arms, legs and feet, hand-eye coordination, and so on. Similarly, people who spend eight hours a day in an office working at a typewriter or a visual display terminal will be biologically different from those who work on construction jobs. There is no way to sort the biological and social components that produce these differences. We cannot sort nature from nurture when we confront group differences in societies in which people from different races, classes, and sexes do not have equal access to resources and power, and therefore live in different environments. Sex-typed generalizations, such as that men are heavier, taller, or stronger than women, obscure the diversity among women and among men and the extensive overlaps between them… Most women and men fall within the same range of heights, weights, and strengths, three variables that depend a great deal on how we have grown up and live. We all know that first-generation Americans, on average, are taller than their immigrant parents and that men who do physical labor, on average, are stronger than male college professors. But we forget to look for the obvious reasons for differences when confronted with assertions like ‘Men are stronger than women.’ We should be asking: ‘Which men?’ and ‘What do they do?’ There may be biologically based average differences between women and men, but these are interwoven with a host of social differences from which we cannot disentangle them.”