there are no pre-existing rocky children. all my love to rocky/adrian pebble enjoyers but to me rocky is a fun uncle. he has to be able to give them back
baby doesn't hatch until every other crew member is dead. rocky was not actually expecting them to hatch at all. there was more than one egg. there is one baby
eggs were moved to engineering, is how there is still one baby
timings work out such that rocky gets a good couple months being Completely Fucking Alone except for some eggs that may or may not still die.
rocky has never previously looked at an egg and thought 'oh that's a baby'. every egg in a clutch hatching is very rare. if none of them hatch rocky is going to kill himself, statement
he's not even quite AT tau ceti so now on top of trying to pilot the ship by himself he's figuring out some kind of baby bouncer which is not actually standard eridian nursery furniture. eridian babies can walk within hours. eridian babies clamber. rocky needs the baby to remain in his reach until the baby's carapace has hardened enough to withstand falling from any height, please. please.
he is just narrating absolutely fucking everything to the baby. this is how we pilot the ship. this is how we've juryrigged the ship so piloting it solo is possible. this is xenonite, rocky is making toys so we stop grabbing random tools. that's a wrench. that's a– nope that's a saw! babies don't get those!
baby's first word is an expletive
baby does not have a name, because rocky is not thinking of them as His Baby. this is someone else's kid he is keeping alive until he can get them back to their actual living relatives. he doesn't get to name them, that would be insane
this line of thinking lasts until the baby has enough language processing to assume their name is the nickname rocky uses most frequently. which is just 'kid'
at which point rocky is like. okay. you need a name. i am still Just Some Random Guy. so YOU get to pick your name
but the baby is now an eridian toddler. so the baby's picks are a) sounds they like b) nouns of things they like c) words they've heard once and think are pretty. baby name [single C chord, eridian equivalent of being named ɓ]. baby name Spinning. baby name Rations. baby name Electrolytic Etching. baby name Electrolytic ɓ Spinning Spinning Spinning
and rocky is the fun uncle, rocky does not have access to parenting books or neonatal classes or even his own parents. rocky is making this up as he goes. rocky is calling the baby Electrolytic ɓ Spinning Spinning Spinning
and yknow. rocky is autistic, obviously. the blip-A crew skewed pretty autistic for the same reasons the petrova task force skewed pretty autistic. the baby is also autistic
rocky is spending a lot of time holding off his own meltdown so he can deal with the baby's meltdown, and he is literally just Withstanding It because what else can he do. sometimes when the baby starts screaming he also starts screaming. this never helps. they just scream themselves out together
he tells the baby a lot of stories. he tells them about their parents, what he knows of their relatives, what erid is like. he tells them his favourite stories from when he was a kid, his favourite stories now. adrian's favourite stories
by the time grace turns up the baby is equivalent to human ten – for the purposes of this AU eridian infancy is a few weeks but childhood is a few decades and a bit stagnant / based on molts. after first molt they're human-five-ish, and they hover around there until second molt kicks them to preadolescence, and then third molt is teenage and we're not there yet – and could probably qualify for an engineering apprenticeship. which is not normal, developmentally
rocky tries to keep the kid away from grace at least at first. it does not work even a little bit. your new best friend the spider rock, and your other new best friend the smaller even more excitable spider rock. they're so lucky grace can spot a middle schooler from a hundred metres because he has no concrete reason not to assume they're both adults
grace: oh that's a child. that's definitely a child. oh this is so cool, getting to meet an alien child and see how their development works compared to ours and ........WHY IS THERE A CHILD. ON THE SPACESHIP.
rocky explains they didn't mean there to be a child on the spaceship but sometimes people dying enmass of an unknown terrifying illness make ill-advised decisions regarding egg fertilisation control. so now rocky and the kid are making do, until they can get back to erid and get the kid back to their family
grace, watching the kid mimicking rocky's posture and sticking to rocky's side – sometimes outright climbing up and sitting on rocky's carapace – and listening to every word rocky says: right. of course. nothing familial going on here at all
