Pchelik's hive

"Oh! There's a central social space like a living room, but because you don't care if what you lay on is soft or hard, it's simply carved into the floor." and Adrian would go "Yes, Grace. Good job, Grace."

He'd go around poking stuff with an improved xenonite suit, "I get it now, the home for an Eridian is less for physical comfort and more for mental comfort. You display trinkets because they make you happy, and spend a lot of time with hobbies and such to pass time." "Yes Grace, that is true."

He mentions human dining rooms and Rocky begs they just move on with the tour. This leads them into Rocky's personal workshop and suddenly Rocky thinks they should go back and talk about the dining rooms instead.

CW: nsfw, eggpreg / oviposition. Trans ftm Grace implied -> no explicit words for his genitals used, but it’s implied he has a vulva + vagina + uterus. MINORS DNI, STATEMENT.

Grockdrian haunts me with visions everyday tbh. Adrian is “the dad and the pet they said they didn’t want” with Grace to me

Eridians fall in love. It’s not like it used to be where it was survival of the fittest—you wanted someone who could create the best offspring. Nowadays, those things are just seen as a very attractive bonus. “Wow that Eridian is so smart/strong/etc, I’d love for them to carry my eggs” is a common fantasy. While pre-Grace Rocky and Adrian didn’t plan on raising their own pebbles anytime soon, they had their fair share of fooling around with the idea when their respective cycle rolls around.

Adrian is enamored with the idea of Rocky teaching their kids how to build and problem solve. Rocky daydreams about Adrian, his mate that’s nearly double his size, happily letting their children sit on top of his carapace as they work. And then there’s the more steamy (lavatic if you will) fantasies—Adrian’s hand pressing down on their mate’s ovipositor to help the eggs come down; teasing Adrian as they get worked up from their body preparing to lay.

Ultimately, the marble-sized eggs don’t merge and harden before getting tossed. Eridians don’t really have an attachment to them, especially mated ones that aren’t actively trying to conceive. Passing on to the next generation isn’t necessary for the species’ survival, so Rocky and Adrian get to have a little kinky fun with it

And then in comes ryland grace, who Adrian isn’t completely enamored with at first, honestly. He’s fragile and starving when he gets to Erid, and Adrian sees how much their mate has fallen for this weird, wet creature. Rocky brought him home with a courting mark on his arm and plenty of hope, but Adrian sees the condition Grace is in and prepares for their mate to be heartbroken.

Still, this human helped saved their entire planet and their mate.

Adrian will fix.

Ryland settles in and Adrian becomes the head of the human’s biodome team. The human’s species is ridiculously needy—Adrian huffs a little when they shift the in-house-rain system a few degrees for the third time that week. But it’s something new beyond waiting for answers about their star’s death, though—Grace shares with them science and computers and a new language. For the first time in many years, Adrian finds themself genuinely excited to enter their lab everyday.

They become friends. Rocky is thrilled that Adrian now comes to visit with him in the mornings beyond checking on the structural integrity of the place.

Eventually, the two of them get really close. Adrian visits Ryland beyond just checkups, and they begin to work on building a proper lab in the dome for the two of them to share. They’re both equally fascinated with each other’s planet, constantly showing the other something new. They get lost in working parallel for hours, becoming so comfortable with each other that they don’t even need to communicate.

It reminds Adrian of when they first met Rocky—an awkward and talented pretty thing with a habit of falling over.

Adrian doesn’t know when they started finding Grace pretty, but Rocky has been calling the human “Captain-Scientist-Doctor-Pretty-Ryland-Grace-Unmated” for long enough that neither of them blink an eye when it becomes “Captain-Scientist-Doctor-Pretty-Ryland-Grace-Courted-Rocky-Adrian-Offlimits.” They barely discuss it as the human’s presence in their lives becomes easy. It’s like he’s just another part of their society, like Grace was born there.

Grace getting a proper job as a teacher is the final nail in the coffin for both of them. Ryland is more than amazing with the kids—he memorizes their names beyond what he calls them in English. He puts the Eridians that are still learning to perceive 3D structures closer to the front. He never lets one of the little ones who struggles to learn the alphabet texture fall behind, going as far to design them a special bio-suit so they could enter the dome and learn one-on-one. Adrian is over the moons when he gets the bashful design request. When they bring the blueprints home to Rocky that night, their mate makes a comment about Grace raising Eridians of his own.

Something in Adrian stirs excitedly at the concept of Grace raising Eridians. Not his students, but Rocky and Adrian’s. They imagine Grace holding blue, brown, and green pebbles, the human chirping and squawking as they climb up his chest. Grace watching over the eggs carefully, using the instruments he helped design on with Adrian to make sure their internal development goes well makes them both swoon.

Grace’s internal temperature just barely matches the range of required temperatures for best clutch viability. They ponder that for a little while, something possessive and hot swelling in them at the idea of Grace walking around clearly claimed by where his two mates marked him inside and out. Grace making the strained sounds he does when exerting just for his mates to hear as he pushes down. Adrian holding the human to their front while Rocky sits between their little human’s legs, helping them pass their clutch and making sure it feels good. Maybe Adrian could reach a free arm around and play with the top of the human’s external genitalia that was as fascinating as it was terrifying—why humans evolved to have something so fragile and important on the outside they don’t know—and seeing how much their human could take, just how much they could leak.

The train of thought startles them—Grace became their mate at some point, hadn’t he? It had been months of courting with gifts ranging from food, to nesting material, to the finest jewelry Rocky could make. Adrian had built Grace an entire lab full of his favorite things. They had completely changed Grace’s name in Eridian and everyone knew that this incredibly strong, smart, and talented creature was very much claimed. The three would live the rest of their lives as a happy mated triad.

…Unbeknownst to Rocky and Adrian, Ryland Grace has zero fucking clue of this.

We've decided that Adrian is a big, pretty blue/green rock who Rocky is obsessed with, and Grace is intimidated by, but in the same way that we sometimes find hot people intimidating. The complex color, the way light reflects off of the geode structure, and the patterns you can see underneath. Absolutely beautiful, but would Eridians have the same society beauty conventions? They don't perceive color or light, and those inner patterns, depending on the geode, are often viewed as imperfections by collectors. Would Eridians also see those inner imperfections and view them as not attractive?

Much like we are supposed to look at Ryan freaking Gosling as Grace and interpret him as somewhat of a loser within the world of the movie, within the Eridian society, Adrian is considered a catch for many reasons, their size for one, but being attractive is not one of them. The uneven mineral deposits and the way their surfaces are angled affect the way sound bounces of them. It's not necessarily unpleasant, just not overly desirable. Adrian is just as typical as any other Eridian, but they are compared to impossible beauty standards that so few actually meet.

Of course, Rocky thinks Adrian is hot as hell, but he is in the minority, claims everyone else is stupid, so when Rocky brings home this leaky space blob, who seems transfixed by Adrian, Adrian thinks Grace is just being polite towards them for Rocky's sake, but the more time they spend around him, the more genuine they realize he is.

Imagine, after decades of your world becoming colder and colder, you are saved. A single Eridian, the only one of twenty three to survive, arrives in an alien ship, accompanied by a creature you can barely conceive.

Everything about the alien is so loud, hinges formed from tissue thumping and stretching in constant movement, even while unconscious. Completely organic, reliant of oxygen and hydrogen. Instead of a protective carapace, it regrows its damaged tissues. It has senses you do not, and technology so unlike your own, both able to utilise a force you have never heard of. The same force that killed almost your entire mission team. Highly adaptable, able to teach itself how to fly its ship in under a week, able to become fluent in the engineer's dialect in less than four years.

And if Erid's best engineer is correct (and there's no reason it wouldn't be), this creature not only managed to breed a predator of the warmth-taker to survive in various atmospheres, including Threeworld's, but also turned around to provide aid when it discovered that the predator could escape xenonite.

And you think: Surely, this creature which protects itself without a carapace, which sleeps so lightly and knows so much and learns so quickly, which saved two planets at the cost of ever returning to its thrum, surely, a creature so extraordinary must have a name to match

And you think: Perhaps it is strength, Mountain-Base or Lonsdaleite-Carapace. Perhaps it is intellect, Diamond-Claw or Lockpick-Mind. Perhaps it is courage, Song-Through-Silence or Path-Carver

And you think: None of these names hold the true weight of what this creature is to them. How do you describe something like that, which aids without expectation of anything in return, which risks its own life for the sake of a species it cannot touch, which performs miracles simply because it was asked.

Do you think she had a moment of terror? of belief? Do you think her fingers twiched over her tablet ready to give the orders to quarentine everyone who ever interacted with the apperently slow acting mpreg microbe? Did her mind go to every Alien movie and ao3 trope that could have explained the situation? Did she wonder briefly about the ethical and political implications of keeping a maybe sentient maybe alien child? with human parent(s)???? in a pseuto-governmental lab?

like think of the speed of light vs speed of sound, MASSIVE gap, no wonder eridians have a longer lifespan. i have to imagine a scenario where rocky realises grace lowkey reacts at superspeed if he sees something far enough away for the light and sound discrepancy to be obvious. cause sure rocky can hear for miles but theres gonna be a delay eventually

In the book, Eva most probably gets thrown to the ground by the explosion. As soon as she recovers, the very first person she calls out to is Grace, asking if he's okay.

Alright, maybe that's just because she knows he's the closest person to her.

But that's not what sticks with me.

What sticks with me is what she does next.

She physically goes to him before reaching for her radio to find out what actually happened.

And I kept asking myself: why?

Grace already answered. He said he was alright.

So why not grab the radio immediately? Why not assess the situation first?

Why did she have to go to him?

Because she needed to make sure he was actually okay.

Because she needed to see with her own eyes that he was still there.

Because maybe, no matter what had just happened, she knew she could deal with it as long as he was still there.

Before anything else, she needed to know that Grace was safe.

I actually can't with Eva.

Then there's the movie.

There's a small movement Sandra Hüller makes that you could interpret as Stratt checking on Ryland for a split second before she runs toward the explosion.

But what really gets me is Ryland.

Stratt takes off running without a second thought. It's dangerous. They don't even know what happened yet, but she runs toward the explosion like her life depends on it.

And Grace follows her.

This is the same man who's defined by his fear. The same man who believes he's a coward. The same man who couldn't willingly sacrifice himself for humanity.

Yet when Eva runs straight toward danger...

...he runs after her.

It's the first time we see him willingly throw himself into a dangerous situation without her forcing him or cornering him into it.

It's his own choice.

His instinct isn't to run away.

His instinct is to follow her.