productivityplease

Well... Yes and no.

The last time Ryland Grace was CONSCIOUS of any human touch was when he was knocked out. Absolutely true.

But the last human contact he would have had was Yao and Ilyukhina. Who were told that he was scared about panicking during launch and asked to be sedated. Who did all the pre flight checks before the Hail Mary launched. Who would have carefully, gently carried Grace to his bed in the dormitory, made sure he was secure, and initiated his coma procedure.

There would have been love there. Remember Ilyukhina throwing her hands high and saying "welcome to crew!" Remember Yao saying how he hoped Grace would say yes. Remember how much the crew trusted Grace, Stratt's First Officer, the guy who helped them so much, and was so kind to them, and was the one who they entrusted their preferred methods of suicide to. Who thought they were wonderful and brave.

They would have tucked him in. Maybe brushed his hair out of his face. Maybe said something kind to him before initiating their own coma procedures.

Eva Stratt, meanwhile, is a stain. Graffiti tucked away in alleys and under bridges, forever painted over by the powers that be. A name meant to be forgotten. Stratt has always known this was part of the deal: after all, humanity needs a villain just as much as it needs its heroes. The best she can hope for is to be erased entirely on Earth.

Then humans start spotting predators, ambushes, and hidden creatures in complete darkness before any of the aliens can detect them.

Apparently, when a human says, "That shadow has a face," the correct response is no longer, "You're imagining things."

It's, "Everyone stop moving."

Okay, so we all know that Grace would have multiple moments where he freaked out because Rocky is a specially adapted ambush predator. Moments where he spends three hours trying to find Rocky, getting frustrated because of he can’t find him, only to realize that Rocky was somehow silently scuttling one step behind him the entire time playing a ‘game.’ Freaky.

But I think that Rocky wouldn’t even have a concept of Grace as a persistence predator until after they arrived on Erid, and that would freak him out FAR more.

Picture this: Rocky enters the bio dome a couple months after Grace returns, and he finds Grace running around the beach. Apparently, he does this when he is anxious. Rocky offers to talk him through it, but Grace keeps glancing longingly at the beach and fidgeting, so Rocky offers to run with him even though he thinks it’s pointless.

5 minutes. 10 minutes. 20 minutes.

Rocky is exhausted, and taps out. He’s in an ungainly suit on uneven sand. He calls it quits and sits on the sand to watch Grace. He doesn’t get this running thing. It seems so pointless. He watches Grace keep running.

30 minutes. 45 minutes.

He’s a little shocked now. This is a long time to run. Most Eridians would have collapsed at this point. Some would have died. And yet here’s Grace, who was skeletal only a few months ago, still running.

An hour. An hour and a half.

It suddenly strikes Rocky that the Eridian gravity is MUCH higher on Erid than on Earth. He and Grace have discussed this multiple times now. And yet Grace keeps. On. Running. Is this what it means to be a persistence predator? To run and run and run? It occurs to Rocky that Grace could have caught any Eridian he put his mind to be simply…jogging behind them at a light pace.

2 hours in, and Grace finally stops. He’s red in the face and drenched in sweat. His limbs are shaking. And yet he turns to Rocky, and smiles.

“Thanks, bud. I feel a lot better now.”

Creepy

As funny as it is that rocky sees grace and complains about grace and humans in general as a terribly inefficient blob of water and fluids and teases constantly...

I REALLY think this should be a relatively rocky-exclusive perspective. He's watched this incredibly stressed human drip all kinds of tears and goos while they were floating around in space, and grace let down basically all of his guard around rocky personally, have discussed and understood eachother over life threatening missions. To Rocky, grace is Grace!

But grace does have some naturally combative push to him (see, the commentary that got him stonewalled in the scientific community in the first place, and being able to keep up with and handle Eva stratt) and further more, when an eridian is Not Rocky, i.e. not incredibly socially withdrawn and traumatized and maybe on their own spectrum of divergence before his ill fated mission and was very susceptible to latching onto a strange and unusual creature in just as much crisis as him...

That is to say. The eridians are going to meet grace with wildly different priorities and expectations. And what they're going to get is a human dangerously close to deaths door, and cornered and dying humans aren't always the most friendly or cooperative and kind, even the Nicest Humans You Can Get.

So they get a dying human. And as tumblr loves to say, humans are terrifying to aliens, and fuck do they persist. Rocky's so-described "pathetic space blob" grace is terrifying to most eridians, especially the scientists studying him.