the true story of your death

Your blood, what matter is it made of?

I stand up and look to the bodies. No longer a stern commander; no longer a cheerful friend. Just two empty husks that once held souls but now barely looked human. They deserve more than this. They deserve a burial.

Just a little snippet from a fic idea I have where Grace is having PTSD-fueled anger issues once they get to Erid so Rocky forces Grace to start doing therapy. With him, Rocky, as the therapist. Which goes about as well as you'd expect.

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Record scratch, Grace thought. You're probably wondering how I got here.

But then he remembered there wasn't much of a story behind his present situation. Rocky got tired of having to fix the toaster every time Grace threw it across the room in a tizzy, secretly gave himself a doctorate in human psychology while Grace slept ("Freud is a little bitch, statement."), and then threatened to not fix anything in Grace's dome until Grace gave in and submitted to Alien Mandated Therapy. Grace knew Rocky was bluffing and would repair anything that was critical to his survival, but he only lasted about three hours with broken glasses before seeing the taped frame out of the corner of his eye started driving him nuts and he caved. 

"So what now?" Grace asked, craning his neck to look back at Rocky. Rocky had insisted that Grace lie down on the couch so Rocky could sit behind him like in human moving picture media, as Rocky had said. "Are you gonna, like, CBT me?"

Rocky perked up. "Male chicken and ball torture, question?"

"What? It stands for Cognitive Behavioral Therapy."

And then he realized that this was Rocky's synonymic workaround because they didn't have the word for "cock" in their shared lexicon. Cock and ball torture. Which he supposed, yeah, could be abbreviated as CBT.

"Oh my god, no," he groaned. "Where are you even learning this stuff? Stop looking so excited, no one is torturing my cock or balls, okay?"

Normally he could read Rocky pretty well, but he was having a hard time figuring out if he was pretending to be disappointed because he thought it would irritate Grace or if he was genuinely saddened that Grace wasn't going to let him get his grubby little claws all over his junk for nefarious purposes.

Rocky steepled his fingers. "And how does that make you feel?"