Okay, so there's a scene in Project Hail Mary (book) not long after Grace and Rocky meet when Grace leaves to sleep while Rocky is absent from their tunnel and leaves the amount of time he'll be gone taped to the wall between them in popsicle sticks. Grace then oversleeps and is gone more than two hours longer than he said he would be. He wakes up and Rocky is tapping on their divider wall loud enough to be heard in the crew quarters and he's very upset when Grace reappears, hitting the wall and the numbers and pointing to his clock and shaking his fist. And the first time I heard that I went "lil guy why are you so impatient" but after hearing the rest of his story it hit me:
Rocky lost his entire crew to an unknown illness and has been alone in space for forty six years. Lil guy wasn't impatient he was freaking frantic that something had happened to the only other being he'd met in the past fifty years and relieved and understandably worked up when Grace reappeared and was just fine but oh my word, can you imagine? You've been alone for so long and you don't even know what killed your crew or why you survived and you finally, finally meet another person and they leave you a note for when they're gonna be back AND THEN THEY DON'T SHOW UP ON TIME?! where are they question?! are they okay question?!
And all you can do to ask, "hey are you okay over there question?!" is bang on the wall between your two ships and HOPE that this person you met didn't just die or have a horrible accident. FOR TWO HOURS. Headcanon that those two hours were when Rocky came up with the idea for the zenonite ball so he could come into the Hail Mary because he HAD to be able to make sure Grace was okay, even before they were friends, he could not lose anybody else, even this weird alien he just met, this is the first time he's had HOPE in almost FIFTY YEARS. It's no wonder he insists on watching Grace sleep as soon as they have the words for it. ;-;
