do you want to hear a story?

okay, so, i was thinking about this one night for normal reasons, and i was like “wow yeah i really want to write about their relationship kind of falling apart a little bit” and so now here i am. with a planned duology-maybe-even-longer-series.

the title of the whole thing will be the universal constance of eridian love stories—at the very least, that’s the working title. two works are encompassed: ad astra and per aspera. depending on how much i enjoy the writing process and how much people enjoy reading the fics, i’ll consider making it a whole series (although any following works would be single-chapter because i’m really not a longform writer hahahaaa i’m pushing my limits a LOT with these projects).

ad astra will basically cover what rocky went through before going to space (discovery of astrophage, thrums, getting on the blip-a) and throughout the journey (a couple filler chapters of spaceship shenanigans to establish the systems, hierarchies, dynamics of the crew), and…beyond that (death of the crew, rocky’s Half A Century Spent Alone And Probably Also Dying And Kind Of Sort Of Losing It, some stuff with grace [although i’ll try to avoid recounting the events of phm wherever i can there might end up being some pov-switch-retelling-type portions]). so yeah.

per aspera will be the return trip to erid (rocky thinks about adrian like a fuck ton, various conversations with grace, growing steadily more codependent, will have some secret-third-thing-ing probably), the arrival at erid (joyous reunion! lots of touching and whatever-the-eridian-version-of-happy-crying-is! some vague foreshadowing of upcoming grief probably!), early re/adjustment to erid (grace is dying, it's slow and painful, he kind of wants to just End It at this point, rocky’s freaking out and also totally different from Way Before, adrian tries to help, they fail, general falling-apart-of-lives-and-relationships), later re/adjustment (grace is no longer dying but he is still Struggling A Lot With Everything, rocky and adrian are Going Through It, grace is kind of a homewrecker but he doesn’t actually realize this at any point because adrian and rocky don’t fight in front of him and he’s still kind of not okay physically speaking so he has some more pressing issues i guess), recovery (adrian and rocky start figuring out how to be around each other again, etc).

i'm going to throw in a ton of insecurity for everyone too. grace wonders if rocky only likes him cause he spent so long alone and dying in space before they met. rocky wonders if grace only likes them because it needs them to survive and because they were the first intelligent living thing it came across in space after waking up with two dead bodies and no memories. adrian wonders if rocky only stays with them out of perceived obligation and some kind of desperate yearning for the past and if anything will be okay because they're both so different now and neither of them remember how to do anything but grieve for each other. grace wonders if adrian hates him (a little bit, yes, but they're very guilty about it and thinking about it for too long freaks them out they're developing a whole entire complex about it) (they alternate rapidly between being very nice to grace, entirely ignoring him, and being extremely passive aggressive). rocky wonders if grace and adrian hate them (no). adrian wonders if rocky and grace hate them (also no) (well. every time grace is around them he kind of wants to cry but that's not really hatred it's just a Whole Other Weird Thing) (not to mention it's grace, the famously Leaky Gross Wet space blob its kind of expected). it's all very complicated, very stupid, and it makes everyone involved want to kill themselves and each other. Not Good. statement.

as you can see this is very thoroughly planned out and not at all haphazard and the nonspecificity of the plan will definitely not come by to bite me in the ass.

basically my thought process when it comes to this project is that it #PissesMeOff that the fandom as a whole imagines this like. perfect reunion where adrian is Immediately Okay With The Nasty Fucking Half-Dead Alien Wisp rocky brings home from space and everything is okay and there are no challenges besides medical ones on grace’s part only. it's not exactly a bad thing per se and of course this is to be expected but i personally hate romance and love divorce so my sinister little mind went “okayyyyy but that wouldn’t happen though would it” and it’s like NO it would NOT.

because like. okay. imagine with me for a sec. you’re adrian, alright? your sun is just up and fucking DYING. no one knows what’s going on. the planet will cool down, and eventually it will get too cold for literally anything to exist and everything will die. including you. including your mate. you think about how much you hate cold weather. you think about your mate's bad limb. you think about your sibling’s new clutch of eggs, which are due to hatch soon and which they've been struggling to have for so long. the pebbles might not even get to live beyond the Actual Fucking Apocalypse, and just how sad is that, yknow? you think about your friends in the colder regions of erid, you think about eridians who won’t have the time or resources to relocate, you think about eridians who’ll have to leave their homes. you think about overcrowding and resources growing thin and you think about wars like erid hasn’t seen since the last peacemaking thrum, which was generations ago. you think about the other scientists and you think about the poets and you think about the artisans and you think we are not ready for this. you’re scared. terrified, even.

so you drag your mate to all of the thrums and you’re there for the discovery of these strange tiny organisms eating your star. no one knows what to do. you pretend not to panic. they call it astrophage (i might come up with something else we'll see)—star-eater in one of erid's ancient root languages. you are asked to join the science teams to discover as much about astrophage as quickly as possible, and your mate is chosen to co-lead the engineering teams to build probes and new equipment and everything is everywhere and at the very least you’re doing something.

in the end, it’s not enough. they need scientists and pilots and engineers and doctors to go into space, where your species has never gone before, because what would you have done? there is no longer a choice. erid is dying.

for maximum efficiency and professionalism, the recruiters say, none of the crew can have any affiliations with each other prior to the mission. it makes sense. it would be too much grief and stress for everyone on board, they say. it makes sense. it would be best for all relationships to be strictly professional to avoid or at least delay interpersonal drama for as long as possible, they say. it makes sense. they've asked rocky to be the ship’s second engineer, they say. they will go into the stars, they say. you cannot follow, they say. it stops making sense.

you've been together for longer than you haven't. maybe you have an anniversary coming up. maybe you were finally seriously talking about having pebbles together. maybe, oh, i don't know. maybe you don't want your other half to go off into space and maybe die and maybe never see them again. maybe you want them to live. you don't say any of this; nothing, you know, is worth the lives of every single organism on erid. no single eridian is that important. not even rocky. oh, your rocky; you are grieving almost before the director of the space division finishes their sentence.

"i hope you understand, scientist adrian," they say. "erid is at stake."

"i know," you say. you do your best to sound far more okay than you feel. "you have made a good decision."

and they have. they have, because your mate is one of the best engineers on erid. hell, they're an actual genuine genius. maybe one of the youngest to ever attend the top engineering school on erid. they're only IIV+Vℓ (arbitrary, i'll think about it more) years old now, and they're co-leading the engineering division of the astrophage project. the leaders in the space division have made a good choice. rocky's probably one of the best choices. it's selfish of you to be upset over this. but you're young, too. you should have had a whole life with them ahead of you.

it's okay.

rocky doesn't want to go.

it's...less okay. you have to convince them that it's the best possible decision, convince them that they're good enough, convince them to leave you maybe-forever to sleep and eat in an experimental vehicle full of strangers and they don't want to, adrian, they're scared, what if they fail, what if they mess up, what if something happens and you're not there, adrian, please, they don't want to leave you, they love you so much, they thought they were going to get to have so much more time with you, you have to understand, what if they die all by themself in fucking space and they never get to see you again and you don't find out they're gone until you're too old to be happy again, adrian, please, come on, just listen to them; how can you say that you want them to go? how can you say that?

you have to admit to them that you're not sure about it either. that you don't want to let go of them so soon. they're relieved.

"but," you say, and the tension picks up, "it's the right thing to do, isn't it?"

they cannot argue with that. your rocky is not a selfish person.

"yes," they say, "i suppose it is."

they are quiet for a very long time after that, and then they ask you to watch them sleep. you do, and you wonder how much time you will have before they have to go.

as it turns out, not very much. you are bidding them farewell far earlier than you ever wanted to, and you feel like a character in a romantic tragedy. you ask rocky to promise you just one thing. (anything, anything, anything.)

"promise you won't die," you say.

"i promise," they say.

"promise you'll come back. promise you won't forget about me." like a flood, the words keep coming; there are mourning songs already in your voice.

they try, weakly, to make a joke; you said one thing.

it doesn't land. they leave. you are alone.

for years, you work on the astrophage project from the ground. you throw yourself into it, because what else can you do? there's nothing else for you here except the responsibility of all life on erid. you've got a job, and a damned important one too; fuck absolutely everyone and everything, you're going to do it right. you climb the ranks of the science division until you're so deeply buried in work that you don't have time to think about anything else.

your sibling's pebbles hatch. another one of your siblings finds a mate. your parents are worried about you. you are invited to visit your relatives. you decline. every so often, one of them comes to watch you sleep. rocky's family chips in too, and you pretend it doesn't hurt you to wake up to someone who is almost-your-mate with almost-their-voice, and you float through life in silence and terrible grief.

the day the team is supposed to come back arrives and passes, and there is no word from them. a few years' delay can be expected, says the flustered head of the spaceflight division.

"have hope, my friends," they add. their fidgeting claws are not comforting

have hope.

you try. years pass. nothing, nothing, nothing. someone in the diplomacy division propositions you; you are so surprised that you reject them outright with none of the etiquette that such an interaction requires.

"no," you say, and that's it.

you wait. in your mind, you are still in a committed relationship, and you refuse to be unfaithful. your family is worried about you. rocky's family has gone through the mourning rites already. the families of the other crew members go on with their lives. rumors spread throughout the astrophage project that you're delusional, insane, driven mad by grief. you pay it no mind. you wait. you wait. you wait.

somewhere down the line, news arrives that a ship has made contact with the space elevator; an alien ship, no less. it communicates at a strange frequency, but the diplomacy, engineering, and spaceflight teams pull through. there's an eridian on board. they are speaking very oddly, but they are an eridian, and they bring news of a predator of astrophage and, of course, a whole fucking alien. apparently, it's kind of maybe a little bit dying.

you find out about all of this relatively quickly, even though the spaceflight division did their very best to keep the news from spreading. the story cannot be suppressed. you try not to hope too much. as it turns out, you needn't have worried; the head of the spaceflight division approaches you and tells you that rocky is alive. the only one who survived the trip. you almost collapse in sheer relief. (you will mourn the rest of the crew some other time. you deserve to be happy about this.)

so when the ship finally docks, you are among the very first at the elevator. because of your rank, your status as a no-longer-widow/er, your insistence, and the spaceflight team's general concern for your emotional wellbeing, you are permitted to greet your mate in the elevator.

oh, it's unreal. it is absolutely fucking unreal. have you not been hoping for this every second of every day since rocky first left? have you not been waiting for this moment? you're almost too numbed by the surreality of it to have any strong emotional reactions to all of this. it's been centuries (eridian). you've wanted this more than anything for centuries. you're finally going to see your mate again.

you're almost a little nervous. what if it's different? what if they won't take you anymore? what if they don't want to see you? what if they do want to see you and then they do and they're so disappointed by all the little ways you've changed in their absence that they change their mind about you? what then? you think you'd just kill yourself at that point. honestly. you'd devoted so much time to longing for this that if any of the above happens you will genuinely just tip over into suicidality and kill yourself.

you shouldn't have worried.

when you see rocky, every single concern leaves your mind, because ohhhh oh oh oh OH my god it's them it's them it's them they're here and they're alive and they've aged and they hold themself differently but it's still them it's them it's them it's them it's them. you've wanted this for so long.

it's a whole entire thing. they say your name and it sounds a little different from before, flatter and quieter as if they've slowly released you from their expectations of home and you say theirs and there are still grief-chords attached to it and it may well be a scene from one of those old eridian love stories that pebbles learn about in school.

"you waited," they say, and their voice is different from before, quieter and a little rougher and limited to an odd range of notes. you notice them noticing the wedding stone that's still embedded in one of your limbs.

"yes," you say. "i would have waited forever."

and you would have.

for just a little bit, it's perfect; you and them again, tentatively remembering each other.

from there on out, it only gets more complicated. the alien rocky brought back from space is dying. it has saved their life so many times, and they have saved it in return. they are back so late partly because they'd come to a roadblock in the mission, and partly because they had given the alien a massive amount of astrophage fuel to try to send it home. they are close in a way that no other beings in either of your star systems have ever been.

rocky spends most of their time tending to it in the spaceship. you, as one of the leading scientists on the astrophage project, are assigned to head a subdivision to build the alien a habitat, synthesize as many of its missing nutrients as quickly as possible, and generally prevent it from dying. which it is. very slowly.

the alien's deteriorating condition is pushing rocky into a terrified frenzy. if they are not working, they are sleeping. if they are not sleeping, they are eating. if they are not eating, they are working. on and on and on. you are just as busy, but you wish with all your hearts that you could have just a moment with the person you'd been missing for far too much of your life.

as time wears on, the alien starves. rocky's voice becomes a high wail, already grieving with a kind of visceral desperation you'd never seen from them before, that not even you had experienced. it's terrifying. you realize that they are not the same as they were when they left; they are louder and quieter, far more haphazard, entire life tangled incomprehensibly with this disgusting, dying water-bug. you are not a part of it. you try to help as much as you can. you try to be comforting. it doesn't work. of course it doesn't work.

the two of you fight a lot, nowadays. it feels as if your relationship is falling apart before you; every step you take is wrong, and you are dancing around each other, trying not to fall into the empty space that is Everything That Once Was. you feel like they're being taken from you all over again, except this time you can see no clear reason, and this time they recoil from you every time you try to reach for them. this time, it's worse.

because they're there, aren't they? they're right there. and they're not. some days they don't even come home. they rarely stay long enough to watch you sleep. they're right fucking there, and you still have to sit there and miss them and miss them and miss them.

it's turned you bitter, the terrible ordeal your life has been. you're still quite young, and you've spent more of your life grieving and hurting than you've spent happy. what fucking crime had you committed to deserve this?

you almost relish the arguments, hours spent screeching at each other with all of nothing and everything between you, FUCKING LISTEN TO ME and YOU CAN'T KEEP DOING THIS and IF YOU WOULD JUST STOP AND CALM DOWN AND THINK FOR A SECOND and it's horrible horrible horrible, but it's the only chance you have to hear their voice. between fights, there are moments; you are clinging to each other, to the versions of each other that you'd lost, and you cannot be around each other for long before you are fighting again.

in between, you are both tired. rocky says your name like it hurts, and you know that you are the same.

you're going to lose them, you think. you're far too tired to stop it from happening.

so that's what adrian's been going through. and they're supposed to just like what. be okay with all that? they're supposed to just smile and take it? yeah, i don't think so. NO ONE goes through something like that and comes out of it happy-go-lucky and totally fine. if i were in their place, i think i'd be genuinely homicidal. i would be bloodthirsty. under the circumstances, i think they actually deserve a few murders. if they wanted to just get a divorce and live out the rest of their life as a hermit it'd be a shockingly normal reaction.

all i'm saying is that i bet adrian does find grace fascinating to a degree, i bet Bioengineer Scientist Adrian is so so interested in all of this i bet they want to dissect him piece by piece (/pos), but i think he's too tangled in their personal life for it to just be that, yknow?

i can't imagine they'd be totally okay with everything from the get-go. they wouldn't be ONLY bitter and jealous, of course, because they've been Going Through It too and they understand what it is to be alone and afraid and unsure of anything, but they wouldn't just. be fine with it. no one would just be fine with it. i think they'd try to help out, they'd understand the gravity of the situation and they'd do their best to help keep grace alive and healthy and maybe even happy when they get time and space to breathe, but it would be. complicated.

they'd make friends eventually, but it would still be really weird. it would be like. yeah man. it would be Extremely Fucking Strange. i don't know. whatever. go my awful codependent secret whatever-the-fuck thing romantic-not-romantic-kind-of-but-also-not-queerplatonic-vaguely-resentful throuple.

okay, so, i was thinking about this one night for normal reasons, and i was like “wow yeah i really want to write about their relationship kind of falling apart a little bit” and so now here i am. with a planned duology-maybe-even-longer-series.

the title of the whole thing will be the universal constance of eridian love stories—at the very least, that’s the working title. two works are encompassed: ad astra and per aspera. depending on how much i enjoy the writing process and how much people enjoy reading the fics, i’ll consider making it a whole series (although any following works would be single-chapter because i’m really not a longform writer hahahaaa i’m pushing my limits a LOT with these projects).

ad astra will basically cover what rocky went through before going to space (discovery of astrophage, thrums, getting on the blip-a) and throughout the journey (a couple filler chapters of spaceship shenanigans to establish the systems, hierarchies, dynamics of the crew), and…beyond that (death of the crew, rocky’s Half A Century Spent Alone And Probably Also Dying And Kind Of Sort Of Losing It, some stuff with grace [although i’ll try to avoid recounting the events of phm wherever i can there might end up being some pov-switch-retelling-type portions]). so yeah.

per aspera will be the return trip to erid (rocky thinks about adrian like a fuck ton, various conversations with grace, growing steadily more codependent, will have some secret-third-thing-ing probably), the arrival at erid (joyous reunion! lots of touching and whatever-the-eridian-version-of-happy-crying-is! some vague foreshadowing of upcoming grief probably!), early re/adjustment to erid (grace is dying, it's slow and painful, he kind of wants to just End It at this point, rocky’s freaking out and also totally different from Way Before, adrian tries to help, they fail, general falling-apart-of-lives-and-relationships), later re/adjustment (grace is no longer dying but he is still Struggling A Lot With Everything, rocky and adrian are Going Through It, grace is kind of a homewrecker but he doesn’t actually realize this at any point because adrian and rocky don’t fight in front of him and he’s still kind of not okay physically speaking so he has some more pressing issues i guess), recovery (adrian and rocky start figuring out how to be around each other again, etc).

i'm going to throw in a ton of insecurity for everyone too. grace wonders if rocky only likes him cause he spent so long alone and dying in space before they met. rocky wonders if grace only likes them because it needs them to survive and because they were the first intelligent living thing it came across in space after waking up with two dead bodies and no memories. adrian wonders if rocky only stays with them out of perceived obligation and some kind of desperate yearning for the past and if anything will be okay because they're both so different now and neither of them remember how to do anything but grieve for each other. grace wonders if adrian hates him (a little bit, yes, but they're very guilty about it and thinking about it for too long freaks them out they're developing a whole entire complex about it) (they alternate rapidly between being very nice to grace, entirely ignoring him, and being extremely passive aggressive). rocky wonders if grace and adrian hate them (no). adrian wonders if rocky and grace hate them (also no) (well. every time grace is around them he kind of wants to cry but that's not really hatred it's just a Whole Other Weird Thing) (not to mention it's grace, the famously Leaky Gross Wet space blob its kind of expected). it's all very complicated, very stupid, and it makes everyone involved want to kill themselves and each other. Not Good. statement.

as you can see this is very thoroughly planned out and not at all haphazard and the nonspecificity of the plan will definitely not come by to bite me in the ass.

basically my thought process when it comes to this project is that it #PissesMeOff that the fandom as a whole imagines this like. perfect reunion where adrian is Immediately Okay With The Nasty Fucking Half-Dead Alien Wisp rocky brings home from space and everything is okay and there are no challenges besides medical ones on grace’s part only. it's not exactly a bad thing per se and of course this is to be expected but i personally hate romance and love divorce so my sinister little mind went “okayyyyy but that wouldn’t happen though would it” and it’s like NO it would NOT.

because like. okay. imagine with me for a sec. you’re adrian, alright? your sun is just up and fucking DYING. no one knows what’s going on. the planet will cool down, and eventually it will get too cold for literally anything to exist and everything will die. including you. including your mate. you think about how much you hate cold weather. you think about your mate's bad limb. you think about your sibling’s new clutch of eggs, which are due to hatch soon and which they've been struggling to have for so long. the pebbles might not even get to live beyond the Actual Fucking Apocalypse, and just how sad is that, yknow? you think about your friends in the colder regions of erid, you think about eridians who won’t have the time or resources to relocate, you think about eridians who’ll have to leave their homes. you think about overcrowding and resources growing thin and you think about wars like erid hasn’t seen since the last peacemaking thrum, which was generations ago. you think about the other scientists and you think about the poets and you think about the artisans and you think we are not ready for this. you’re scared. terrified, even.

so you drag your mate to all of the thrums and you’re there for the discovery of these strange tiny organisms eating your star. no one knows what to do. you pretend not to panic. they call it astrophage (i might come up with something else we'll see)—star-eater in one of erid's ancient root languages. you are asked to join the science teams to discover as much about astrophage as quickly as possible, and your mate is chosen to co-lead the engineering teams to build probes and new equipment and everything is everywhere and at the very least you’re doing something.

in the end, it’s not enough. they need scientists and pilots and engineers and doctors to go into space, where your species has never gone before, because what would you have done? there is no longer a choice. erid is dying.

for maximum efficiency and professionalism, the recruiters say, none of the crew can have any affiliations with each other prior to the mission. it makes sense. it would be too much grief and stress for everyone on board, they say. it makes sense. it would be best for all relationships to be strictly professional to avoid or at least delay interpersonal drama for as long as possible, they say. it makes sense. they've asked rocky to be the ship’s second engineer, they say. they will go into the stars, they say. you cannot follow, they say. it stops making sense.

you've been together for longer than you haven't. maybe you have an anniversary coming up. maybe you were finally seriously talking about having pebbles together. maybe, oh, i don't know. maybe you don't want your other half to go off into space and maybe die and maybe never see them again. maybe you want them to live. you don't say any of this; nothing, you know, is worth the lives of every single organism on erid. no single eridian is that important. not even rocky. oh, your rocky; you are grieving almost before the director of the space division finishes their sentence.

"i hope you understand, scientist adrian," they say. "erid is at stake."

"i know," you say. you do your best to sound far more okay than you feel. "you have made a good decision."

and they have. they have, because your mate is one of the best engineers on erid. hell, they're an actual genuine genius. maybe one of the youngest to ever attend the top engineering school on erid. they're only IIV+Vℓ (arbitrary, i'll think about it more) years old now, and they're co-leading the engineering division of the astrophage project. the leaders in the space division have made a good choice. rocky's probably one of the best choices. it's selfish of you to be upset over this. but you're young, too. you should have had a whole life with them ahead of you.

it's okay.

rocky doesn't want to go.

it's...less okay. you have to convince them that it's the best possible decision, convince them that they're good enough, convince them to leave you maybe-forever to sleep and eat in an experimental vehicle full of strangers and they don't want to, adrian, they're scared, what if they fail, what if they mess up, what if something happens and you're not there, adrian, please, they don't want to leave you, they love you so much, they thought they were going to get to have so much more time with you, you have to understand, what if they die all by themself in fucking space and they never get to see you again and you don't find out they're gone until you're too old to be happy again, adrian, please, come on, just listen to them; how can you say that you want them to go? how can you say that?

you have to admit to them that you're not sure about it either. that you don't want to let go of them so soon. they're relieved.

"but," you say, and the tension picks up, "it's the right thing to do, isn't it?"

they cannot argue with that. your rocky is not a selfish person.

"yes," they say, "i suppose it is."

they are quiet for a very long time after that, and then they ask you to watch them sleep. you do, and you wonder how much time you will have before they have to go.

as it turns out, not very much. you are bidding them farewell far earlier than you ever wanted to, and you feel like a character in a romantic tragedy. you ask rocky to promise you just one thing. (anything, anything, anything.)

"promise you won't die," you say.

"i promise," they say.

"promise you'll come back. promise you won't forget about me." like a flood, the words keep coming; there are mourning songs already in your voice.

they try, weakly, to make a joke; you said one thing.

it doesn't land. they leave. you are alone.

for years, you work on the astrophage project from the ground. you throw yourself into it, because what else can you do? there's nothing else for you here except the responsibility of all life on erid. you've got a job, and a damned important one too; fuck absolutely everyone and everything, you're going to do it right. you climb the ranks of the science division until you're so deeply buried in work that you don't have time to think about anything else.

your sibling's pebbles hatch. another one of your siblings finds a mate. your parents are worried about you. you are invited to visit your relatives. you decline. every so often, one of them comes to watch you sleep. rocky's family chips in too, and you pretend it doesn't hurt you to wake up to someone who is almost-your-mate with almost-their-voice, and you float through life in silence and terrible grief.

the day the team is supposed to come back arrives and passes, and there is no word from them. a few years' delay can be expected, says the flustered head of the spaceflight division.

"have hope, my friends," they add. their fidgeting claws are not comforting

have hope.

you try. years pass. nothing, nothing, nothing. someone in the diplomacy division propositions you; you are so surprised that you reject them outright with none of the etiquette that such an interaction requires.

"no," you say, and that's it.

you wait. in your mind, you are still in a committed relationship, and you refuse to be unfaithful. your family is worried about you. rocky's family has gone through the mourning rites already. the families of the other crew members go on with their lives. rumors spread throughout the astrophage project that you're delusional, insane, driven mad by grief. you pay it no mind. you wait. you wait. you wait.

somewhere down the line, news arrives that a ship has made contact with the space elevator; an alien ship, no less. it communicates at a strange frequency, but the diplomacy, engineering, and spaceflight teams pull through. there's an eridian on board. they are speaking very oddly, but they are an eridian, and they bring news of a predator of astrophage and, of course, a whole fucking alien. apparently, it's kind of maybe a little bit dying.

you find out about all of this relatively quickly, even though the spaceflight division did their very best to keep the news from spreading. the story cannot be suppressed. you try not to hope too much. as it turns out, you needn't have worried; the head of the spaceflight division approaches you and tells you that rocky is alive. the only one who survived the trip. you almost collapse in sheer relief. (you will mourn the rest of the crew some other time. you deserve to be happy about this.)

so when the ship finally docks, you are among the very first at the elevator. because of your rank, your status as a no-longer-widow/er, your insistence, and the spaceflight team's general concern for your emotional wellbeing, you are permitted to greet your mate in the elevator.

oh, it's unreal. it is absolutely fucking unreal. have you not been hoping for this every second of every day since rocky first left? have you not been waiting for this moment? you're almost too numbed by the surreality of it to have any strong emotional reactions to all of this. it's been centuries (eridian). you've wanted this more than anything for centuries. you're finally going to see your mate again.

you're almost a little nervous. what if it's different? what if they won't take you anymore? what if they don't want to see you? what if they do want to see you and then they do and they're so disappointed by all the little ways you've changed in their absence that they change their mind about you? what then? you think you'd just kill yourself at that point. honestly. you'd devoted so much time to longing for this that if any of the above happens you will genuinely just tip over into suicidality and kill yourself.

you shouldn't have worried.

when you see rocky, every single concern leaves your mind, because ohhhh oh oh oh OH my god it's them it's them it's them they're here and they're alive and they've aged and they hold themself differently but it's still them it's them it's them it's them it's them. you've wanted this for so long.

it's a whole entire thing. they say your name and it sounds a little different from before, flatter and quieter as if they've slowly released you from their expectations of home and you say theirs and there are still grief-chords attached to it and it may well be a scene from one of those old eridian love stories that pebbles learn about in school.

"you waited," they say, and their voice is different from before, quieter and a little rougher and limited to an odd range of notes. you notice them noticing the wedding stone that's still embedded in one of your limbs.

"yes," you say. "i would have waited forever."

and you would have.

for just a little bit, it's perfect; you and them again, tentatively remembering each other.

from there on out, it only gets more complicated. the alien rocky brought back from space is dying. it has saved their life so many times, and they have saved it in return. they are back so late partly because they'd come to a roadblock in the mission, and partly because they had given the alien a massive amount of astrophage fuel to try to send it home. they are close in a way that no other beings in either of your star systems have ever been.

rocky spends most of their time tending to it in the spaceship. you, as one of the leading scientists on the astrophage project, are assigned to head a subdivision to build the alien a habitat, synthesize as many of its missing nutrients as quickly as possible, and generally prevent it from dying. which it is. very slowly.

the alien's deteriorating condition is pushing rocky into a terrified frenzy. if they are not working, they are sleeping. if they are not sleeping, they are eating. if they are not eating, they are working. on and on and on. you are just as busy, but you wish with all your hearts that you could have just a moment with the person you'd been missing for far too much of your life.

as time wears on, the alien starves. rocky's voice becomes a high wail, already grieving with a kind of visceral desperation you'd never seen from them before, that not even you had experienced. it's terrifying. you realize that they are not the same as they were when they left; they are louder and quieter, far more haphazard, entire life tangled incomprehensibly with this disgusting, dying water-bug. you are not a part of it. you try to help as much as you can. you try to be comforting. it doesn't work. of course it doesn't work.

the two of you fight a lot, nowadays. it feels as if your relationship is falling apart before you; every step you take is wrong, and you are dancing around each other, trying not to fall into the empty space that is Everything That Once Was. you feel like they're being taken from you all over again, except this time you can see no clear reason, and this time they recoil from you every time you try to reach for them. this time, it's worse.

because they're there, aren't they? they're right there. and they're not. some days they don't even come home. they rarely stay long enough to watch you sleep. they're right fucking there, and you still have to sit there and miss them and miss them and miss them.

it's turned you bitter, the terrible ordeal your life has been. you're still quite young, and you've spent more of your life grieving and hurting than you've spent happy. what fucking crime had you committed to deserve this?

you almost relish the arguments, hours spent screeching at each other with all of nothing and everything between you, FUCKING LISTEN TO ME and YOU CAN'T KEEP DOING THIS and IF YOU WOULD JUST STOP AND CALM DOWN AND THINK FOR A SECOND and it's horrible horrible horrible, but it's the only chance you have to hear their voice. between fights, there are moments; you are clinging to each other, to the versions of each other that you'd lost, and you cannot be around each other for long before you are fighting again.

in between, you are both tired. rocky says your name like it hurts, and you know that you are the same.

you're going to lose them, you think. you're far too tired to stop it from happening.

so that's what adrian's been going through. and they're supposed to just like what. be okay with all that? they're supposed to just smile and take it? yeah, i don't think so. NO ONE goes through something like that and comes out of it happy-go-lucky and totally fine. if i were in their place, i think i'd be genuinely homicidal. i would be bloodthirsty. under the circumstances, i think they actually deserve a few murders. if they wanted to just get a divorce and live out the rest of their life as a hermit it'd be a shockingly normal reaction.

all i'm saying is that i bet adrian does find grace fascinating to a degree, i bet Bioengineer Scientist Adrian is so so interested in all of this i bet they want to dissect him piece by piece (/pos), but i think he's too tangled in their personal life for it to just be that, yknow?

i can't imagine they'd be totally okay with everything from the get-go. they wouldn't be ONLY bitter and jealous, of course, because they've been Going Through It too and they understand what it is to be alone and afraid and unsure of anything, but they wouldn't just. be fine with it. no one would just be fine with it. i think they'd try to help out, they'd understand the gravity of the situation and they'd do their best to help keep grace alive and healthy and maybe even happy when they get time and space to breathe, but it would be. complicated.

they'd make friends eventually, but it would still be really weird. it would be like. yeah man. it would be Extremely Fucking Strange. i don't know. whatever. go my awful codependent secret whatever-the-fuck thing romantic-not-romantic-kind-of-but-also-not-queerplatonic-vaguely-resentful throuple.