Work Text:
“What Grace doing?” Rocky asked, rolling up to the man like a puppy that was just trying to be a trip hazard.
Grace didn’t quite blame him; there wasn’t much to do on the Hail Mary, so hanging around one another was pretty much the best entertainment they could get, but still, he could do with maybe a meter of personal space?
“Just looking for my glasses, Rock,” Grace replied, squinting so much his eyes hurt as he looked around for the stupid things.
It wasn’t like he couldn’t see without them, but he definitely din’t like the headache that came if he tried to do anything particularly fiddly -like reading- without them.
“Grace leave glasses on lab table fourty-two seconds ago. Grace forget, question?” Rocky replied, with a tone teetering somewhere between confusion and exasperation.
He got like that when Grace did something particularly ‘human’ (derogatory).
“In the Lab?” Grace replied, eyebrows pulled together in a frown. “Really? I could’ve sworn I was still- oh, nevermind.” He made his way to the lab, where the glasses were indeed sat innocently on the table, apparently put there by Grace while he… well, wasn’t paying attention. Somehow.
Rocky followed, of course.
“Human memory stupid. Grace forget so quick. Eridian never forget,” Rocky said, his voice possessing that clear, smooth quality it had when he was particularly proud of himself.
“Yeah, yeah,” Grace replied, shoving his glasses up his nose, and making his way back to the ‘don’t go crazy’ room, where he had left his laptop.
He had been making notes on Eridian biology and culture, hoping that someday, he’d be able to send the information back to Earth. It wasn’t much in comparison to the whole taomoeba thing, but Eridians were the first intelligent alien species they had ever come across, so information on them was pretty valuable, he thought.
And it kept his mind off… everything else about his situation.
“Alright, Rocky,” he said, settling into a small seat he had made of spare blankets and pillows, and pulling one laptop into his lap while the other two that translated Rocky sat off to one side.
Rocky rolled into place in front of Grace. “Why Grace wear glasses, question?” He asked, with a tone that said he had just remembered he didn’t actually know.
“I’ve told you this, Rock. What about your superior Eridian memory, huh?” Grace laughed at his own joke as he pulled up the word doc with his notes. The computer took a moment to load the near-50 pages he had already written up (most of which were very quick notes, which would have been just about indecipherable to anybody but him)
“Grace say Grace can’t see without glasses, but take off and still see. How, question?”
Oh yeah, he guessed the explanation ‘I can’t see without them’ that he had given when Rocky first asked wouldn’t make tons of sense to an alien who’s species literally doesn’t have a sense of sight at all.
“Uh… well, I can still see without them, like, my eyes still work, but it’s blurry if I try to see something close up, you know?” Grace replied, frowning at the mess of sentences in his notes.
At least half of this had that red squiggly line that meant even the computer couldn’t make sense of his awful spelling, most likely all done in an extreme rush by a severely sleep-deprived Grace.
“No,” Rocky replied stubbornly. “Rocky not know. Rocky cannot see.”
When Grace didn’t reply immediately, he added; “New word, question?”
“Which one, Rock?” Grace asked distractedly.
“Eyes still work, but- new word.” Rocky replied, his voice more wavering than usual, like it always was when he imitated Grace. Grace assumed he was being mocked, but he had never asked.
Grace frowned as he looked off into space -literally-, trying to remember what he had said. “Uhhh… poorly? No, you’d know that one. Worse? No… oh, Blurry! My eyes are blurry without my glasses!”
“Yes! What new word mean, question?” Rocky asked
Well shoot. Blurriness was pretty hard to explain, too. “It’s like… less clear. Everything’s messy, things mix together. Makes it hard to see.”
Rocky made a noise halfway between a hum and a series of clicks that meant he understood. “Like when hear through wall!” He chirped excitedly.
“Yeah! Yeah, it’s exactly like that! … I assume.” Grace really didn’t understand fully how Eridians saw, and probably wouldn’t ever understand, being human and not Eridian, but the comparison sounded accurate enough.
“So Grace add wall in front of eye? How that help, question?” Rocky asked, again with his ‘stupid humans’ tone of voice.
“It’s glass. And it’s curved, so it can focus the light into my eye. It’s called refraction.” Grace explained, holding his glasses up to the wall of Rocky’s ball so he could see the shape of the glass.
“All humans have, question?” Rocky asked, once the glasses had returned to Grace’s face.
Grace shook his head. “Nope, not everyone. Most people’s eyes can refract the light for them, but mine stopped being able to do that properly when I was in College. Now if something’s too close, it goes all blurry.”
Rocky made a series of excited clicks at this. “Some Eridians same! Get old, and hear less. We call them 🎶”
Grace inputted the word as ‘deaf’ in his laptop. “Yeah, we have people like that too. People that can’t hear, I mean. We call them deaf. Must suck to be deaf as an Eridian, though. They can’t see anything.”
“Yes, very hard. Some can hear little bit, some not at all.”
“Uh-huh, same with us. But our deaf people use sign language sometimes. Talking with their hands,” Grace said, searching up ‘sign language’ in his image save data to pre-empt the questions he would no doubt get from Rocky.
Rocky bobbed his carapace up and down in an approximation of Grace’s nodding as he pointed his ‘seeing device’ at the screen. “Deaf Eridian feel vibrations of other Eridians talking. Must speak very close to them. Sometimes touch.”
“Huh. That’s pretty cool, Rocky. Can they read?”
Rocky made a so-so motion with his hand. “Sometimes yes, sometimes no. Cannot feel everything through Eridian claw.”
“Yeah, your claws are pretty tough,” Grace said thoughtfully, before adding; “Humans have pretty sensitive hands. Sometimes when a human is blind- oh, that means they can’t see, by the way- they can read braille. It’s like a series of bumps on something that make words.” Grace said.
“Oh. They hear like Eridian, question?”
Grace shook his head. God, he wished he could hear anywhere near like an Eridian. Maybe then he wouldn’t hate having bad vision.
“No, bud. Humans still can’t hear through walls. But sometimes they can hear and feel things a little better, I think.”
“How they ‘see’, question?” Rocky asked.
“They don’t, Rock.” He said. But clearly, that wasn’t a sufficient answer, so he added; “but they usually have a cane to help them. They move it on the ground in front of them so it can feel anything they’re about to walk into. And sometimes they have service animals. Like a dog that can tell them where to go.”
Rocky thought over this for a moment, long enough that Grace considered opening his word document again. He was pondering the awfully spelled sentence: ‘distanct relaytige? Astrophagev, taomebra and rocjy and me? Adrieb evolve us?’ (This was bold, italicised, and underlined.), when Rocky finally replied.
“Grace go blind, question? Rocky will be service animal. Statement.”
Grace couldn’t help himself; he laughed. Rocky sounded so serious about it, but all he could think of was the absurd image of the rock on a leash, walking him around.
“No, bud. I’m not going blind. My eyes might get worse as I get older, but I’ll be alright.”
Rocky nodded seriously. “Grace can see forever?”
“Yup. Probably,” Grace replied.
Rocky made a sullen sort of noise; a clicking grumble an octave below his usual range. “Humans lucky can see. Rocky wish Rocky can see. Many many things not make noise. Human technology easier when can see.”
“Ohhhh,” Grace began, a satisfied grin on his face. “So you admit Eridians aren’t always better? Humans aren’t that stupid after all!”
“No, no no,” Rocky replied, very clearly frantic to prove Eridians were far superior. “Humans not only earth creature that can see. Humans still stupid. Not special.”
Grace snorted. “Right.” It was true, some animals could see far more colours than them. But he didn’t want to admit that.
“Well, Rock, some animals see less colours than us. Actually, some humans see less colours too.”
Rocky perked up at this, always being eager to hear more about human biology. It’d be pretty strange if he wasn’t, given humans were quite literally aliens to them.
“Not see same colours? Why, question?”
“Their eyes are damaged. Sometimes the receptors in human eyes don’t work, so they can’t see some colours. They still see everything, it’s just coloured differently. They’re called colourblind.”
“What colours Grace see, question?”
“Er… all the ones humans can see? wavelengths of 380 to 700 nanometers?” Grace said, hoping that a scientific explanation would help Rocky more than anything else he might be able to tell him.
“Rocky know this. These colours are what, question?” Rocky persisted.
“Well… there’s a lot in-between, but we call the separate colours red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo and violet,” Grace said. “ROY-G-BIV.”
He wasn’t sure he’d ever get that out of his head, after repeating it about a million times to kids. Being a science teacher definitely ingrained some things into his skull.
“Many many many new word.” Rocky said, his voice quivering with interest. “Eridian have no word for colour.”
“Yeah, you told me. Green is medium-rough, right?”
Rocky nodded. “Yes, yes, colours rough and smooth to Rocky.”
Rocky began to say something else, but cut himself off before Grace’s translator could pick it up. A silence fell over the alien, and he went completely still. Not asleep, but thinking. Grace watched him attentively all the same.
When he finally spoke, his words were hesitant. “What colours look like to Grace?”
Oh. Right.
He supposed, logically, it made sense for Rocky to ask this. But it still took Grace a moment to properly process the question.
What did colours look like?
It was so deeply ingrained in his mind, he wasn’t sure if he could explain the very concept of colours. Where would he even begin?
Blue is the colour of the sky, but no, not your sky, my sky, but it can also be the colour of the ocean- nope, that doesn’t help either, your ocean is probably pitch-black. He could tell Rocky about its wavelength, but then he’d be right back at the stuff Rocky already knew, and he’d have gotten no-where.
He supposed that all he had to fall back on was description. Poetry.
God, he’d always been awful at poetry.
“Uhm.” Grace said. Great start.
“Well… red is first. It has the lowest wavelength. The ‘smoothest’ colour.”
“Yes.” Rocky replied, uninterested in this, which he knew.
To buy himself a bit more time, Grace quickly searched the colour up on his laptop, turning it around to show Rocky.
“It… it’s quite a… usually, it’s used to show… bad things. When you see it, you know something is wrong. I don’t really know why- maybe it’s because our blood is red. Oh, and fire is as well.”
Rocky made a soft, distressed chittering noise. Still wasn’t over the fear of fire, that one.
“It’s okay, Rocky. But you know what I mean? When you see red, you panic. All of the lights go red in here when something is very wrong, too. Like when we nearly crashed into Adrian.
Our cameras show us the petrova line as red. Lots of bad things.”
But, like all things, it wasn’t as simple as that.
“It can also show us love.” Grace added. “It’s the colour of hearts, and when it’s lighter, it’s pink. Pink is a good colour.” His mind briefly skittered over gendered colours, and he firmly set that concept aside until later.
“Colour look like… bad? And also love? Question?” Rocky asked, sounding utterly confused now.
“Uhhh… yeah. Pretty much.”
“Colours confusing.” Rocky said.
Grace nodded. “Yeah, well, that might just be because I’m not explaining them well. Or… I don’t know. I guess they’d always be confusing to you, seeing as you… have no concept of them.”
“What next colour?” Rocky asked.
“Oh, yeah. Orange. Uhm… orange is like red. It can be panicky, but it’s also… a bit more energetic. Happier. It’s… it’s the colour of a lot of stars. Tau ceti and Sol are very orange.” He showed Rocky this one as well, watching his little texture panel show a surface that was nearly entirely smooth, with occasional, shallow ripples.
He felt a bit stupid, explaining things like this, but god, how else could he go about it? Rocky was still nodding along, entirely enraptured, so clearly this was at least somewhat fine.
He couldn’t help but think about all of the poets and artists that must have explained this in a far better way, people that would have captured all of the emotion in a colour with immaculate, beautiful detail.
Grace could have looked these artists up, surely there was something in all of the nonsense that Stratt had downloaded, but… no, he was the one that met the aliens. Some possessive, stupid part of him demanded that he also be the one to teach them about something so important as this.
“And there’s yellow.” Grace said, again showing Rocky the colour on his laptop. “It can be obnoxious, I guess, but… I think it’s mostly a happy colour. It’s bright. Honestly, I think yellow might be my favourite. Reminds me of the- of Sol.” Tears pricked in his eyes, and he wiped them away quickly. As if Rocky wouldn’t have seen.
“Grace miss Sol, statement.” Rocky said, a soft, sympathetic humming present in his voice.
“Yeah, I do.” Grace replied. “Do you miss… oh yeah, I guess you can’t really see Eridani, can you?”
“No. Can’t see anything. Next colour, question?” Rocky continued. Even at the best of times -which these pretty much were- he was far from patient.
“Uhhh… Green’s next.”
“Medium rough!” Rocky clicked excitedly, “Adrian planet this colour!”
“Yeah, Rock. Green’s a good colour. A lot of Earth’s plants are green, so it’s- makes me think of- of alive things. Of nature. It’s a hopeful colour.”
“Green is… beautiful, question?” Rocky asked tentatively.
‘Beautiful’ had been a hard concept for them to both grasp. For Grace, beauty was something one saw, for the most part. To attempt to explain that to Rocky was hard, to say the least.
But then, music could be beautiful as well. Writing could be beautiful. Thus the concept was a bit difficult to convey to Rocky
To Rocky, beauty was… something else that Grace couldn’t quite grasp, but understood to be something between the beauty of sounds, and the beauty of an idea.
They had decided to make do with the word, understanding that it meant a slightly different thing each time.
Thus, Rocky’s question wasn’t exactly easy to answer. “Well… yeah, Rock. It is. Nature is… really beautiful.” Suddenly, a thought struck him. God, of course! He was in the perfect room to be talking about this!
“Actually, Rock. How about I show you green?” Grace said, pulling his laptop close again.
“Grace has shown Rocky green. Grace forget, question?”
Grace is stupid, question? Grace added in his own head.
“No, Rock. But colours aren’t just colours alone. They mix together, and they make things. Beautiful things, like Adrian.”
He already knew there was images of forests he could show in this room, so he put them on the screens first.
“Look at the screens, Rocky. That is green.”
To Grace, it was nothing short of breathtaking. He had always been more of a fan of the ocean, but there was no way he could look at this, with it’s sweeping canopy, and leaves practically glowing from the sunlight like little shards of green glass, and not think it was beautiful.
I should have seen this. He thought, abruptly. He had gone on nature walks very occasionally, and he had been to parks, sure, but this was different.
He had never truly appreciated the beauty of earth, the way that the sun beamed through the trees, the way the sky was painted golden and orange by the sun when the day began.
And now he never would. He would die on Erid, which was, by his guess, pitch black. He would never see the ocean again. He would never bike through a foggy morning. He would never-
“Oh, god,” Grace breathed, the forest disappearing quickly beneath hot, blurry tears.
He tried to wipe them away, but no matter what he did, he couldn’t stop them from streaming down his face, his chest heaving as he attempted to get air in.
Rocky made a concerned humming noise, and Grace felt a warm plate of xenonite press against his side. “Grace leaking. Why, question?”
“It’s- it’s just a-a lot.” Grace spluttered between gasping, helpless sobs.
Rocky hummed again, and Grace heard the click of his claw on the xenonite as it pressed against Grace.
“Grace like colour, question?”
Grace nodded, a wavering on his lips as he looked up at Rocky. “Yeah, I do. You know, I never really thought about it, but… I really love colours. I love… I love Earth, Rock.”
“Oh.” Rocky said, his carapace low to the ground with sadness. “Grace want go home, question?”
It took a moment, but finally, Grace shook his head. “No, bud. I’ve got to save Erid, remember? I’ll see Erid, then… well…” he took a deep, shuddering breath. “How about I show you blue?”
Rocky had seen the ocean on these screens before, but Grace showed him again. Gentle, lapping waves, then a light sky with soft clouds, then dark, greyish rainclouds.
“Blue’s a very calm colour.” He said, as the rain pattered down around them. “It can be sad, too.” Grace laughed weakly, and flicked back to the ocean screen. “I like this blue. I… I miss this blue, most of all.”
He hadn’t seen the ocean in so long, now. Not properly, at least. He had seen it on Stratt’s Vat, but he hadn’t been in the water, or sat on the sand and watched it, or anything that he had once loved about the beach.
And now I never will.
“Uhm, and, there’s indigo and violet.” Grace said, his voice still wavering as he spoke. “They’re both- kind of the same, compared to the others. And they don’t really show up in Nature much. It’s a special colour. They used to use it to show that someone was royalty.”
“New word.” Rocky said, politely ignoring the tears streaming down Grace’s cheeks.
“Uh, yeah. Royalty. It means… they’re really important people. I’ll explain it later.
There are also other colours, like… Uhm, brown, and grey, but they’re a bit… uh, boring, and black and white, but those two aren’t really colours and they’re- I’ll tell you about them later.” Grace sniffled once, and wiped his eyes. God, he was a mess. Leaky space blob, indeed.
There was a long silence, in which both of the two watched the waves on the screens. Rocky was pressed close to Grace, and though it felt no different than if he weren’t, it was comforting, somehow, to know he was there to watch the oceans together.
Slowly, Grace’s breathing settled with the waves. If he took his glasses off, he could nearly pretend he was on earth, watching a normal ocean. He closed his eyes and imagined it, listening only to the sounds of the tide, reproduced in a way that was accurate enough he could just about pretend he believed it.
“Rocky think of Eridian word for colours.” Rocky said finally, pulling Grace out of his reverie.
“Yeah, bud?” Grace said, opening his eyes to see the pixelated sky flicker above him.
“Grace say word, and Rocky say in Eridian.” Rocky said, and Grace sighed, but sat up, reaching across the room to get his translation laptop.
“Alright then. First, red.” Grace said, watching Rocky expectantly.
And Rocky began to sing.
His voice was lower than it usually was, but held emotion unlike anything Grace had heard before.
Rocky’s song began as a low, continuous note of distress that took Grace’s breath him from his lungs, intertwined closely with something that brought warmth to his heart, like a hand had been placed there.
The noises were woven so tightly that Grace could hardly tell one from the other, couldn’t have brought himself to try for anything.
Slowly, the distressed note tapered into nothing, leaving only the warmth behind, which steadily grew stronger, until Grace could feel the heat with such strength that when it ended, his chest ached with the lack of it.
Oh god. Oh god.
“Rocky… that was beautiful.” Grace said, and for once, the word didn’t feel inadequate, or clumsy. He could, for just a second, understand exactly what Rocky meant when he called something beautiful.
“Grace like Rocky word?” Rocky said hopefully.
“Yeah, Rock. Yeah, I really do.” Grace said.
Typing the word red into his translator after that felt wholly inadequate.
“What about… orange?”
This new song began with the same distressed noise as the previous one, but it felt… lighter somehow. Grace didn’t fully understand it until Rocky began the next strand of the song, a series of bright, chittering notes, like birdsong.
Of course, Orange was a few notes higher. Shorter wavelength, higher sound. Grace nearly laughed at his own stupidity.
Then, just to test his theory, he allowed Rocky to nearly come to a stop, the last strains of music going silent for barely a second before Grace said; “Yellow.”
Yellow began higher, as he had anticipated, and carried much more of that birdsong-brightness, spun with a long, sustained note that felt so suffused with energy it forced Grace to inhale deeply to make space for it.
The note carried on just long enough that it nearly burned, like staring for too long into something too bright. Then, the song came to a stop, with a final chirp from Rocky.
When the sound ended, Grace felt it’s absence keenly. A shiver passed over his skin, and he had to blink hard to keep the tears from escaping his eyes.
“Uh,” Grace said, not wanting the music to stop, “green?”
This song was different, in that the notes change much more quickly. While the others felt far removed from any of Rocky’s words, this one sounded very familiar.
Very familiar, like a word that he had heard before, but smoothed out, somehow, and with another tone beneath it, a tone that swelled, rose higher and higher.
Rocky began the first word again, while the second sound continued. This time, Grace caught the meaning of the tune.
Adrian. He was saying the name of the planet, or he was approximating it, the same way one might hum a chorus rather than speak each word.
Of course. Grace grinned at the realisation, and continued grinning as the song came to an end.
“This Rocky favourite colour.” He said, with a tone that Grace thought was downright wistful.
“Because of your mate?” Grace asked, and Rocky chirped in affirmative. “Rocky… that’s really sweet.”
Grace thought for a long moment, then added: “these don’t sound like your usual translations, Rock.”
Rocky hummed with agreement. “Yes. Translations not exact. Are… need new word. Longer collection of feeling. Made to be beautiful.”
Grace remembered his earlier thought about poems. “You mean poetry, don’t you? Are you making poetry?”
“Yes, statement. Eridians call 🎶” Rocky said, and Grace put it into his translation software as ‘poetry’
Funny that it took so long for that word to come up in conversation. Then Grace remembered their chosen professions, and well, maybe it wasn’t that odd.
“I didn’t pin you as a poet, Rocky.” Grace laughed, and Rocky made that high, clicking laugh of his along with him.
“Rocky not very good. Many Eridians better. Grace will like.”
“No, this is great. What about blue?”
Rocky made a small noise like he was adjusting from speaking to singing, then began.
This song was kind of depressing, in a pretty way.
It contained a few soft clicks like raindrops, and a high, sad noise like a wail, but this cry wasn’t quite as jarring as the others.
It felt softer, in a sense. More subdued.
Melancholy ebbed through Grace, a sensation pleasant enough that he could allow himself to sit with it, to admire the complexity of it, before the wail grew higher and took on a heaviness which dragged constantly at him, and would not permit being admired.
When the song -poem? Perhaps?- ended, Grace was, for the first time, glad to see it go. He could still feel the impact of it within his chest, but it was lesser, and vanishing more with every breath.
“That’s a sad one, Rock.” Grace said, and Rocky agreed.
“Grace want hear last colour, question?”
“You’ve got one for indigo and violet? Grace asked, surprised. He hadn’t really been in much of a state to explain those two as well as he would have liked to. Or any of them, really, but Rocky had done well so far, right?
“Yes. But short.” Rocky said, as if Grace would have minded.
“Go ahead, Rocky.” Grace said.
This last poem was, indeed, shorter. It was the highest of all of them, but it was elegant, in a way, with clicks that called to mind Rocky’s celebration clothes, and a tune that could have nearly been mistaken for a human’s voice, if the person listening wasn’t particularly detail-oriented.
It came to an end with a soft ‘twinkling’ noise at the end, and Rocky waited expectantly for feedback.
“Sounds good, Rock.” Grace said, gently patting the ball. “You’re a great poet.”
“Thank. Grace explain colours well.” He said.
“Oh, barely,” Grace laughed, but he couldn’t help the faint shimmer of pride in his chest, that anything even remotely as beautiful as that could be interpreted from his own words.
There was a beat of comfortable silence as Grace watched the lapping waves, his heart still heavy, and his chest warm with affection.
“What colour is Rocky, question?” Rocky piped up, and Grace laughed to himself.
“I’m sorry to tell you, bud, but you’re mostly brown. Like a rock.”
He guessed it must have been pretty disappointing, to discover that out of all of the beautiful colours he could have been, Rocky was not a shade of rainbow, but rather a dull, mottled brown.
Rocky made a low noise of frustration. “Oh. Rocky hoping was green.” Then, as if he had only just thought of it; “Grace say brown boring, question? Grace think Rocky look boring, question?”
The alien’s indignant tone was more than enough to dismiss any residual sadness from Grace. He laughed, loud and helpless, as Rocky continued to chatter on about this perceived insult.
Humans rude, colours stupid, Grace stupid, blah blah blah. Rocky continued on for a very long while, though Grace suspected this was mostly thanks to the reaction he was getting from Grace.
“If it helps,” Grace finally managed through laughter, “you’ve got a bit of- of greenish-blue on you as well. Very pretty; not boring at all.”
Rocky seemed placated by this, though Grace didn’t stop chuckling to himself for a long while afterwards.