Chapter Text
“Explain again. No understand.”
I groaned, knocking my head repeatedly against the back of my chair. “There’s not many other ways to describe colour to someone who can’t see, Rock. There’s like, whole papers about this back on Earth.” I had barely eked my way through a philosophy elective in undergrad. I didn’t know where to even begin explaining qualia and the philosophy of mind to someone to whom the concept of vision is literally alien.
“But Rocky still not understand,” he insisted. He jabbed a claw at me. “Bad explanation. Thought Grace was supposed to be teacher, question? Rocky pity Grace’s students.”
“Hey. Uncalled for.”
“Is true,” he said, and shifted a limb like he was shrugging.
I sat up a little more in my chair, and looked over the rim of my glasses at him. “They got it straight away when I explained it to them. Are you saying you’re dumber than a sixth grader?”
Rocky stomped his foot. “Rocky will get it, if Grace explain properly.”
I grinned. Sometimes it’s nice to know that I can get under his skin (crust? shell?) just as much as he gets under mine. “Fine. But pay attention this time, okay?” I tapped the laptop screen, which had had a slide about the electromagnetic radiation on it for nearly an hour now. “All these waves either side, gamma rays, x-rays, microwaves, radio waves; we can’t see those. But here, in between ultraviolet and infrared -”
“Astrophage light.”
“Right, that’s just outside our visible spectrum. Humans can see from 380 to 750 nanometers, and the wavelength that something absorbs or reflects is what gives it colour.”
“Yes, yes,” Rocky said impatiently. “Rocky understands that bit. Roy give.”
“Hmm? Who’s Roy?”
He huffed, a tooting noise that meant he thought I was being purposely slow. He made it a lot. “Grace say different colours make acronym. Roy give.”
“Oh, ROYGBIV?” I asked, and he nodded. “Yes, those are the seven main colours, and then there’s infinite other colours made of those - and that’s not even including hue, value, saturation…”
“Slow, slow, too fast, no understand.”
Rocky rolled a little closer, pointing his little looking-gun up at the screen. When I peeped at the box it translated to, the visible light spectrum was just a flat box with some labels about wavelength. How would you explain an experience to someone, when they have nothing analogous?
“Hmm,” Rocky intoned, tapping the tip of the looking-gun against the xenonite barrier. “Oh! Idea!”
With two of his spare limbs, he flipped the display box over and started shuffling around in its inner workings. Curious, I leant over to see what he was doing. His claws flicked deftly through what looked to me like metal spaghetti, but what I assumed was Eridian circuitry. It looked unbelievably delicate and complex, but Rocky manipulated it with precision I hadn’t expected from claws so wide and blunt.
“Am done!” He announced after a while, flipping the board back over. This time when he pointed the looking-gun at my screen, the visible light spectrum appeared as a gradient from completely flat to noisy grain. “Can now see wavelengths emitted by screen. I display pattern as smooth for high frequency light, rough for low frequency light. Can see colour!”
He spent the next couple of hours gleefully informing me what texture each of the digital displays were, and demanding a corresponding colour to add to his vocabulary. Eventually, after reassuring him for the fifth time that the map background was, in fact, dark blue, I yawned dramatically and jabbed a thumb in the direction of the dormitory.
“Great job pal, we’ll pick this up in the morning.” I scooped up my blanket from the back of my chair, and headed towards my xenonite nook. At Rocky’s insistence, I’d been forgoing my actual bunk for what was essentially a me-sized burrow surrounded by his environment on all sides, with just a small opening for me to crawl into. The claustrophobia was minimal by now, and I was starting to get used to the persistent heat and Rocky’s humming surrounding me as I slept. “You coming?”
Clattering sounds followed close behind me.
As we both settled in for the night, Rocky pressed against the wall closest to my cheek, he mumbled a soft “Rocky not dumb as sixth grader, statement.”
I fell asleep before I could confirm or deny.
Four years was a long time. It felt much, much longer when I sat down on day 200 and calculated that realistically, I only had enough food to last me another hundred. 150, if I rationed.
Mournfully, I thought of the entire packet of ramen I’d chosen to waste on making my Blip-A model. I’d even take a mouthful of mustard, now that the bottle had officially run dry.
Behind me, a familiar clatter let me know that Rocky was making his way down to the lab. He’d been conspicuously absent the last few days, refusing to elaborate on whatever his new project was that he’d squirreled away in his section instead of working on it in the lab while I did whatever I was doing. “Is surprise,” he’d said shortly when I pried about it over dinner. “Grace mind own business. Will see when it is ready.”
I called out to him without looking up from my whiteboard once he was by the doorway. “Hey buddy. Is it lunchtime already?”
The red underlined tally of remaining rations in front of me said that lunch could probably be postponed for a while.
“Rocky is done with surprise project.” He rolled the ball right up to my shins, almost bowling me over. “Grace look, Grace look!”
When I turned to face him, he was already nearly vibrating, rocking back and forth with excitement. Clutched in one claw is what looks very much like his seeing wand for screens. A pyramid shaped clear piece of xenonite is pointed at me, and Rocky chirps excitedly when I kneel down to get a closer look.
“Is probe for colours!” He pressed it against the nearest wall to me. “Reflected light into probe, onto Rocky box. Rocky see colour of anything, not just from screen!”
He clicked something on the side of the wand, and the box beside him shifted into rough striations. “Grace colour. Is yellow?” He shifted it around more, and the texture slid up and down the scale. “Grace many colours! Yellow and pink and white, lots of colours, very varied.”
I knelt in front of him, dumbstruck as he jabbed around me more, listing every colour as he spotted them. He seemed entranced by my hair, shifting between strands to hear the tiny variations of yellow. I let him, my head pressed against the barrier as something dangerously close to tears started to well up inside me.
Rocky chattered away continuously, more to himself than me, as he fiddled with the settings and made notes to himself to add more detail, and I let it wash over me, a comforting hum that I only realised had stopped when he tapped insistently on the xenonite against my cheek.
“What Grace think, question?” he said, shuffling as if suddenly nervous. “Grace like?”
I straightened up to look at him properly. “Grace like a lot. Amaze, amaze, amaze.”
He hopped happily. “Good! Rocky is glad it worked. Took longer than thought, light annoying to work with. Sound much more reliable, Eridians much better physiology.”
“Hey,” I protested lightly, “Don’t undo all your nice work by being a brat about evolution. I was going to suggest something fun, but now I’m not gonna.”
“Nooo, fun activity. Rocky only joking, am sure that there are many benefits of human vision. Grace give fun activity now.”
In my old classroom, I used to have a binder full of word searches and colouring pages for when kids finished their work early. A couple of them had asked for a copy of my silly whiteboard doodles to colour instead, which is how I’d ended up with a desk drawer full of photocopies of my own poorly drawn diagrams of animal and plant cells back on Earth, and one that had made it to Tau Ceti with me, thirty chloroplasts housing each kid’s name and a cytoplasm full of well wishes.
I grabbed a sheet of blank paper, and a thick black marker pen to sketch out Rocky’s very first Mr Grace Colouring In. Once it was done, I searched through every drawer I could think of, praying that my faint memory of the green and yellow box wasn’t me mixing up my classroom and my spaceship, and that I had actually seen some…
“Voila! Crayola!” I said triumphantly, dropping the packet in front of Rocky’s ball. He tilted his carapace at me.
“New word.”
“Crayons. Drawing tools. You can use them to colour this image in.”
Rocky didn’t say anything for a beat. “What is the image?”
I grinned. “Me and you. Don’t you see it?”
He considered the screen displaying his visible version of it again, and then tilted back towards me. “Grace bad at drawing. Looks nothing like Grace Rocky. We are not circles.”
I rolled my eyes. “It’s a representation, I never said I was an artist. Now you do the colours on it! Choose from the packet.” I rattled the box of crayons near his more flexible panel. He’d been refining it over the last couple of months, and by now it allowed for a decent amount of dexterity. “Go on, do my hair first. Find the yellow.”
“Is insulting,” Rocky muttered to himself, still obliging me and examining the crayons with his new tool. “Rocky not an infant. Grace is the infant.”
He beckoned me closer, and I let him get another good look at my hair. “Yellow. This is yellow crayon, yes?”
“Spot on.” He picked up the crayon, almost dropping it several times as it slid against the uneven surfaces of his xenonite glove. Once he was satisfied it wasn’t going to hop out of his grip, he gestured for me to hold the colouring page up for him to scribble my uncombed hair on top of my blobby head.
It punched straight through, leaving doodle Ryland with an unfortunate TBI and the crayon snapped in half against the palm of my hand.
The complaints about humans’ inefficient art supplies followed me throughout going to find some tape, and nursing my newly bruised hand. Having learnt that I was clearly too weak to be an effective easel, I pinned the paper onto the whiteboard instead, and dutifully sat to the side to model for him whenever he needed to select a new colour. It was an oddly comforting experience - new memories were few and far between after all this time, but I suddenly recalled being sharply reminded to stay still as Marissa’s ex-girlfriend used me as a model for her art assignment, and me spending the whole time thinking that I really should’ve peed before we started.
“Is complete!” Rocky proclaimed, breaking me out of the light doze I’d fallen into. “Is beautiful. Should be in gallery.”
I nudged the board to face me, and grinned. “Oh Rock. You’ve got a real talent.”
Besides my caved in little head, the limited colour selection had left me looking horribly burnt with hot pink skin and patchy brown splodges for my beard. My glasses took up over half of my face, framing the pupiless blue eyes he’d spent at least five minutes deliberating over. The teeth were unsettlingly realistic for such a cartoony drawing, individually defined with bright red gums. He’d got me dead to rights on the hair though; my hand came up to smooth down the tufts that had been standing at a right angle behind my ear, dutifully captured by Rocky’s crayon.
Rocky shuffled, rubbing two claws together. “Is good? Question?”
My heart melted slightly. “You said it yourself. It’s beautiful.” My eyes focus on the little Rocky I’d drawn beside me, all five legs outstretched like a starfish. He’d apparently just scribbled over it in one shade of brown and called it a day. “Bit of detail missing on the self-portrait though. Where’s all your colours?”
“Rocky is brown.”
“Well yes, but also green and -”
“Is boring,” Rocky insisted, stomping his foot. “Difficult to coordinate looking tool and crayon and screen at same time. Everywhere look on Rocky is boring boring same colour.”
Aww. I’ve managed to introduce body image issues to an alien species with no concept of vision.
“Not true! Give that stick here, I’ll show you.” I pushed my hand into the mesh panel, letting the heat seep between my fingers. Xenonite is good at containing the extreme temperatures on his side of the divider, but there was always a warmth to it that felt amazing against my now permanently cold skin. It was a big part of why I’d so easily tolerated the insistence that we sleep as close as physically possible once we reunited.
Reluctantly, he handed me the colour wand and scooted back enough that I could manoeuvre it to examine him. “See? These patches are green, and there’s all these darker veins that run all over you. Very pretty.”
“Pretty…” Rocky repeated. “Means beautiful-handsome-attractive. Pleasing to Grace eyes, question?”
My face heated with embarrassment. It was a perfectly sensible and innocuous question, but it was making my stomach churn like I’d been caught out for… something. Something superheated and stomach flipping. Whatever it was, it felt like a crisis for another time, preferably when Rocky was asleep and I was alone, and could filter through whatever insane feelings my space-madness had cooked up now in peace.
“Um. Yes. You’re a real stunner, pal.”
Smooth as a shark.
“Thank!” Rocky hummed, looking exceptionally pleased with himself. “Rocky considered handsome on Erid, am glad that I am pretty for Earth too. Thought that my colours were too boring, look like dull dirt to Grace. Happy this is not the case!”
Oh good gravy, he was vain.
I watched him preen for a few more seconds, a fond smile spreading uninvited over my face. He instructed me to hold the probe steady as he turned a full 360 degrees, holding different parts of himself up to the prism and trilling happily at the colours it communicated. He seemed entranced by the area of smooth green (“is medium rough”) embedded in the lower part of his favoured limb, examining it multiple times and requesting it be compared to the green patches by his joints. When I asked if it had a meaning, like his mission and family etchings, he froze, bringing another limb up to caress it.
“Yes. Is mating mark, from Adrian.”
“Oh.” I took a closer look. The stone was more translucent and reflective than Rocky’s otherwise opaque carapace, the shadows of the indent’s base visible through the dark green crystal. I racked my brains trying to remember my meticulously curated rock collection from when I was a kid. I definitely had one this colour, small and smooth and fitting perfectly in my tiny hand. It had soothed me, rolling it around my palm over and over again until my heart stopped pounding and I could breath like a normal person. I remember a teacher joking that if I kept it up, I’d erode it down into dust.
Rocky was still running his claw over it, so gently that it didn’t make a noise. I wondered how many times he’d laid there doing the same thing over the last forty-six years, knowing he may never see Adrian again.
I cleared my throat. My eyes were threatening to become leaky again.
“So you guys exchange mating marks when you become official?” I asked. If in doubt, always resort to an anthropology (Eridropology?) lesson. “Humans do a similar thing. It varies from culture to culture, but many of us have wedding rings to wear on the hand, and they often have precious gems embedded in them.”
Rocky perked up. “How to choose gems, question?”
“Depends on the person,” I shrugged. “Some people want an expensive one, that’s why diamonds are very popular. Some gems have different meanings, so you choose one that means what you want to communicate to your partner. Pretty often they’re just chosen for whatever looks best.”
“Best colour.”
“Yeah, that’s a big part of it.”
“For only when married? Because Rocky has watched The One with Monica's Thunder episode and she had a ring from Chandler before wedding.”
Rocky had, unfortunately, become a huge fan of sitcoms. I couldn’t so much as complain about the cold of outer space without being told that “Well [expletive] Grace, I can’t control the weather”.
Now that he seemed to have moved on from the probe, I gently set it down in his ball and removed my hand from the xenonite matrix so that I could settle more comfortably leant against the wall. “Those are engagement rings. They tend to be smaller, and show that you’ve both agreed to get married.”
“Fiances?”
“Yes, it shows that you’re fiances. Do you have a similar thing on Erid?”
He shifted a little, snipping his claws against each other. “No. Eridians are either mated or not. Nothing in between.”
I blinked. “So you don’t date for a bit to make sure that you’re compatible? I thought Eridian mating was for life? What if you end up hating each other?”
Eridians lived for centuries. And from what Rocky has already told me, they didn’t have a concept of divorce, or a failed relationship. That’s a long unhappy marriage.
“Not jump straight in, Eridians not stupid. No Vegas marriage,” Rocky said stiffly. “We are friends for time before. Make sure we develop love. Then when both sides feel love, and agree it is a good idea, we can mate then. Give piece of carapace to one another, is traditional. Rocky-Adrian had it embedded, but other Eridians keep separate in home or on jewellery.”
Something in that tugged at my heartstrings. “So you’re always friends first?”
“Yes! Like Monica-Chandler, not Meredith-Derek. Love at first sight human concept, considered very weird on Erid. Normal to ♩♬♪♪.”
“Word?”
“♩♬♪♪. Means to develop attraction to friends because compatible connection, then become friends who are mates. Human word?”
I hesitated. “I don’t think there is one.”
Rather, there is one, but it’s considered a whole new type of person. A memory floated to the surface of sitting in my flat, researching the different sexual orientations ready for the pride month health class special, and realising that I wasn’t half as aware of queer terminology as I’d thought. I’d been congratulating myself for knowing what an otter was, completely oblivious to things being a lot more complicated than straight, gay and bisexual.
I had spent most of my adult life sitting pretty comfortably at the straighter end of bisexual, where I only dated women plus that one time with my lab partner in college (and Carl? Potentially? That question mark is still haunting me, and no matter what I try I can't force the memory to resurface). I was vaguely aware that I might have a lower libido than average, but nothing pathological. But as the crash course list started talking about asexuality, and demisexuality in particular, recognition started insistently tugging at my gut. Attraction only once a close personal bond is formed…
I’d been friends with Linda for years before ever thinking of asking her out. When we’d first kissed, sat side by side in the cinema, she’d rolled her eyes and said “Finally,” before pulling me in for another. The rest of those memories were clouded by other activities, but I could recall being a little confused about what was so ‘finally’ about this, as if I’d been putting it off. On reflection, that had been a repeating pattern in every ill-fated relationship until then. I’d always been ‘making them wait’. Was that what it meant by…
I’d slammed the laptop shut. My class didn’t need any more detail besides the definition, I’d decided.
I blinked, back on the Hail Mary. Flashbacks had been getting more and more sporadic over the last few months, which I guessed was because my amnesia was now just edging into permanent memory loss rather than a brain fog. The big ones now only really came for the life-changing revelations. The rest seemed to filter in around me, like waking up realising that I’d always known the periodic table song, or that I loved DDR as a kid. Dumb stuff that was barely worth commenting on, but I’d still sometimes note it down in case I forgot again.
Rocky hummed at me. He’d gotten better at spotting when I was having a moment.
“Grace ok? Social discomfort talking about ♩♬♪♪, question? Is all right. Am aware that it is very alien to human mating processes.”
I forced myself to smile. “I’m fine buddy. It’s nothing.”
Because it was. What was the point of getting into the nuts and bolts of my personal model of attraction, if it was never going to be relevant again? It’s not like I was going to bump into another human to fall in love with. A thought which was oddly comforting, and was promptly filed away right next to whatever had possessed me to call Rocky pretty earlier.
I picked up the pack of crayons and the colouring page, resting it against my knee. I plucked a dark green out, and started to swirl it over where doodle Rocky’s limb joints connected to his carapace.
“Tell me more about Adrian.”