Chapter Text
Part 1: Alone at the edge of the universe
Chapter 1: The Fighter
“Grace wait wait wait!” Rocky shrieked.
He scrambled after the human who was gasping for air, knocking into everything as he hurtled through the Hail Mary towards the attached space that had been built to be a mirrored lab, one half in Grace’s biosphere, the other half an eridian-friendly replica. The spaces were separated by a large, transparent xenonite barrier that was only broken up by two airlocks, one on either side of the room, that served as the eridian scientists entrance to the biosphere.
One of these airlocks was what Rocky was currently trying to get Grace to stay away from, but to no avail. Curses rumbled through him, but also a growing, tittering melody of concern for his friend. He should have let Adrian break this news to Grace, they probably could have convinced him to wait. Rocky knew he could be too straight forward for his own good sometimes.
Rocky had tried to break the news to Grace strategically, but he had gotten too excited and ended up blurting out the most important part. A few days ago, an eridian team working on improved radar technology had found a strange ship floating just outside of Erid’s gravitational pull. The experimental scanners had picked up the signal of a single life sign on the ship, which in Rocky’s opinion was an extremely generous thing to call the vessel. One of their orbiting ships had managed to tow it back to Erid, and early that morning, Adrian and Rocky had supervised a team as they cut the vessel open. To their extreme shock and horror, the life sign inside was a human. A very injured, nearly dead human. But still, another human!
Adrian and their team had been working desperately in the sterile environment of the airlock to attempt to stabilize the new human. However, even with their access to the Hail Mary’s database, they had only been marginally successful. The human, a male, had been so thoroughly soaked in blood that the team had a hard time telling where he was injured. Some of it was obvious, and they had patched those up as best as they could, which had yielded some positive results. His heart beat was weak, but it had fallen into a steady rhythm in the last couple of hours, so Adrian and Rocky had decided to tell Grace.
“Mistake mistake mistake,” Rocky rattled to himself, then louder as he realized Grace was approaching the lab entrance. “Grace stop, please! I need to explain!”
It was too late. Grace barely dodged a stationary tool cart as he slammed his glasses on to his face, though he nearly knocked them off again as he crashed into the barrier. The medical team, to their credit, barely flinched at the sound, continuing to scramble around the air lock, working to keep the new human stable.
“Grace--,” Rocky whined.
“Oh my god,” Grace choked out. “How is he alive?”
Rocky could hear the tears in his voice. “We do not know,” he hummed quietly, a simple, soothing rhythm. “But he is. The best eridians for the job are working to keep him that way.”
Grace made a strange noise. “That blood can’t all be his…god, his arm…his skin…”
Rocky pushed up against Grace, adding a grounding rumble to his soothing melody. “Maybe you should look away.”
His friend made the strange noise again. “I think I’m gonna be sick,” Grace replied, his voice thin. He took a shuddering step back from the barrier, then made an aggressive heaving noise and emptied his stomach into a nearby trash receptacle.
-- -- --
“Are you feeling better?” Rocky chimed softly, pressing himself against Grace’s leg.
Grace took a tentative sip of water, then placed the cup on the floor and put his head back between his knees. “Guh,” he replied, then took a deep breath. “Yeah, a little. That was just…a lot.”
“I am sorry,” Rocky rumbled. Grace laid a hand on his xenonite suit, running his palm over the almost too-warm surface.
“You tried to warn me, bud. I just wasn’t listening.”
The two were still in the lab, but now tucked away in a corner on the other side of the room from the barrier. From their place on the floor, a shelving unit and multiple workstations blocked Grace’s view of the airlock. Grace rubbed at his face, then ran both hands through his hair before clutching them together at the base of his neck. “How in the ever-loving fudge is he still alive?”
“He is strong,” a new voice said. Grace looked up to see Rocky’s mate, Adrian, standing by the end of the shelving unit. “Or maybe just stubborn. That seems to be a common trait amongst humans.”
Rocky hummed with contentment as Adrian approached and settled down next to him. Grace gave the larger, green-blue eridian a look. “You’re calling us stubborn?”
“Yes,” Adrian chimed. “It is a compliment. For being so delicate, it is impressive that humans are almost as stubborn as eridians.”
Grace laughed weakly. “Okay, fine. I’ll take the compliment." They all fell silent, the only sounds the whirring of the air circulator and then distant clicking of eridian claws from beyond the barrier. “How is he doing?”
“Bad,” Adrian replied. Grace choked back tears as they continued. “But, his heart rate has stabilized and seems to be growing stronger. Brain waves are present. My team will continue to work on him through the night. If he survives, his chances of recovering will increase dramatically.”
Grace lost the fight against the tears then. They streamed down his face, hot against his skin as he started to sob. A strange mixture of emotions swirled inside him, too many for him to try to parse out in the moment. Instead, he leaned heavily against Rocky clutching at him as he sobbed into his suit. Both Rocky and Adrian rumbled and hummed soothingly, and Grace could feel it in his chest. He focused on that feeling, trying his best to ground himself in it. It took him longer than he would have liked, but eventually the tears stopped and he was able to finally take a steady breath. Using his cardigan sleeve, Grace wiped at his face and sat up straight.
“Please, how can I help?”
-- -- --
Grace entered into the airlock, clutching the bundle of clean rags and anti-bacterial soap to his chest. His heavy breathing was starting to fog up the view screen of his hazmat suit, so he tried to implement one of the breathing techniques he had learned from a therapy module aboard the Hail Mary. It only kind of worked. Grace stared at the prone figure and swallowed hard against the horror creeping up his throat. The fact that this was better was almost incomprehensible to him.
According to Adrian, the man was suffering from radiation poisoning. It wasn’t quite acute, thank god, but it was enough that his skin had begun to slough off in certain areas. This, coupled with a handful of deep, penetrating wounds to his remaining limbs made him look like he had been put through a meat grinder. That wasn’t even accounting for the broken leg, ruptured spleen, collapsed lung, fractured ribs and collarbone, and the gaping, jagged wound on the left side of his face, through which Grace had seen the white glint of teeth before it was covered with gauze.
Oh, yeah. And the left arm, missing everything from just above the elbow and down. It had been ‘violently removed’, according to the medical team.
All of those things had been dealt with to the best of the eridians current ability. Now, it was Grace’s job to clean the dried, caked blood from the man so that they could better assess him. After that, they would repair what else they could, and monitor him to see if he would survive the night. If he did, then they would consider moving him to the Hail Mary’s medical bay where Armando the robot could give him around the clock care.
Grace set the rags and soap down by the make shift double sink. He gripped the edge of it until he felt like his knuckles would burst, then took a deep breath and let go. Continuing to breathe deeply, Grace filled one side with warm water and soap, stirring the soap in with his hand. Once the basin was full, he grabbed the first rag, dunked it in, set his jaw, and got to work.
-- -- --
Grace didn’t know why he started with the man’s feet. Most people probably would’ve started with the face.
An old memory of his first cadaver lab in college came to him. The professor had explained that they always covered the cadaver’s face and hands unless actively working on the areas because these were considered the most familiar, intimate parts of the body. The parts that family and friends were most likely to recognize. Privately, Grace had been glad for the practice because it made it easier to ignore the fact that the flayed body before him had once been a living person.
There was no chance that he would be a person Grace knew. Maybe he avoided the man’s face for a reason more similar to the latter.
He gently wiped away the dried blood from his sole. The man had been in some sort of tattered tactical gear when he had arrived, and though the clothing had been quickly disposed of, Grace couldn’t help but wonder about it. What more could his clothing have told them about the unconscious man? Lost in thought, he finished his meticulous cleaning of the man’s foot and moved on to the next, tossing the now crimson rag into the sink and grabbing a fresh one.
As Grace made his way up the body, the pile of bloody rags in the second half of the sink continued to grow. Despite the grim surroundings, the repetitive nature of the task helped to finally settle his mind. It was an incredibly slow process, especially as he cleaned around the areas that the medical team had seen to, but the extra time also allowed him to study the man closely.
Adrian had been right about him being strong. He was incredibly well-muscled, but in the way of someone who worked hard for a living, and used their body daily. Sturdy legs and well-formed abs, the ridges palpable under a softer layer. There was only a dusting of dark hair along his stomach and across his broad chest, and his skin was sickly pale, though Grace didn’t know how much of the coloring was from his current state and what was natural. The most-worked muscles seemed to be those of his shoulders and arms, or just, arm. He couldn’t help but be a little impressed as he wiped the grime from the dramatic curve of the man’s bicep. It took hours of dedication, or years of manual labor, to get muscles like that.
Grace moved from bicep, down the forearm and to his hand, but as he did a first pass over the back of the man’s hand, he paused. He had noticed a handful of older scars along his arm as he had worked, but his hand was covered in them. Irregular ones overlapped on his knuckles, indicating he had split them open multiple times. Jagged ones ran parallel over the back of his hand, and another ran from the back of his thumb, curling over his wrist bone and onto his forearm. Maybe these were caused by some sort of machine? His fingers bore thick calluses, and his ring finger had a strange divot in the tip as though a chunk had been taken out long ago. Grace ruminated on what could have caused that as he dabbed blood from his palm and found one final scar, a clean slice that nearly bisected his palm. He paused again, his mind restless as he absentmindedly chewed on the inside of his cheek. The man’s hand told Grace a story of a rough life. He had been a hard worker, a fighter, and wasn’t unfamiliar with pain.
Setting the man’s hand down, Grace cleared his throat, blinking away tears. He hadn’t really understood why his old professor had referred to hands as being intimate until now, and couldn’t help but wonder what story his own hands told.
Shaking his head in an attempt to clear away his thoughts, Grace grabbed a fresh rag and quickly, but gently cleaned the man’s injured arm.
It wasn’t long until the only thing he had left to clean was the man’s face. He stood there for far too long, wet rag clutched in his fist, mentally berating himself for hesitating. Grace had nothing to be scared of, he knew that logically. The man’s eyelids hadn’t even fluttered the whole time he had been working. But still, some strange emotion clutched at his heart and tightened his throat.
Finally, Grace made a soft frustrated noise, and resumed his task. The man had a short beard, which Grace did his best to clean, but there was only so much he could do with what he had on hand. He cleaned the uninjured -- well, less injured -- side of his face first. Under the dark beard, his cheek was sunken, his face the same too-pale as the rest of his body, except for the barley there freckles that dusted his nose and the high points of his cheekbones. His nose was slightly crooked, most likely from an improperly set break, and a fresh, red wound ran across it. It was a wonder it hadn’t broken again.
His brows were furrowed, even in his deeply unconscious state. They were dark and severe, set over sunken eyes with a slight epicanthal fold. On the right side of his face a faded scar ran from his temple, cutting through the tail end of his -=brow. Grace was surprised at how long the man’s hair was. If he were upright it would’ve fallen just past his shoulders. The length seemed incongruous with the rest of the story his body told, but maybe he had always worn it pulled back. Or maybe it was a personal preference. Unfortunately, like his beard, Grace couldn’t get the man’s hair as clean as he would've liked. Truly, it wouldn’t be properly clean until it was given a good soak.
Grace took a step back, tossing the final rag into the sink. He stretched his back as well as he could in the hazmat suit, and was about to call it a done deal when he noticed that the gauze over the man’s face wound had turned a wet pink.
“Shoot,” Grace mumbled. He must not have been as careful with the wet rag as he had thought. Quickly gathering fresh gauze and other supplies, he began the process of replacing the wound dressing, but as he carefully peeled back the current one, what he saw caused him to cry out, stumbling backward into the wall.
His chest heaved as he stared at what had been revealed, unable to tear his gaze away. Beneath the gauze was not the jagged wound he expected, but a zippered row of massive, pointed teeth. The skin appeared to have split around them, extending this side of the man’s mouth two-thirds of the way towards his ear. Blood oozed from various places along the edges of the skin, mixing with his saliva to coat the teeth in a pink-tinged film.
Grace wasn’t sure how long he stood there, staring at the man’s face, clutching at the wall behind him, but after a while, his fear diminished and scientific curiosity filled its place. He inched forward, picking up a clean piece of gauze, and with strangely steady hands cleaned the area in order to inspect it further. This was clearly something new, given that the medical team had stitched up the far corner near where his jawbone connected with his skull. There weren’t any lips on this side of his face either, as Grace could follow almost every tooth to where it attached into the gum. The ones near the new corner of his mouth were smaller and the largest ones were about where his first molar would have been. The teeth then got smaller again, returning to normal size below the side of his nose, though still pointier than normal human teeth, before disappearing behind what remained of his lips.
With no hesitation, Grace ever so carefully opened the man’s mouth just enough to see that all of his teeth were in fact at least a little pointed. Then, to Grace’s bafflement, he noticed that there appeared to be a second, smaller row of teeth behind the ones he could see on both the bottom and top of his mouth. All of his teeth curved in slightly, pointing back towards his throat. It reminded Grace of an eel skull he had seen once when on a field trip with his class to the California Academy of Sciences.
Gently, Grace closed the man’s mouth. He rocked back on his heels, arms crossed tightly in front of him as he contemplated how something like this could possibly occur. Had the man always had pointed teeth and something had caused them to grow on one side of his face? Or was it all new? His train of thought was interrupted however by rapid tapping on the barrier from the eridian side.
Rocky stood there, multiple legs pressed against the barrier. “I heard you yell. Are you okay, question. Did something happen, question.”
“Yeah, yeah I’m fine,” Grace replied, moving to squat in front of him and place a hand over one of Rocky’s claws against the barrier. “I just went to change the bandage on his face and got spooked.”
The eridian buzzed. “Adrian mentioned a facial anomaly. Is it bad, question.”
Grace tilted his head from side to side, pressing his lips together. “It’s different,” he finally replied. “I just hope it doesn’t cause him pain or make it difficult to eat.”
Rocky warbled in agreement. “Have you eaten, question.”
Grace sucked on his teeth. “No, not since I puked. I’ll go do that so the medical team can come back in.” He tapped a rhythm onto the barrier and Rocky repeated it back to him. “I’ll see you in a bit, okay bud?”
“Okay, Grace. Please eat.”
“I will, I will,” he replied with a soft smile. “Don’t worry.”