Chapter Text
Gentle waves lap calmly at the shoreline. There's no rising or lowering tide to worry about on this beach—it didn't seem necessary to Grace or to the Eridian team dedicated to the functions of the bio-dome—so it's easy to find the perfect spot to sit.
And they have.
Grace lounges across Adrian's two front appendages, and Rocky's curled up against his side. Adrian dwarfs them both, their large carapace making a surprisingly comfortable lounging spot for Grace and Rocky to sit against. The Eridian xenonite suits improve with each iteration. These seem like almost nothing, but they keep the Eridians safe in Grace's artificial atmosphere and keep Grace safe from the damage that touching them uninhibited would cause. More of it, anyway. Grace cracks his eyes open and glances down at his bare arms before closing them again and letting his head drop back into the crook of Adrian's arm.
It's so peaceful. Until it isn't.
"Rocky take Grace inside." Adrian's smooth but commanding tone cuts the silence.
"What?" Grace squints and holds his hand up to block the light. He lands on the sand with a little huff as Adrian moves and Rocky wiggles to sand upright.
"Rocky take Grace inside now. Hurry, hurry," Adrian reiterates with a little frustration audible in the warble of their voice.
"No, I got that, I just—" Rocky and Adrian are doing that thing where they have more than one conversation at once and Grace can't entirely keep up, but he gathers it's urgent and lets Rocky nudge him back up towards the house.
On their way up, Grace feels it under his feet—the vibration in the ground that must have set off Adrian's alarms. An earthquake (Erid…quake)? He isn't sure. He glances back over his shoulder to see a disturbance in the water, out by the edge of the bio-dome's xenonite walls. The water starts to turn red. Grace runs.
Rocky shoves Grace over the threshold and closes the front door behind them with equal force, checking the seals and the backup life support systems.
"Rock, talk to me," Grace requests. It's not something he usually has to ask for, but Rocky is focused and wiggling in a way that Grace knows means he's anxious. Heck, Grace is anxious too.
"Ground opening under Grace's water. Bad, bad, bad." Rocky shivers and presses his front two claws against the front door, likely to get a better picture of what's going on outside.
"Well, it's not good." Grace peers through the door's windows, his stomach turning as the deep red seeps across the surface and turns his usual gorgeous beach view into something nightmarish. A seemingly never-ending supply bubbles up from where the water churns. "You know, we had something called red tide on Earth, it's algae—maybe this is like that."
He doesn't sound very convincing.
"Grace will stay inside with Rocky until we know outside is safe. Adrian and bio-dome team will handle it."
"Yeah, that's fair," Grace answers, his voice squeaking a little. A thought pings in his head. "Can we get a sample?"
Rocky lets out a quiet purr, his 'thinking noise', "Rocky will ask."
Before Grace can say anything else, something breaches the surface of the water and Grace lets out a shriek as he flinches back from the window a little like that might help him. Not just one something, several somethings. Tendrils like vines that creep up the inner wall of the bio-dome and more that start crawling up the beach. "What the fudge is that?"
"What make Grace think Rocky know, question?" Rocky trills incredulously.
"It's your planet!" Grace counters. Rocky lifts and drops his carapace in a way that someone might roll their eyes and doesn't reply.
The intruding branches eventually stop reaching. Their length and expanse seem arbitrary but the remaining structure resembles a leafless tree. It's huge. The ground stops trembling. The water's entirely red. Grace frowns. Sure, there's the issue of where this had all come from and if it was dangerous, but also… his poor beach.
A handful of suited Eridians with equipment in tow scurry across the sand—members of the bio-dome team—with Adrian leading them and chirping out instructions. When Adrian starts to approach the house, Rocky taps his feet against the door with nervous energy.
"Keep Grace house closed for now," Adrian instructs, "Does not seem to be anything in air, but always better safe and sure."
"Adrian would bring Grace Rocky samples of anomaly for doing science, question?" Rocky whistles through the door.
"Please?" Grace adds for good measure, resting one of his palms against a panel of the window.
"Fine," Adrian concedes. "Just be very careful. Never see this before, but Grace Rocky have dealt with plenty of new things in space. Adrian bring samples soon."
"Thank, thank, thank." Rocky wiggles with appreciation.
"Yes, thank you, Adrian!" Grace calls after them as they make their way back down to the shore. He claps his hands together and then drums on the top of Rocky's suit. "C'mon, buddy, let's set up in the lab."
Pray that you stay dead.
It's not Simon's only thought, but it's the loudest. Thoughts are maybe all he has now. Shitty afterlife, if you ask him. It's pitch black, there's no sense of where he begins or ends. His chest still moves like he's breathing, but he can't be breathing. It's the only thing that moves—that can move. That is unless he just thinks it's moving. He can think.
Sometimes he thinks he can feel something in the dark. Thick vines wrapping around whatever's left of him. He's grateful for it, it's something. It hurts. Everything does, really, if he thinks too hard about it. He thinks about something else. He hopes this was worth it. He wonders if this is it forever.
Nobody talks to him anymore. Not even in his imagination. It's lonely. It hurts in a different way.
It's still so fucking hot. How is that fair? Maybe this is Hell. That would track. Different from the stories, sure, but it's not like people are really making it back for accurate storytelling. Simon has to be in Hell, that's why everything burns. Great. Now what? Nothing.
There's the occasional clang of the memory of the deathtrap he'd been sent down there, the sensation of the vehicle hitting something. Ghosts of his last moments are haunting him. He's sure they're getting more frequent, but he can't prove it. What would he do if he could? The same thing he did when he figured out he was in Hell. Nothing. Chest in, chest out, maybe.
He starts to think that he hears… music. That's a new one. It's not like any music he's ever heard before, his thoughts must be getting more creative. It's interrupted by a long, loud mechanical screech.
What the fuck?
The tight pressure of the vines starts to loosen, tendrils dragging over where they touched—then they're gone. For a moment, he has a partial outline of where the barrier of himself exists. Something else starts to wrap around him in their stead. Rope, maybe. He can't tell for sure. They tug on him and he tries to yell before he remembers he can't yell anymore. No air where he is. The muscles try anyway. He feels them.
The usual pitch black of his vision gives way to red. The sounds around him get louder. Both the mechanical ones and the musical ones. The temperature gets lower. He's so dizzy right up until the moment his senses slip back into complete and total darkness.
Grace pushes himself back from the lab table and nearly knocks his stool over in the process. He'd figured another test might yield a different result, but he'd been wrong. The implications of what he's looking at twists his stomach into knots. It shouldn't be possible.
"Yep. Still looks like blood. Ungodly amounts of irradiated human… blood." His words get quieter as the observation trails off. Luckily the Eridians know about radiation now, and they can use astrophage to mitigate any harm it might cause, but honestly that's pretty low on Grace's list of things to worry about right this second.
Rocky lifts his carapace in surprise and shivers. "Ugh. Human fluid. Disgust!"
"Yeah," Grace agrees, leaning his head back to stare at the ceiling for a moment. "Pretty gross."
"And the solid is plant material, question?" It's mostly for confirmation, they'd been over this a few times by now.
"Mhm." Grace gives a thoughtful hum and knits his brow together. There's a frantic series of raps against the front door that has both Rocky and Grace scrambling towards it so fast they almost trip over each other in the doorway.
They take up their previous crowded positions against the door to see Adrian outside—they've got their carapace held low to the ground like they're nervous.
"Need Grace to put on suit and come see. Bio-dome team find human-like creature in big metal vehicle under liquid!" Adrian points towards the beach with one of their back legs. "Only one. Figured there would me more because liquid is human blood, but I assume Grace Rocky figured that out already. Also big fast-growing tree is holding onto vehicle, so we cut it open to retrieve human-like creature. Is not dead, but is sleeping very heavy."
"Human-like creature? What makes you say that?" Grace's heart races and he tries to get a better look of what's going on out there, but he can't make out anything important from this far away.
"Grace will see. Is different from Grace, different from humans that we have seen on Earth thinking machines," Adrian explains. "Go. Put on suit, hurry."
Grace nods and pulls himself from the door to go do what he was told while Rocky and Adrian converse behind him. His newest xenonite suit is easier to get into and move around in, which he's thankful for because he needs to be quick. Especially if he might not be the only human on Erid anymore, however that might have happened—questions for later.
He returns to the door with his suit on over a regular outfit consisting of one of his pun-bearing science T-shirts and a pair of pants he'd made from an orange Hail Mary jumpsuit, having left his lab safety equipment strewn around his closet.
"Grace always so messy," Rocky chirps his teasing judgment and opens the door so he and Grace can follow Adrian down to the beach.
"I'll clean it up later," Grace waves off the comment and closes the door behind them.
The trio make their way to a spot on the beach where a handful of the bio-dome team are positioned in a circle that breaks open to let Grace in. In the middle—what looks mostly like a man. He's covered head-to-toe in the blood from the rift, and he's in bad shape.
He's missing his left arm—it looks torn midway through his bicep—and he's got open wounds of unknown origin that seem to be mostly concentrated on that side of his body. Long, sharp teeth jut out of the same cheek and every time his chest falls after rising, three openings on his neck and three more on his ribs amidst the damage flutter and ooze blood.
"Holy moly," Grace breathes out, crouching beside the man with a sympathetic wince. This is bad, and so many questions are running through Grace's mind, but he has to push them away. This guy's breathing. "We gotta get him to Armando."
With the help of Rocky and Adrian, Grace gets the stranger up to his house and lays him down on the floor of the kitchen. It's nowhere near ideal, but Armando starts working right away. Grace looks from the man to the trail of watery blood that had dripped off of him—it leads all the way outside. He scrunches his nose in disgust and looks down at the blood on the hands of his suit as well.
"Rocky will build quarantine area while Armando fix until we know more about new life-form. Grace can help," Rocky insists, tapping at Grace's leg excitedly.
"Good idea, buddy." Grace nods, but he doesn't move right away. "Just let me— I need to clean up some of this blood, first."
"Oh, right, right, right. Some human fluids make Grace queasy," Rocky says, mostly to Adrian. "Rocky will help Grace. Adrian can go back to help bio-dome team." Rocky shuffles closer to Adrian and bumps against them affectionately before Adrian bows in agreement and heads back out through the front door.
Grace and Rocky collect a handful of cloths and bottles of disinfectant before they start to wipe the floor down. It feels like it takes forever. The blood smears, some of it's drying to the floor while other parts are gelatinous from coagulation. Grace really doesn't want to be sick in this suit.
When the floor—aside from the part directly under their current crisis project—is finally clean, Grace takes one last unsoiled cloth to clean the remaining blood from his and Rocky's suits and drops it in the bag they've designated for the other soaked fabric.
"Grace feeling better now, question?" Rocky tilts his carapace the way Grace sometimes tips his head when asking something.
"Yeah. I'm alright. Thanks for the extra hands," Grace lets out a quiet laugh and reaches to rest his hand against the top of Rocky which earns him a happy chirp and the feeling of Rocky pressing up against the touch.
"Good, good, good. We build quarantine area now." Rocky scrambles away to get started on xenonite panels and Grace pushes his table and chair out of the way so they have more room.
Grace can hardly keep his eyes off the figure on his kitchen floor as he and Rocky build transparent walls around him. He thinks back to helping Rocky build his areas aboard the Hail Mary—it feels like a lifetime ago, so much has happened since then, but at least the experience lets Grace fit the panels together with practiced ease.