Chapter Text
This is Humanity’s second contact with alien life – first contact with intelligent alien life – and it’s Rocky’s inexpert ass at the helm.
“Whoaa,” Rocky murmurs, leaning in eagerly, pressing both hands and the front of his EVA helmet against the strange glass-like wall.
The alien makes a frightened, high-pitched squealing sound at the motion.
Rocky jumps backwards, alarmed. Wow, the little fella is jumpy.
The alien hurls the rod it’s holding in one of its claws against the glass, hard. Rocky throws his arms out on instinct, but the glass wall holds against the alien’s attack. The impact makes a loud thud noise – the little alien is stronger than its size would have you believe – but doesn’t break.
Rocky keeps both hands up in what he hopes is a placating gesture. He bends his knees into a crouch, making himself appear smaller, less threatening. The alien on the other side of the glass wall is comparatively tiny, probably about the size of a corgi and just as stocky.
The alien chirps. The sound seems less frightened now. It whistles a few tunes, then squeals again, but not as high-pitched as before. It sounds almost apologetic, like it’s embarrassed at the way it had screamed.
“Aaaaa,” Rocky mimics, waving his arms slightly, hoping to convey his understanding. It’s okay, Rocky had been startled too. This is a crazy, new situation for the both of them.
The alien tilts its body, as though curious. Then it starts swaying in place, alternating between bending and stretching its stubby legs.
Rocky has no idea what it’s trying to say. He decides to copy its movements, just to be polite.
Then the alien lifts its two front limbs and starts waving them like it just don’t care.
Rocky does the same.
The alien stretches the two limbs out horizontally to each side and wriggles them one after the other, strangely fluid in its movements for something that looks made entirely from stone. Rocky feels silly as fuck, but he follows suit, adding a pop and lock shoulder move that hasn't seen the light of day since his early college days.
The alien lets out a series of whistle-snorts.
Is it laughing? It certainly makes Rocky laugh. He had never thought about what it would be like to meet intelligent alien life, but he certainly never imagined they would be so damn cute.
The alien is a scientist. His planet’s sun is going through the same thing as Earth’s. His people, like the Humans, observed that Tau Ceti isn’t dimming, and decided to do the same logical thing: send their brightest minds there to check it out.
Unfortunately for Humanity, their brightest minds hadn’t survived the coma, leaving only Rocky alive. Rocky was only supposed to be up here to maintain the ship that keeps the scientists alive while they figure out the problem. But when Rocky woke up from the coma, his crewmates had all been long dead. He had failed his mission.
But now there’s an actual scientist with him! Grace – Rocky had decided to call him Grace, for being his saving grace and all, but also because as soon as they had gravity in the tunnel that connected their ships, Grace had very gracefully tripped over his own claws – definitely had the brains to figure all this out! He had already figured out a way for them to communicate. There was a lot of pointing and gesturing and puppet shows involved, but now Rocky’s engineered Ilyukhina’s music player into a makeshift live-translation device. They can speak to each other now! Actual human-to-alien conversation!
Rocky learns that the extraordinary metals that make up Grace’s ship and the tunnel that connects it to Rocky’s really are made of xenon alloys. Once Grace gives him some samples to analyse, Rocky has not been able to stop tinkering with it. The raw stuff in liquid form only works in the Eridian’s high pressure ammonia-rich atmosphere so Rocky rigged one of the biosafety cabinets in his lab – he's not going to be using any of that science equipment any time soon, he doesn’t even know how half of them work anyway – into a self-contained atmospheric system for him to work in, kind of like a glove box, but using robot hands he can control from outside the cabinet.
The hot box, as Rocky’s taken to call it, allowed him to construct all sorts of xenon-alloy stuff, including an EVA suit for Grace. It’s a bit crude, more like a hamster ball for Grace to roll around in than an actual suit, but it’ll do for the moment while Rocky drafts up a better one.
“Look, it’s safe, I promise!” Rocky does a silly little pantomime of opening Grace’s airlock drawer and walking around, waving his arms and heaving dramatically deep breaths, demonstrating how Grace won’t die in Rocky’s atmosphere while he’s wearing the suit.
Grace sways in place, uncertain. He’s already inside the ball suit, but he’s hesitating from actually stepping through the airlock and into Rocky’s side of the glass wall. “It is large request,” Grace hedges.
It is, Rocky must admit. They’ve only just met each other a few days ago. They’re not of the same species. They’re not from the same planet, or even star system. It’s a big ask to trust them with your life.
But they need to work together. And Grace’s Eridian biology is a lot less complex and a lot more resistant to environmental factors than Rocky’s squishy, porous Human nonsense. Eridians don’t even breathe in the conventional sense. All respiration is internal. They basically just need temperature and pressure control for their temporary life support. Easy enough for Rocky to construct now that he’s got his hands on the miracle metal he's taken to calling xenonite.
Still in his ball, Grace rolls away from the glass wall.
Rocky deflates. Yeah, it is too much to ask. It’s not like Rocky has much to realistically show for his expertise. He’s been stuck on Tau Ceti for years without figuring out anything. Rocky wouldn’t trust Rocky with his life either.
But then Grace comes back. He rolls determinedly towards the air lock, cycles it, then throws the panel open on Rocky’s side.
The vents atop Grace’s carapace move up and down. He shuffles his arms, moving the ball from side to side. Then he skitters around in excited circles.
“I didn’t explode!” Grace chitters happily.
“Oh my God, you did it!” Rocky falls to his knees and grabs the sides of Grace’s ball, grinning widely. “How do you feel?”
“Same as I would be in own atmosphere, I think. But strange to be in a ball.” Grace braces two claws on the inside of the ball. “Can’t touch things. Can’t interact with outside.”
“I’ve already got ideas for that actually. There are a bunch of biosafety cabinets with robot arms in my lab so I can rig some up to your ball for you to use. The hands are shaped a lot like yours, so I bet it’d feel really natural. I’ve already set aside space in the ship for you to live in, so you won’t need to be in the ball the whole time. I’m sure you’d want to sleep and eat and uh... other stuff too.” Rocky regards Grace’s form, the featureless pale gold rock face of his carapace and his very distinct lack of any kind of bodily orifice. “How do you eat, anyway?”
Grace squeaks, scandalized, his ball rolling backwards. “Rude! 🎶 🎶 🎶! Rude-rude-rude! You can’t just ask someone how they eat! Grace-Rocky just met, not 🎶 🎶 🎶. Rocky not even give Grace 🎶 🎶 🎶 gift before asking!”
Rocky glances at the translation device. That’s a lot of words it’s not picking up. And he’s not sure he understands the context of the words it is picking up. Maybe eating is like, an impolite thing for Eridians?
Rocky lifts his hands in placation. “Sorry, I didn’t mean to offend.”
Grace leans forward slightly. If he had eyes, Rocky is certain they’d be narrowed in suspicion. “Is ball-suit 🎶 🎶 🎶 gift? Rocky means to 🎶 🎶 🎶 Grace?”
“Dude, I have no idea what those words mean.”
Grace grumbles. “Rocky is 🎶 🎶 🎶.”
Well, this is getting out of hand. “Need word,” Rocky says.
“Bad.”
Rocky's face falls. “Rocky is bad?”
Grace sighs. He rolls closer and gently nudges Rocky’s knee. “Not bad-bad. Just small-bad. Bad like hatchling who doesn’t know better. Bad but still cute.”
Rocky risks a smile. “Are you calling me a little rascal?”
“Don’t know word. But yes. Maybe. Ball-suit is good. Rocky is little rascal. But smart-smart rascal.”
Rocky barks out a laugh.
He doesn’t know what makes him do it – maybe it’s the pride of an engineering job well done, maybe it’s the giddiness of knowing someone trusts him and his work enough to bet their life on it, maybe it’s Grace calling him cute – but Rocky leans over and plants a wet, noisy kiss at the top of Grace’s xenonite ball.
“Ew! Disgust!” Grace yells.
So Rocky has a new roommate.
Waking up with a boner is a lot more awkward now that Rocky’s no longer floating alone. Eridians have an ingrained need to have someone watch them sleep, which Rocky is more than happy to do for Grace. He couldn’t imagine how terrible it must have felt for Grace to sleep alone in the weeks before they met.
But this impulse then also translates to a need to watch others when they sleep, which Grace does for Rocky, every time.
Grace is fascinated at the way Humans don’t fall into full paralysis in sleep the way Eridians do. Rocky had barely gotten any sleep that first ‘night’. Grace would squeal in excitement every time he moved in sleep and bombard him with questions. Grace’s field of science back on his planet had been the study of possible extraterrestrial life so Rocky’s very existence is a point of deep interest for him. Grace wants to know everything about the Human physiology. Rocky is no scientist. He has no idea why his body does half the things that it does.
Maybe if Rocky had more knowledge on the Human body, he could just answer all of Grace’s questions outright. Instead, he’s had to rig up one of the ship’s spare laptops that contained all Earthly knowledge to survive Grace’s atmosphere and hand it over to him to peruse at his own leisure.
So now Grace is the one explaining to Rocky why his dick gets hard in the mornings when he wakes up. Something about neurotransmitters and hormones and nitric oxide release and blood flow.
Yeah, let’s go with that. Nothing at all to do with the fact that Rocky’s touch-starved and constantly craving a body around him, on top of him, beneath him. That every time he sleeps, he dreams about touching someone, hugging them, kissing them, sinking into their body, pressing himself deep into them until he cries from pleasure.
The thing is, now that Rocky isn’t alone anymore, the faceless bodies he imagines are starting take form into the only other person he’s constantly around. Don’t ask him how he could realistically get off with an alien that looks like a boulder with legs. Horny dream-Rocky makes do.
“Come onnn, Grace,” Rocky wheedles. “Please?”
“No, Rocky,” Grace says firmly.
“Pretty please?”
“No.”
“I’ll let you watch me eat. It looks beautiful!”
Grace pauses, tilting his carapace in Rocky’s direction. Eridians don’t technically have a front-face since their auditory sensors are all over their body, but Rocky has noticed that Grace favours a particular angle with which to ‘see’ Rocky. When asked about it, Grace admitted that his hearing is slightly impaired and he hears better when directing his carapace a certain way.
“What does Rocky eat?” Grace asks hesitantly.
Ha, Rocky knows he’s got him now. He knows Grace’s curious scientist ass wouldn’t be able to resist the chance of observing natural alien behaviour.
“Oh, all sorts of stuff. Dealer’s choice. We got burritos, we got ramen, we got pirozhki. We even got some post-coma broth paste, which isn’t as terrible as it sounds to be honest, but it’s probably not too exciting to watch. It just kinda squeezes into the mouth and slides down the throat without chewing.”
“Mngh,” Grace makes a strange noise that may be disgust. “Um, Rocky pick.”
“Okay!”
Rocky decides on ramen. He’s been craving a real kick of MSG into the bloodstream lately. And there’s a bit more to the prep than just blasting it in the microwave that Grace could maybe find interesting.
Grace is quiet as Rocky takes his first slurp of the scalding hot noodles. He chews slowly, rolling it around in his mouth, letting Grace get a good look-see of the whole process. When Rocky swallows, Grace lets out a small shudder.
“🎶 🎶 🎶,” Grace mutters. “Disgust.”
“Okay, now your turn,” Rocky says, continuing to dig into his ramen.
“Now? Rocky not finish first, then Grace start?”
“We can eat together. Dinner and a show. We do this stuff all the time back on Earth.”
Grace shudders again. “Humans 🎶 🎶 🎶.” But he goes over to prepare his meal anyway.
Turns out Eridians do have an orifice, hidden, tucked beneath their carapace like a starfish’s mouth. Although to call it an orifice would be incorrect. It’s not a hole that’s open to the environment like a mouth would be. It’s a closed rock surface just like the rest of his carapace, but a slightly darker blond color. Grace runs a claw across the surface a few times and he starts… splitting. The dark blond fault line is prying apart like shifting tectonic plates.
Grace’s split seam stretches, revealing his soft, fleshy insides, which are a pretty, iridescent pale silver that shifts every colour like an opal. There’s no obvious ‘hole’ that Rocky can see. But then Grace’s insides start shifting, rippling into folds like squishy lips, slowly blooming open like… well, like a...
“Holy shit,” Rocky mutters, ogling down the barrel of what he can only describe as a pretty, shiny, alien pussy.
“Rocky be quiet now. Grace eat,” Grace chides.
Rocky mimes a zipping motion across his lips, leaning in eagerly for a closer look. His tepid ramen sits forgotten by his side.
Grace uses a claw to scoop the food he prepared then pushes it inside himself. His entire hand disappears up his… mouth. His silvery folds glomming around his wrist like he’s sucking himself in.
Rocky’s dick twitches in interest.
Grace retreats his hand out of himself with a lewd squelch. His claw is slightly sticky with whatever silvery fluid coats his insides. He quickly takes a cloth with a clean claw and wipes down his sticky claw with succinct movements. His seam closes, leaving a raised stony ridge over the crack like a scar. Then Grace steps into what looks kind of like overalls, soft padding that goes over his closed seam and straps that go over his shoulders.
Grace settles onto his side and curls his arms protectively around his underbelly. He’s making low, satisfied, purring sounds.
“That feel good?” Rocky rasps, trying to ignore the way Rocky Jr. is still trying to make himself known inside the pants of his flight suit.
Grace lifts a claw and waves it non-committally. “Eridian food have no feel, not like human food. You say sweet, salty, bitter, I can’t understand. No taste receptors to understand.” He stretches his arms straight out like a cat before curling back into a comfortable position. “But um, feel good, yes. Feel full. Nice. Weird that someone is watching.” He giggles softly.
Rocky picks up his ramen and shovels in a mouthful, hoping the spicy Sichuan would kick some sense into his half-chub and kill it dead. Seeing Grace all languid and satiated is doing something to him. “Well, it’s weird for Humans to have someone watch us sleep, but I let you do it.”
Grace rolls over slightly to angle his favored hearing side towards Rocky. “Sleeping is 🎶 🎶 🎶 for Humans?”
“Need word.”
“Mmm, socially not polite. Needs to be hidden from others. Like eating.”
“‘Private’? Something that needs to be discreet?”
Grace hums in acknowledgment. He seems lethargic, like he’s close to falling asleep. Food coma, perhaps, Rocky thinks fondly.
“I guess sleep is kind of a private thing for Humans,” Rocky explains. “Usually people sleep alone or with people they’re intimate with.”
“Grace-Rocky watch each other sleep. Grace-Rocky eat together. Grace-Rocky … intimate?” Grace asks sleepily.
Rocky flusters. “Uhh… I mean, I guess… Depends on what you mean by-”
“Mmm, talk later. Apology. I sleep now. Rocky watch?” Without even waiting for an answer, Grace rolls back over and stops moving. He’s asleep.
Rocky finishes the rest of his ramen and watches Grace sleep as is the Eridian norm.
Grace usually sleeps about eight hours, same as a human, but he only needs it every three days or so. So far, it’s timed perfectly so that he sleeps during Rocky’s awake cycle, so he can watch him sleep. While Grace is conked out, Rocky usually hovers nearby, experimenting with xenonite alloys in the hot box, doing maintenance repairs on the ship, basic chores of cleaning and tidying up. But lately, Rocky’s been making use of Grace’s sleep time to do some maintenance on himself too, namely ‘cleaning out the pipes’.
Rocky’s always had a healthy libido. He’d been known to haunt the local bars and clubs to find people to warm his bed for the night whenever he had a hankering. He’s never been the type to deny his body’s needs. And if he was feeling too lazy and asocial to pick up a stranger, he could always call up Adrian for a convenient good time.
The four years in space is the longest Rocky’s ever been celibate since he lost his virginity at fifteen. As soon as he regained muscle function after the coma, one of the very first things he did was jerk off. Anything really to provide his brain with a dopamine rush to stave off the feelings of failure, loneliness, and existential doom.
And now there’s Grace. It’s so nice to just talk to someone and have them talk to you back. And boy does Grace talk. There’s still a lot of Eridian words Rocky has yet to learn, mostly hyper-specific cultural concepts or really technical scientific terms, but he’s gotten conversational Eridian pretty much down. There’s so much gesture in the Eridian language, too. Or maybe that’s just a Grace thing. His arms and claws are constantly in motion when he gets into one of his yap sessions.
Grace is so cute when he does that.
Somewhat distantly, Rocky thinks it should be wrong to feel attraction to a faceless rock alien. And maybe if there was a shrink floating around to psychoanalyse him, they’d probably pathologize his feelings for Grace as an effect of years of extreme isolation and depression.
Rocky, however, has never been the overly internalizing type. He just deals with whatever’s in front of him. If there’s a problem, he fixes it. It’s just that maybe he’s subconsciously shifting the goal-post on what he’d consider a problem. Is there really a problem with having the hots for Grace?
Grace is exactly Rocky’s type – minus the whole ‘incompatible living environments’ and ‘they’d hurt each other if they ever directly touch’ thing.
He’s smart. Like, so smart, it’s unbelievable. And Rocky can tell that he’s such a scientist at heart. Not just brilliant at his job but also really loves it. He always gets so excited to learn something new, and so happy to teach Rocky anything he wants to know. He’s never impatient or arrogant about it either. He just genuinely loves science.
He’s so funny too. He’s constantly peppering in these Eridian culture references in his science yaps that completely go over Rocky’s head, but he does them so earnestly and with such dorky little wiggles of his claws that Rocky can’t help but laugh. And he would just randomly break into these skits as though Rocky would understand. Like the time he picked up one of Rocky’s rafter squares and holds it up against his ball, singing and turning in place with it like it would mean something to Rocky. Grace must have been so popular back on his planet, like he must have been a riot at parties.
And by God, is he so unbelievably pretty. Phyisical attraction comes easily to Rocky, he must admit. People are just so beautiful. And it helped that he used to live in LA, too. But Grace…
Grace is literally unlike anyone he’s ever seen. His pale gold carapace body has flecks of copper throughout like he’s made of the raw marble ancient Greeks would carve into their temples. His legs are accented with dark blue streaks like veins of lapis lazuli. His surface is not entirely smooth; there are natural dimples here and there, but there are also engravings around the wrists of each claw and at the top of one shoulder that look intentionally carved. They’re small, intricate things, and Rocky hasn’t had the chance to really study them up close. Maybe someday he’ll ask and Grace would let him.
Rocky stares at where Grace is sleeping in the xenonite tunnel he constructed for him. One of the straps of his overalls had slipped down his shoulder when he rolled over earlier to sleep. The sight has no right looking as sexy as it does. Grace’s ventral seam is hidden from Rocky’s shameless ogling. Rocky’s horny lizard brain is feeding him fantasies of pushing aside the covering like it’s a panty’s gusset and giving the freshly-closed seam a nice, wet lick. What kind of sounds would Grace make at that? Could Rocky coax him open with just his tongue?
Yeah, okay, pipe cleaning time.
Rocky gets up and heads over to the ship’s one tiny stall of a bathroom. He closes the door for some semblance of propriety. But his stupid dick is almost all the way hard and it’s whispering to him like the green goblin mask about how he doesn't need to be doing all that. Grace is out cold and wouldn’t even know if it Rocky jerked off right in front of him.
Rocky groans when he’s finally got a fist around his throbbing erection. There has to be boundaries, probably. He’s already jerking it to thoughts of his friend’s pretty little mouth-pussy. He could at least have the decency to pretend to hide about it.
God, that pussy. Rocky just knows that it’s going to feature prominently and often in his wet dreams from here on out. The way the ship’s harsh fluorescent lights glinted off the opalite sheen of Grace’s fleshy insides. It had looked so soft and squishy in there. What would it feel like to touch? His folds would yield so nicely to the push of Rocky’s probing fingers. What would it feel like for Rocky to sink his cock in there?
Grace’s wrist is a bit smaller in girth than Rocky’s cock at full mast. There may need to be a bit of adjusting, a bit of stretching for Rocky to fit in there. But Rocky would be so gentle about it. He’d make Grace feel so good, finger him, lick him a little to get him all wet and relaxed. He’d find all the sweet spots inside him, rub them good until Grace is all but begging to have something bigger inside him, something that could stretch him out and fill him to bursting.
Rocky grunts, resting one forearm against the bathroom wall and pressing his forehead against it. The shoulder of his other arm shakes as he frantically strokes his cock.
Grace is so tiny too. Are all Eridians that small and adorable or is it just Grace? He’d be so unbelievably hot and tight for Rocky. He’d make all these cute sounds while he’s getting fucked. High-pitched trills and breathy whistles that would drive Rocky crazy. Fuck, he wants to wrap himself around Grace and never let go. He wants to say fuck it to the xenonite barrier between them and fuse himself into Grace’s carapace. He wants to spill inside Grace until he’s dripping with him, until he’s coated Grace’s insides so thoroughly that he defies Eridian biology and manages to taste his cum in there.
“Ohh, Grace-,” Rocky moans quietly in the secret confines of his ship’s bathroom as he orgasms to filthy thoughts of his new alien friend. His smart, sweet, funny, beautiful, adorable alien friend.