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Rocky hunts. Rocky prowls. He’s had his fair share of play hunting Adrian since his return to Erid, but Grace has yet to fall victim to it. It’s kind of difficult to sneak up on someone who lives in a house on a beach with nothing to hide behind but the dunes. Rocky could burrow into the sand and move that way, but that’s no fun.
Which is why he’s waited this long.
Humans are, as it turns out, incredibly particular about the things their eyes perceive on a daily basis. Rocky can empathize with wanting to surround yourself with different sounds from time to time—a part of the reason why Eridians commonly take multiple partners, he imagines—but sounds aren’t sights. There’s no purpose to looking at some things as opposed to others. To an Eridian, sound is communication: that is to say, just being around other people will convey some amount of one's thoughts to them. It’s important to be around many people on a somewhat regular basis—otherwise, connecting in a thrum will be far more difficult.
But looking at stuff? Rocky doesn’t really understand that.
But then, as savior of the planet, Grace gets whatever he wants. When he asked for a change of scenery a few weeks back, it quickly became the top priority to the dozen or so scientists assigned to his biodome. They came to Rocky for counsel, as they always do, which is how he finds himself here.
This is what he knows. He’s taken walks through this exact forest with Adrian many times, talking about anything and everything. Grace doesn’t yet know the full extent of the gift he’s been given—a different environment, yes, but also a part of Rocky’s memories, a piece of his world he can no longer access without suiting up. Grace is part of that world now, moving freely through it where Rocky no longer can.
The extension of his dome was greenlit just this morning, the atmosphere stable at last. Rocky spots Grace in the distance, idly running his hands over the fallen log he’s sitting on. He looks content. Rocky stops for a moment to take it in. How strange humans are. Grace was getting tired of the color of sand, and now that he’s surrounded by a different color, it’s like new life was breathed into him, even as he just sits there peacefully.
Rocky almost feels bad for what he’s about to do. That’s in and of itself a foreign thought: he knows that humans play, and he and Grace have certainly gotten on each other’s nerves plenty in the past, but he looks so tranquil like this, happy in his own company, expecting nothing that might frighten him. This part of the forest was cleared of any non-plant life before approval, so there’s nothing that should be jumping out at him.
Still, it’s that same tranquility that makes for a perfect opportunity. If Grace is too startled, Rocky can promise not to do it again. Consider it payback for all the scares Grace has given him in the past by holding his breath or choking on food.
And so, Rocky gets closer. For all his mass, he knows how to be quiet—not that it’s strictly necessary with Grace’s inferior hearing, but it’s part of the fun. He hunches low to the ground, setting his claws down so very lightly, sticking close to the high grass and moving slowly enough that its movement could be attributed to the wind.
And then, just as he’s about to pounce, Grace’s posture straightens. His head lifts, as if he’s heard Rocky, but he can’t have. Rocky hardly even heard himself, and unless Grace has been lying all this time and has secret eyes on the back of his head, there’s no way he sees him, either.
But he turns around regardless, finding Rocky in his hiding spot with all the precision of someone who knows.
“I thought I felt someone watching me,” he says, like that’s not an insane series of words. “What’chu doing, bud?”
Rocky glares. He stands motionless in the grass and stares Grace down because for a moment, there is nothing to say.
“What the fuck do you mean, you felt someone watching?”
“Language,” Grace says, and Rocky stomps his foot lightly. If ever a fuck was warranted, it’s now.
“Explain!” he demands.
“Can’t say I know how it works, but yeah. Sometimes we just know.”
It’s not often that Rocky is rendered speechless, but this information takes a couple of long moments to fully sink in. They just know. Humans just know. There’s no previously unmentioned sense they possess, nothing Grace has been hiding until now. Their sight is limited by the position of their eyes, and they only hear sounds as far as the bones in their ears can pick them up.
And yet, in their incredible intuition, they just know.
Alright, fine. So Grace can sense when he’s being perceived. But it’s not like that’ll help him when his stamina gives out before he gets anywhere. It’s not like it’ll help him when he is objectively outmatched against a being much stronger than him. If anything, it’ll make his death a whole lot more unpleasant when he sees it coming a second before it happens.
Rocky crosses two of his arms, a gesture he’s picked up from Grace over time and finds perfectly appropriate for what he feels now. “Seems like a pretty useless thing to evolve,” he says. Grace laughs.
“When a tiger’s right behind you, yeah, maybe,” he says. “But it’s not just predators we sense. It’s anything looking at us.”
Rocky considers how stressful that would be when combined with Eridian senses. Eridians can hear each other from a mile away; he imagines it would be pretty overstimulating if he were aware of another’s awareness on top of that. More than that, he still doesn’t see why this would be a trait nature would select.
“If your prey sees you,” he says, “you’re a pretty bad hunter.”
Grace makes a sound at that, something both amused and thoughtful.
“What?” Rocky asks, and Grace’s face does something strange.
“Wanna bet?” he asks, tapping his fingers on the log. Rocky unfolds his arms to lean closer. He does like winning. “You be the prey. If I catch you, I win.”
It’s so absurd that there’s a moment where Rocky thinks he’s joking. Though he does take daily walks, Grace has been less than keen on anything more strenuous than that since his arrival on Erid. His body is already beginning to feel the effects of living in more gravity than he’s used to. And even if none of that were the case, it’s also just an insane thing to offer.
“What?” is all Rocky can think to say, and Grace laughs in a way that is objectively pleasant but also a little unnerving in this context.
“You think humans are bad hunters,” he says. “You told me you’re a tactile learner. So let me demonstrate. For science.”
Always back to that excuse. Rocky has lost count of how many instances of fucking around they’ve both chalked up to science. It’s pretty much a certainty that when he and Adrian decide to lay eggs together, Grace will be there with a pen and a notepad, sitting in on the most intimate thing an Eridian will ever do. For science.
Though it’s not just that. Before the hunger got to Grace, before it seemed for a short, terrifying while like he might not make it after all, he and Rocky would spend their ample time together making up all sorts of games to measure their skill against each other. They’ve worked out nearly all the ways that humans were better than Eridians and vice versa, as well as the ways that Rocky was better than Grace and vice versa. After months of pursuing a shared goal, it was fun to set their sights against each other, to work to achieve something that the other could not.
Rocky has always been competitive, so his response is an easy one. Grace might not even realize how stupid this bet is; this might be over within a few seconds. Rocky turns to run, to get as far away as possible as fast as he can and watch Grace despair in the attempt to catch up.
He gets as far as a few paces when he realizes Grace isn’t following. He turns back around.
“Are you coming?” he calls out.
“Oh, yeah,” Grace says, making a waving motion with his hand. “Go ahead. I’m giving you a headstart.”
And at that, Rocky bristles. He stomps back the couple of steps he’s put between them to press himself against Grace’s legs, letting him feel the vibrations of his voice. “You have seen me run,” he reminds him. Humans are stupid; maybe Grace has forgotten. Maybe it conveniently slipped his mind that Rocky is not only much faster than any human could be, but that he’s also on his home turf, while Grace is disadvantaged just by being an alien.
Grace, unfazed, runs a hand over Rocky’s carapace. “I have,” he says. “It’s very impressive.”
Rocky grumbles. He knows Grace doesn’t mean it; he knows they’ll never be done explaining their culture to the other. Still, something inside him stirs with irritation that he does his best to tamper down. “It’s very rude to take a bet and then not take it seriously,” he tells Grace. Grace turns to him properly, shifting his entire body toward him, and Rocky doesn’t know what to make of the shape of his face.
“Rocky,” he says, eyes fixed to the place where Rocky’s hearing is clearest. “I promise this is me taking it seriously. If you win, you get bullying rights forever, okay?” He pats Rocky’s carapace fondly, taking up his entire field of awareness for a few moments. “I mean it. Go.”
It’s hard to believe that he’s really serious about this. He’s so smart, and his defeat is not a difficult thing to conclude from the data they both have. Rocky is faster, stronger, and sneakier. Grace may have the advantage of sight, but Rocky knows these woods like the back of his hand. With how flawed human eyes can be, Rocky could probably cover himself in moss and make Grace walk right past him—though that would admittedly be cheating, since they’re supposed to be hunting, not hiding and seeking.
It goes against everything Rocky knows to accept this challenge for what it is: an unfairly leveled scale where the party on the upper side mocks the party who’s clearly winning. He and Grace exchange jabs and mockery every day, but this feels different.
But Grace also has yet to break a promise. That is, if Rocky ignores that time all the way back in their tunnel, when Grace said he’d be back in two Earth hours and proceeded to keep him waiting for much longer. Rocky feels just as weird backing down when Grace has not yet wronged him, hasn’t yet disrespected him in earnest, and so he gives a rumble of assent and turns once more.
“You got five minutes,” Grace calls after him, which shouldn’t sound as ominous as it does coming from someone who, even after recovering from the malnourished state the tail end of the mission left him in, is still fine and brittle in the grand scheme of things. Certainly not something built for speed, neither in terms of size nor efficiency. Rocky has seen him run, and it ended with Grace doubling over and heaving for breath after a minute at most. Rocky wasn’t exactly faring better, but at least he has the advantage of being faster, therefore tracking more distance in the same amount of time.
Rocky runs, and he’s certain that Grace must have slept poorly last night, because why else would he suggest something like this? To not only offer to hunt him down when he knows Rocky is both faster and more accustomed to Eridian terrain, but to give him a headstart? Rocky runs, though not as fast as he would if he really were prey. He could probably make it to the other edge of the biodome in the time Grace has given him plus the time it’d take him to catch up. If he slowed down a bit, he might wait for Grace in his own home.
So that’s what he does. He’s not exactly looking forward to gloating, considering that winning a race against a human is not really a feat, but there’s a unique kind of satisfaction in the fact that Grace is apparently fully convinced that it’s a fair competition. Even if Rocky can’t figure out why. Grace isn’t usually one to boast against all evidence proving his limitations.
Rocky slows to a walk, tapping the ground to orient himself. He knows these trees, the canopy overhead. Before the mission, he and Adrian would stop here occasionally just to listen. The wind is milder these days, an inferior replica of the real thing outside of Grace’s dome, but Rocky can still tell it sounds nicer here than it would farther out, where the foliage grows sparse.
It’s several minutes until he hears something. For a moment he thinks it’s an animal, but then he remembers that there are no animals in Grace’s dome. Rocky slows to a trot so his own steps won’t muddle the image, and there, maybe a furlong behind him, he hears Grace’s steps. He’s walking briskly, trusting the terrain like there aren’t dozens of ravines and burrows that had to be patched up before he was allowed in. He walks like he can see Rocky through all the trees, which Rocky knows he can’t—but then, he also knew that Grace couldn’t see out the back of his head, and he turned out to be wrong in unexpected ways.
Rocky sprints. It occurs to him that they didn’t set a time limit, nor one of distance. According to the only condition they set, waiting for Grace in his house would not be a win. Outrunning him would not strictly be a win. Damn it, there is no way for Rocky to win unless Grace loses him, unless artificial night falls and he gets tired. Rocky looks to the sky. He cannot see light, but he can faintly sense the humming of the lamps all around the dome, still shining at full brightness. Not for the first time, he curses himself for his zeal, his insatiable eagerness for competition. He should’ve laid out the terms more clearly.
The forest inclines. A pleasant hike on any other day, just challenging enough to count as exercise—but now that Rocky is climbing up the hill as fast as he can, he really starts feeling it. Leaves slip from under his claws, nearly tripping him. It would probably have been smarter to go around; Grace’s long legs give him an advantage when walking up uneven ground.
Rocky’s panting by the time he reaches the top. It’s a sharp, overstimulating feeling to move this frantically, hot and cold blood pumping through the same muscles in quick alternation. The moment he’s sure he won’t slip back down, Rocky plops to the ground with his legs spread out, doing his best to relax. He may be physically superior to humans, but in his eagerness to prove it, he forgot he was never among Erid’s greatest. There are many ways to torture oneself for sport, and Rocky is ill-inclined to all of them. Lying there in an attempt to soothe the ache from his muscles, he wonders if his clutchmate would’ve done any better in this, nimble as they are. He wonders how they would feel about him bringing home an alien only to let himself get chased down by said alien in the woods he knows like his childhood home. He wonders if they even know he went to space.
He misses them. It’s an absurd thought to have at this moment, but with his heart pounding so hard he hears it in the air around him, Rocky finds himself wishing he’d stayed in his home clan a little longer, run with his clutchmate a bit more often, watched them grow up just a little more.
Rocky tips over slightly, resting his carapace. If things were different—if they were to gloss over the circumstances of their parting—Rocky thinks they would’ve laughed at him.
He laughs at himself, too. He wouldn’t have it any other way; in their endless wisdom, Adrian taught him that looking back would bring nothing but suffering. Rocky would not want to be blind to the beauty of the life he chose: meeting Adrian in a new clan, namely, and finding work that truly fulfilled him after decades of trying and failing to conform, and meeting Grace despite the loss that came with the mission, and every instance of seeing him laugh so hard his strange human body began leaking.
There are no regrets, when he really thinks about it. Still, it’s in this ludicrous moment that he feels the absence.
After some time, Rocky begins to get back to his feet. He taps one of them against the ground.
He shoots upright when he hears the sound return, bearing the shape of Grace’s form. Rocky does it again, just to be sure. Grace once told him that human brains tend to fill in the gaps, seeing beasts and monsters in the shadows of clothes hung over chairs; maybe it’s that.
But no. Grace is at the bottom of the hill, moving slowly enough that Rocky didn’t hear him coming.
The way down is tricky, and Rocky spends more time trying to keep his balance than actually moving forward. He hears Grace reach the summit when he’s halfway down. He hears him laugh at him when he sees Rocky struggle.
A pebble would be more efficient, Rocky thinks. Any Eridian would have pounced already, sacrificing some amount of damage to themselves in order to catch their prey. If Grace were an Eridian, Rocky would’ve lost already.
Only that’s not true, because an Eridian would’ve caught up to him within the first few minutes. An Eridian would’ve taken measures to avoid being heard; they would’ve hunted in packs with designated roles, one for distraction, one for herding the weakest link of the bunch away, one for immobilizing the prey, one for the final blow.
Grace is one person. He’s taking a long time, but as Rocky untangles himself from the root he stumbled into, he’s beginning to understand that a human’s suit is not speed.
Once again, Rocky runs. He’s starting to loop around now, hoping to slow Grace down. Some of the undergrowth is dense enough to cut into his skin while leaving Rocky unfazed, and he knows of some trees that have continued to grow after falling, winding shapes that Grace would need to crawl under, whereas Rocky can simply walk through.
It helps, but it’s not enough. Rocky makes an agonized sound the sixth time he hears Grace on his heels, and he loses count after that.
He runs.
He stops.
The period between the two gets shorter.
He gets up before he’s ready. He runs. His vents feel like they’re on fire, hot air puffing into the narrow space between his body and his xenonite suit. His limbs become clumsy, dragging behind him. Grace does not call out to him, does not even taunt. He just follows. Laser-focused. Tireless. Relentless. Rocky is more fear than mercury now, terror curling along every cell of blood, warring with the knowledge that he's safe, that Grace won't hurt him, that it's just a game, but it sure as hell doesn't feel like it.
Eridians have very few predators, and their cities are built for maximum safety.
But Rocky is in the woods. And he's been running for a while.
His entire body screams as he pushes harder, as he strains farther than he ever has before, because this isn’t just about winning anymore. Something in Rocky’s brain pushes him forward, no matter how well he knows that stopping in his tracks and surrendering would be a perfectly fine—albeit humiliating—option. Nothing bad would happen.
But Grace is coming, always coming closer, and Rocky needs to run.
These trees he knows so well begin to look alike. He stops strategizing, though now is the time he needs it most. He just weaves past whatever obstacle he can hope to put between himself and Grace, and he prays to all his ancestors that it is enough, even as he knows in his very bones that it can’t be. He doesn’t think it in so many words, but his body understands in ways beyond speech that this has been over for a long time. He doesn’t know how, but Grace is not tired. He will keep following slowly, closing in. He will catch Rocky. Rocky will get slower and slower, until Grace is free to do with him as he likes.
Just as he has that thought, Rocky spots a dip in the terrain. A hollow tree trunk stands shielded by bushes, and Rocky doesn’t even hesitate before giving in to the temptation of cheating. It hardly feels like cheating, anyhow, rather than a desperate attempt at evading certain doom.
He fits himself between the bushes, exhaling. Grace would expect him to slip into the trunk, he thinks, and when he sees that Rocky isn’t in there, he might just pass by. It feels like a good plan. It is. If this is what humans do, if they’re specialized for hunting things that are in turn specialized for running away, surely he’d just keep walking in the direction he last saw Rocky run in. He’d keep going until he could see Rocky. His sight is his primary sense, after all.
For the first time in what feels like hours, Rocky’s breath begins to settle. He doesn’t know what color this bush is, but he thinks it’s dense enough to hide him regardless. He turns his awareness far and wide, listening for steps. Nothing yet.
Exhaustion is so heavy. Rocky has two thoughts in quick succession: first, that he can’t wait to go home after this, that he almost wants Grace to catch him so he can spend what little energy he has left on going home—and then, hot on the heels of that thought comes the flash of fear at the idea of being caught. Never before has his nervous system taken the wheel like this. He knows he’s fine. He knows.
And yet, when his senses begin to dull, when the sounds of the world begin to even out, he jolts so violently that it shakes the bush he is in, which only stokes the flame higher, panic flaring through his vents. He can’t let himself doze off. If Grace walks past him, Rocky will need to know; he’ll need to gauge the distance between them both so he can pick the right moment to emerge and run in the opposite direction. Maybe if he returns to the place where they started, Grace will agree to let it count as a win. Maybe if he stays awake for long enough, it’ll be good enough for mercy.
Rocky forces himself back to awareness, lying very still, taking in his surroundings.
“Hiya,” says Grace from beside him, and Rocky damn near leaps out of his carapace. He scrambles backward, tripping over his own legs in the process, and looks up at Grace from where he’s torn himself out of the bush and fallen on his back.
“What the fuck?!” he yells, more of an accusation than a question. “What the fuck?!”
Grace, of course, does not explain to him what kind of sick fucking joke this is. He rises from where he was sitting against the tree only to double over laughing, all his gangly human limbs tucked close like he’s the one having to shield himself from something. He laughs like he’s just Grace again, rather than some kind of over-mutated predator who could singlehandedly slay every living being on Erid, because apparently he’s failed to mention that he only grows tired of moving when he does so quickly.
Rocky thrusts his limbs forward to turn back around, but is stopped in place. As if it’s some friendly gesture and not the cherry on top of an already terrifying whole, Grace puts his foot on the bottom of Rocky’s carapace, leaning on him with all his weight.
Rocky is paralyzed as he lets it happen. Grace couldn’t truly immobilize him; he could turn back around with a small amount of effort and scamper away. Hell, he could dig his claws into Grace’s foot and force him to let him go if he really had to.
But the thing is that Grace knows this. He knows his weight is insignificant to Rocky, and so he has no qualms about using all of it, and he knows that Rocky won’t hurt him, and that more than anything stirs something foreign in Rocky’s head. Grace told him about how humans hunt for sport, for fun, and the concept is completely beyond him. Hunting is tiring, intense work, and no Eridian in their right mind would do it for any reason other than necessity.
Rocky thinks he might be seeing it, now. He’s pinned under Grace’s heel, and he thinks that’s what this is: a human gloating to the very thing they’ve incapacitated, signaling with every part of themself that there is no getting away this time. If it were anyone else, and if Rocky hadn’t had years to know Grace for who he was, Rocky would recognize this as the death sentence it is, because humans may be weak, and they may lack claws or venom or sharp teeth, but they’re intelligent. They make tools. If Grace had a weapon, he could sink it into the vulnerable flesh of Rocky’s abdomen and be done with it.
Rocky could get away, could win out against Grace’s strength if he could bring himself to move, but he’s so frozen with a mix of horror and fascination that he stays right where he is. Not like he would get far, anyway, tired as he is.
“You still think humans are lame?” Grace asks, and he’s not even out of fucking breath. He talks as he always talks, like tracking Rocky down was a comfortable stroll through the woods. Like the time Rocky spent running as fast as his legs could carry him was nothing but leisure to Grace.
Rocky knew that humans were complex beings, that there was more to them than Grace reasonably had time to explain, but as Rocky lies supine and vulnerable, some part of his mind sags out of place. Grace told him that humans were apex predators, that deaths by other creatures were miniscule compared to the deaths caused by other humans. Rocky believed him, but he sees now that he didn’t truly grasp the meaning of it until this very moment.
“I wonder how things would be if we’d evolved on the same planet,” Grace says, leaning his forearms on his elevated knee. The one kept up by Rocky’s body. It puts even more weight on him, and Rocky feels the texture of Grace’s shoe through the xenonite, the bumps and ridges, the rocks and leaves stuck to the bottom. “You think we’d eat each other?”
It takes every ounce of self control for Rocky to keep the noise he makes somewhat dignified. He kind of needs Grace to stop talking.
“You think you’re edible, pal?” Grace asks, intoned like it’s nothing more than their usual banter, like he doesn’t literally have Rocky trapped beneath him. Rocky’s leg twitches, and that only makes it worse. He feels a bead of mercury run down his underside, where his ventral seam has begun to part.
It’s at this moment that he notices—probably because he hurries to direct his attention toward anything else—that Grace is wearing his glasses properly for once. This, too, does not help in the slightest. It might just be because having them tucked into his collar or hanging around his ears would’ve made them easier to lose, but right now, Rocky can’t help but feel like it was deliberate. The one time Grace cares about having his sight at a hundred percent is when he’s set his mind to hunting Rocky down like an animal.
“It’d probably be one heck of a workout to get to the good bits,” Grace goes on, and Rocky begins to panic once more. Not due to the freakish nature of Grace’s endurance this time, but the greater, more consequential problem of what will happen if Grace notices that Rocky’s leaking silver all over his suit. His breath, already thin to begin with, becomes nothing more than a suggestion rasping faintly through his vents. “Wouldn’t have to cook you, though. You’re plenty warm on your own, no parasites or anything like—”
“Grace,” Rocky says, more urgently than he meant to, because he really, really needs Grace to get off of him.
Grace stops. Rocky feels his smile fade, feels his weight lift in an instant, and he’s back to regular old Grace. “You okay, bud?”
Rocky doesn’t immediately get up when the weight on his abdomen fades. He lays there, feeling the imprint where Grace used to be, his need doubling for how much farther away he is now. He briefly considers reaching out for Grace’s leg to place it back, citing clinginess or something, claiming that the touch was rather nice, even if the rest of it wasn’t. It wouldn’t be too far from the truth, but there is no way to put it that Rocky can reasonably sell. He searches his mind for words that aren’t deranged. He searches for anything that isn’t Grace holding his amygdala in his five-fingered hand, a grip that’s kind only in its restraint.
“Instinct,” he says, just so Grace won’t misinterpret his silence. The last thing he wants is for Grace to feel bad when Rocky’s the one making it weird. “It’s, uh—Eridians have these—humans have them too. Like when you told me about how humans sometimes act like prey despite being predators.”
Grace gets on one knee, heedless of the dirt soaking into his pants. He levels with Rocky, where he’s still belly-up and vulnerable and still very much leaking. How he hasn’t noticed yet is beyond Rocky. He can distinguish colours, and Rocky is pretty sure that silver and brown are far enough apart on the spectrum for Grace to see.
“Shoot, I’m sorry, Rock,” Grace says instead, because he’s Grace, and he’s sweet enough to worry that this might’ve been a bad idea. Which it was. Just not in the way that Grace is thinking. Fuck, maybe this is another one of those moments where humans are so focused on one thing that they completely miss another, no matter how glaringly obvious it is. Grace just looks at where he anthropomorphizes Rocky’s face to be, and his hand twitches like he’s considering a light, comforting touch. “I didn’t mean to scare you.”
Rocky stifles a laugh as he tries to turn back around at a reasonable speed, nothing that seems too hectic or too sluggish. “It’s okay,” he says. “Payback for me trying to sneak up on you.”
It’s convincing enough for Grace to drop the subject. At least Rocky thinks so, based on what he knew about his friend before today. Now, he’s not so sure.
Either way, they walk home in a sort of silence that would normally have been comfortable, though now, in the wake of whatever the fuck this was, Rocky finds himself kicking rocks and dragging his feet.
After fifty Earth years in space, filled with sudden, inexplicable death, the solution to Erid's previously inevitable doom, contact with an alien species, and countless revelations that Eridian science hadn’t yet been ready for, Rocky has never once felt a stronger urge to tell Adrian about something than right in this moment.