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Grace is pretty sure that Rocky springs it on him the second he engineers the form-fitting suit and steps out of his bubble for the first time.
Of course, because nothing is complete without an argument, Grace has to defend this point. "No, it was! It was the first day you could get up close and personal with me while still being, you know, alive!"
"Not 'the second of,'" sniffs Rocky. "Waited until stress tests concluded and I knew it safe. Waited until end of work day, at very least."
Grace reaches over and flicks him in the forehead. Rocky latches onto him in the middle of the flick, and now Grace's hand is trapped between an indignant Eridian and the pillow.
"Who's telling this story?" Grace grumbles. "You or me?"
"Oh, me, me!" Rocky scrambles up halfway onto Grace's chest, prompting a very familiar oomph as Grace's lungs compress in two. Rocky brandishes his arms mightily. "I make puppet show re-enactment. I make..." Rocky tilts his carapace in a way that Grace knows is sly. "...Very accurate anatomical puppet show."
Grace flicks him again. "No, I'm telling this. Put away the—stop building a model, Rocky, you're getting distracted!"
"You getting distracted," Rocky pouts back, but as soon as Grace touches his wrist, he stops constructing the, uh, anatomically accurate model for his proposed puppet show. "You always get distracted with this."
Grace pads at Rocky's skin with his thumb, feeling the contours through the xenonite. Rough. Warm. Familiar.
Rocky curls further on top of him, resting his body on Grace's chest, waiting for Grace to actually collect himself and tell the story.
For a moment, Grace loses his train of thought, tracing one of Rocky's arms with his finger. Feeling the reverberations of Rocky settling down on him, all of his attention on him and the memory.
"It was beginning of night cycle," Rocky prompts, after what must be too long of a beat. "You walk into bedroom and I say..."
Rocky states his proposal as soon as Grace has one foot in the ladder, and Grace misses the next rung and almost cracks his head against the side of his bed in shock.
There is no way Rocky had actually said what Grace thought he heard, just now. "You...you want to what? For science?!"
Rocky tsks, like Grace has taken the implications way out of proportion. "Experiment," he stresses. "Logical, methodical experiment. You make it sound...unreasonable."
Grace explodes. "Unreasonable! Unreasonable! You want to stick your hand up my ass!"
"Arm!" Rocky corrects: like that is what he's hung up on, the semantics of the insane sentence that he had asked—with no forewarning or context, mind you, just blurted it out. "Stick whole arm inside. You said could fit."
"I," Grace sputters. "I did no such thing!"
Even as he says this—and the temperature must be fluctuating again because Grace is starting to sweat above his ears—the whole rigmarole slots into place. Oh. Oh, Grace has a bad intuition that he knows exactly what Rocky is using to justify this.
Slowly, Grace slouches against the wall of the Mary, trying to cement the palm of his hand into his forehead as subtly as possible.
"You made hypothesis in first place," Rocky reminds him—spreads his arms and points to the offending location. If Grace ignored the walls between them, Rocky is pointing directly to the Don't Go Crazy room. "Aloud. Very emphatic. Not rhetorical statement."
And, really, screw NASA for uploading as much media as possible to the ship, more than Grace could ever want or use for mission-related purposes. Whichever jokester was responsible for this, Grace wants press-ganged onto the next interstellar suicide mission stat—because they did also upload porn for him.
So much porn.
And, and, if you really think about it, it is Rocky's fault for being vague about whether he could hear what Grace was doing through two sets of sealed doors, fifty yards, and the Don't Go Crazy surround sound on maximum blast to muffle him.
Grace grinds his teeth from side to side. "It was rhetorical." He remembers locking himself in with nothing but the glow of the laptop, the tinny earbuds connected at the lowest volume, and the generous three sheets of Kleenex he had allotted for the next five to fifteen minutes of his life. And, of course, the three hundred decibels of ocean ambiance to ensure Rocky didn't hear hide nor hair of this. Which had failed. Clearly. "It really, really was."
Rocky chitters in objection. Because, apparently, he had heard and clearly parsed the bit where Grace had moaned and maybe repeated some of the lines the actors were saying, sue him for trying to get in the mood when he's trapped in space and all—and then apparently Rocky had devoted some part of his huge brain to processing this and devising an experiment!
"Not rhetoric! Possible!" counters Rocky. "Very possible, I conclude. See—I made diagram."
Rocky rolls the Who Am I? whiteboard out of the way to proudly brandish what he built (and then hid) behind it, and suddenly Grace is face-to-face with a model that contains striking visuals and detailed measurements and calculations to prove how much, precisely, Grace could take of Rocky.
Not that Grace had thought about it. Obviously not. He was just mumbling to himself and holding onto himself for dear life. It didn't mean anything. It's not like Grace watched the pixels and sped up his grip on himself and imagined how warm it would be, if Rocky reached inside him.
Because—
Well.
The proof is in the pudding, right in front of him. And it's not like the spacecraft with five thousand redundancies is lacking in medical lube. Rocky could do it.
He could—in some potential alternate future that Grace is not living in right now—shove his whole arm inside of Grace.
The air in the bedroom humidifies rapidly, and it's hard for Grace to catch his breath. He needs to start pacing back and forth—or sneeze. Does he have to sneeze?
Across from him, Rocky is standing absolutely still next to his anatomically accurate model.
Grace can't tear his gaze away from the diagram that helpfully measures eight-point-oh-five inch length of one of Rocky's limbs, Jesus Harold Christ, until Rocky pipes up again, softer this time.
"Rocky curious too."
Grace stops pacing and stares at him. Rocky's limbs are as bundled and gangly as Grace has ever seen them, and Rocky rubs two of his arms together in a self-soothing gesture.
Bashful. That's the only descriptor that comes to mind. Rocky isn't getting swept up in the rush of discoveries he could make after mishearing Grace—although, if we're going to jump the gun, let's be honest here: not a mishearing—and, instead, he is confessing.
Rocky curious too.
Grace had murmured some broken phrase about putting it in him, deeper, deeper, keep going keep going, and oh, oh...and Rocky has considered it. Wanted it. In much the same way.
Grace sits down on the edge of his bed, hard. His hands are shaking.
He looks at Rocky: twisted, off-balance, testing the water. Rocky curious too. God.
His tongue sticks to the roof of his mouth. "Rocky also wants...you also want..."
He can't say it. He can gesture, roughly, at his lower half, while also crossing his legs and squeezing himself as small as possible against his bed, but he can't say it.
Rocky whistles Yes! and sticks an arm straight into the air.
...Yeah. Yeah, Rocky had measured his own length and circumference correctly, if Grace's eyeball measurements are anything to go by. Eight at least before the shoulder joint.
(And it's not like you have to stop at the joint, a traitorous voice pipes up inside his brain. Time to jettison it out the airlock.)
Grace screws his eyes shut. All this because it had been way too long when Grace holed himself up with nothing but his laptop and a prayer, and he hadn't expected his brain to leak out his ears like that, except that it kept going deeper and Grace wanted that, he wanted it—
All roads lead to Rome. All options lead Grace and Rocky here.
Rocky leaps up onto the bed next to him. "Grace considering now too, question? Grace look considering."
Grace...could say no.
Grace could muster up the same self-effacing exhale he has judiciously employed throughout the last ninety days to preempt any cultural differences from becoming an actual sticking point between them.
Grace could say, Humans can get very stupid when masturbating and say words in the moment that they don't mean, and that was one of those moments, and is there any way on God's green earth that I can ask you to turn your ears off at specific times in the future so this never happens again.
Grace could do any of these things.
But Rocky is on the bed next to him, and the knot in Grace's stomach is pounding fear-shame-embarrassment-opportunity in time with his heart.
Grace could very well open his mouth and tell Rocky that he's not considering. He could turn down Rocky's nascent scientific curiosity. (It might even be Rocky's...something more.)
But, oh God, Grace really is considering it.
He knows Rocky well enough to hear the self-satisfied smirk in his melody. "Grace now considering."
Grace massages his temples—more like stabs his eyebrow region with his fingers. "Lord help me, Grace is now considering."
"Oh, good good!" Rocky chirps. "We have fun together. Can make Grace feel good. Grace can take whole Rocky arm."
Grace starts coughing immediately. Oh. Oh, okay. Sure. He and what army. "Just like that, huh."
Rocky considers. "Well...working on upgrades to suit." He presses each of his arms against the impressively thin and flexible xenonite. "Iterating. No worry, stress tested! I think good enough now to penetrate you: strong enough to not tear, skintight to feel you and you feel me, but. Need more upgrades and testing before you penetrate me."
Grace has left breathing normally behind about five sentences and two uses of the word 'penetrate' ago. "I—huh?"
He can always tell when Rocky is gaining steam in a discovery when he bumps up an octave to his excited register. Now, Rocky is practically whistling. "Yes, yes, need more flex in suit before confident enough to try your [??] in me, but soon! Very soon, promise."
Grace has to be red right now, right? Fully red? He shakes his head. "Wait, that last word. What's that?"
Rocky repeats it for him and, for emphasis, taps on the uncomfortable weight in Grace's pants.
This one touch immediately transfers enough warmth to him, even through the new double-pane insulation, that Grace goes from slightly interested (Lord help him) to dizzy with it.
Grace freezes on the bed. Any movement and Rocky might take his hand off of him.
On the other hand, if Grace pushed up into him, he might be able to feel the texture of Rocky's skin through the thin membrane. Something he wouldn't have dreamed of when Rocky was in the bubble.
(Something he wouldn't have dreamed of ten minutes ago.)
(Liar.)
"I make new word," Rocky explains. "No good direct translation so I make new one for you."
He pats Grace right on the dick and Grace's thigh twitches despite himself.
Rocky flinches back in surprise.
Before Grace can even think about what he's doing for a single second, he's grabbing Rocky's hand and plastering it back onto him. "Sorry, sorry," Grace says breathlessly, "I panicked—muscles moved by themselves—you can. That's fine. I was just...surprised."
"And aroused."
This helpful addition is supplemented with Rocky drumming his fingers on Grace. Ngh, okay. There's a good chance that the frank discussion of this is going to kill Grace dead.
"So...the word you made..."
Rocky repeats it, squeezing Grace's dick as he does so. Something bubbles out of Grace's mouth for the next three to five seconds, but Grace sure as hell doesn't know what it is.
After the blood has returned to his brain, Grace waves a hand around breezily. "Right, right. How, uh...how formal of a term is it?"
(When Grace translates it for himself in the contours of his mind, how clinical should he make Rocky's dirty talk sound?)
Oh, God, imagine explaining that sentence to Grace from yesterday.
Rocky juts his body up at Grace in disbelief. "I don't know," he says, like Grace is stupid for asking and derailing the moment. "I make up word for new human genitals all by myself, first ever to see and name and research you, and you ask how formal I mean, question?! ...However formal you think I mean. Statement."
Grace is practically cross-eyed, staring down at how Rocky extends his hand and strokes Grace between two fingers, all the while berating him about the correct time and place for a translation discussion. This is doing something irreparable to Grace's psyche. Something irreparably cool, probably. "...Hh, good point."
Translation will shift as needed, Grace informs the remaining two percent of his functioning brain. If they ever establish contact with Earth from Erid—if they ever reach Erid, first—then Grace should request an honorary linguistics doctorate for this. For innovations in translating under such duress.
Grace blinks. "And you said you wanted to, to, to put it in you? Like...your food hole?"
"Yes! Yes, I compare human sex customs and Eridian sex customs. I synthesize hypotheses. More diagrams, if you want—"
"No, that's okay—"
"—Am not picky what order we want to try. Many things fun for Eridians and humans both. Just with current suit durability, should only penetrate. And no biting."
Grace blinks. "No biting?"
"Double insulation not stress-tested for teeth."
It's very difficult to apply Grace's usual standard of problem-solving to the current situation as Rocky strokes him through his pants. "No, but, in what situation would I be biting?"
"This one," Rocky informs him, and reaches up with another hand and brushes Grace's lips.
It's like holding a hot pocket up to his mouth, and Grace opens said mouth to say something like, Oh, right, teeth, but as soon as he parts his lips, Rocky pushes a finger inside.
Grace almost chokes on him—not that Rocky's, like, deepthroating him or anything, just out of sheer surprise—and there's a warm rock in his mouth, and Grace's tongue is plastered up against the surprisingly neutral taste of xenonite, and oh, right. Teeth.
"You tuck teeth in," Rocky adds helpfully, and with another hand, he squeezes Grace through the ever-thinner polyester of his pants. "I do research, is first thing anyone says about putting in mouth. Tuck teeth in."
"I don't exactly do this often," Grace says—tries to say—opens his mouth a little wider to garble something that approximates this. One syllable in, Rocky strokes a finger up his tongue, and that—that—
"Leaking already," Rocky chides, and as he does so, pushes Grace down to sprawling out on his bed, situating himself in the center of Grace's chest. All Grace can see of him is the arm that protrudes out of his own mouth, holy moly, and Rocky's grip around his dick starts sliding up and down.
Gun to his head, Grace doesn't know if the leaking Rocky is talking about is the saliva that gums up every spare inch of Grace's mouth, prompting Grace to do nothing but suck on Rocky's hand, or the fact that he needs Rocky to pull his pants down now, please.
Grace can take initiative. He shimmies his own pants down a couple inches, and Rocky takes it from there: ghosting Grace's hand with the warmth of his own as he grabs and pulls.
A minute ago, the room was too warm. Now, Grace is cold everywhere but the connection points to Rocky.
"And impatient."
Rocky is crossing wires that Grace has never crossed before, pairing the finger in his mouth with the same rhythm that he jacks him up and down, and Grace is going to blow way too soon. Grace uses his tongue to push Rocky's finger against the roof of his mouth, trapping him long enough to (try to) enunciate, "Why are you being so mean?"
"Why, repeat?" laughs Rocky. "You like it."
Simple as that. No follow-up self-reflection needed.
"Now, take hand more. Lubrication important."
"Lubri—you can't be serious—"
Rocky leans in, butts his body against Grace's chin, and all the while he doesn't stop stroking and Grace is going to go crazy before he comes. "Is performance," Rocky whispers. "I have supplies. I prepared."
"Oh, you prepared," Grace says airily. "Wonderful."
This is the last thing he says before Rocky swipes deep enough into his mouth and all Grace can do is suck Rocky's fingers.
"Teeth," Rocky says again. "Teeth, teeth," and Grace tucks his lips over and gives him a thumbs up, folding his mouth around Rocky's suit as tight as he can, feeling every ridge and bump and crevice, sucking onto him for dear life.
In response, Rocky starts stroking him with some semblance of timing, and it's all Grace can do to tangle his own hands onto the top of Rocky's body, find grooves that function as finger holds, and hang on for dear life.
Rocky narrates the discoveries he's making about Grace's body as he finds them. "Back of tongue particularly erogenous. Especially to longer touch. Swipes."
He demonstrates, rubbing his finger down from the tip all the way to the back of Grace's throat, and Grace is so focused on cupping his teeth, he automatically stretches his mouth wide open, making a hh, hh sound with every choppy breath.
"Rocky will sound similar when Grace fingers food hole."
Oh—mother of God—Grace chokes on the image searing itself into his mind, and Rocky slides out of his mouth, keeping that warm pressure at the outside of his lips as he collects a breath—and yet doesn't stop jerking him off, like they've got a looming deadline or something.
A deadline that Grace is going to meet expeditiously, if Rocky doesn't change course soon.
His head swims. His body is on fire, and his mind is a thousand different places, but primarily reveling in the idea of reaching underneath Rocky and pressing in, in, as Rocky loses himself and Grace is the one spouting new discoveries in the land of Eridian erogenous zones.
"Rocky," he gasps, "I'm not...I'm not gonna..."
Rocky eases off of him, just enough for Grace to sink his head back onto the pillow, crisis averted. Bless Rocky for reading his mind.
"You want arm now, question?" Rocky asks. "Before finish?"
Oh.
Wow. Right.
Grace raises both hands in a very important emphasis. "Not whole arm." He rubs some spare spit off of his lips to keep at least a little dignity here with him. "Maybe...maybe little arm."
"Humans call fingering," Rocky informs him, as he temporarily clambers off of Grace and the bed and returns with some wonderful NASA-stamped lube.
"I...I know what it's called." It's all so real, now, as Grace stares at him and the lube and notices that the suit over one of Rocky's arms is cloudy with the layer of spit that Grace had sucked onto him. An arm that could, potentially, go from stroking in Grace's mouth to stroking in his...
"Good, glad you know. Just you say you don't do this much. Wanted to make sure."
Grace weakly gives him two thumbs-up. "Thanks, buddy."
Together, he and Rocky yank the rest of Grace's pants off and fling them somewhere else in the room. He scrunches his bare legs up as Rocky situates himself between them.
His cheeks must be radioactively red.
The cheeks on his face, that is, not...not the other ones. Although, those might be red, too. If only Rocky could parse color, he could let Grace know for sure.
Rocky peeks up at him over Grace's hard-on in the way. It's a very human gesture that Rocky is mimicking, making sure that Grace knows that Rocky is interrupting his whole workflow in order to get Grace's attention. "You good, question? You quiet. Is new."
"Just, ah...nervous."
"Oh." Rocky rests a hand on his thigh, reassuringly sliding up and down the coarse hairs. "No need. I go slow."
"Please, thanks."
Rocky applies a dollop of lube to the palm of his hand, and then stops. "You...you do this before, question?"
Not the time to explain the intricacies of experimenting in college, when he was young and dumb and on top of the world. A lifetime ago. Grace waves a hand. "Not for, uh..." Years. "A while."
Rocky waves an unoccupied arm in return. "I go very slow."
And, by God, he does.
The thing about being mankind's sole surviving, unwitting sacrifice to the stars, is that Grace knows how to relax. Like. Way better than he did when he was nineteen.
Doesn't hurt that Rocky grabs ahold of his dick again and slots it between Rocky's arm and body while he's thumbing at his rim.
Doesn't hurt that Grace can scrunch himself up on his elbows and watch Rocky press his dick against the divots in his carapace, the same places that just a minute ago Grace dug his fingers in for dear life.
Doesn't hurt that Rocky starts sliding Grace back and forth against himself as he traces against Grace's rim.
"Ngah," Grace says. "Oh. Ho. Ah."
"Thought so," Rocky murmurs to himself, and attaches another arm to Grace's dick. Two arms, and his body, and a smidgen of lube, rolling Grace around on himself...and crooking a single finger inside of him.
Grace leaks a lot at this.
He bends a knee and plants it on the wall of the bed cubby to give Rocky more room to work his magic. Yeah. Much easier than the last time.
"Oh, wow, xenonite does feel kinda condom-y," Grace notes at the ceiling. This may be the last full sentence he can manage tonight.
"Will take that as good thing," Rocky says, slowly gliding the finger in and out.
"Good. Yeah. Good. It's good."
Grace's heart rate approaches one-fifty, enough to feel like it's bursting out of his chest, and he can't keep himself upright to watch Rocky work his magic on him. There's too much sensation, his dick is trapped and buffeted between Rocky's pumping hands and body, and Rocky is slow and methodical inside of him.
It somehow feels just like when Rocky stroked his tongue. How weird is that. How many wires are being crossed in his body tonight.
"...Want more, question?"
Grace collapses his shoulders on the pillow and groans.
"Want more, question?" Rocky repeats, tracing his finger side to side within him.
Grace is going to pop. He grits his teeth and sucks in as much air as he can in, screwing his eyes closed. He has to concentrate. He has to last through this.
With yet another arm, Rocky starts tapping on his hip. "Grace, answer please."
"Nghhhhhhyeah. Yeah. Little more. Little—please—fuck—"
Second finger joining in, and Grace is full to bursting with it. Rocky's hand is rough, but the xenonite is smooth, and together the sensations are...they're...
Rocky spreads his fingers apart, and a bubble of spit escapes Grace's mouth. He can't keep his mouth closed, he can't keep his eyes closed, his back is twitching off of the bed and he can't concentrate, can't focus, can't ride the wave, all he can do is chase it—
"Just like that. Just like that—just like that—"
When Rocky next speaks, it is clear that he is grinning ear to ear. "Take long as you need."
Somehow, that is what sets Grace off. The incessant, overwhelming pressure on his dick, and the slow and full stretch that tells his hindbrain too much, too much, not enough—and Rocky, take long as you need.
Rocky's here for him.
He's here for him.
Rocky is here, and he did all this research, and he synthesized so many different hypotheses, and he's here, testing them out with Grace. Making Grace feel good.
Grace loses it, panting arrhythmically.
Yeah, yeah, just like that. Just...just like that.
By the time Grace blinks his eyes open again, languorous and crusty, Rocky is perched over his legs, holding them down in five different spots.
"Wh..." Grace swallows, coughs. "What...why are you..."
Rocky climbs off of him—poises above his pelvis as one more magnificent shiver runs through Grace's body—and then clambers up onto Grace's chest, folding his arms under himself and sitting down.
By way of explanation for why Grace came to with Rocky pinning him down like he's hitting the mat for a K.O., Rocky says, "Grace kicks."
"Oh. Shit. Sorry."
"No need. Rocky can kick too. Will discover this with next suit upgrade."
"Mm." Grace melts against the pillow. He doesn't even need to pull the covers up, not with Rocky as a transportable heater sat square on top of his solar plexus. He can just...sink away into sleep.
Rocky pokes him.
Grace opens one eye.
"I said, will discover this with next suit upgrade. So you say..."
Oh. Grace breaks out into a grin despite himself. Thank God Rocky can't parse color, because there's red again, all over his face. "Of course, Rock. Gotta make you feel good, too."
Rocky rubs his arms together joyously. "Good good good! Okay. Sleep now, I watch."
Grace hums. Gladly. But first... "We're finally close enough, aren't we?"
"Context, question?"
Grace reaches up with Herculean effort and brushes his thumb on the side of Rocky's body. Reaches down and slides his hand from where Rocky is sitting to his chest. Rocky is right on top of him, pressed as close against him as technologically possible. "Watching me sleep. We're finally close enough."
"Yes! Yes! Exactly true. Can finally watch correctly and keep safe."
"You too," Grace murmurs, sinking his hand into the grooves on Rocky's body that will become so familiar to him. "Okay. Goodnight."
"...So?" Grace raises an eyebrow. "Did I get everything right? No need for a puppet show?"
Rocky hums. "Pertinent details all covered," he allows. "Memory serviceable. No need for puppet show, but...if you want, puppet show always available."
Grace laughs. "Now, did you want me to recall that specific night for any particular reason...or, maybe there's no reason, and you just wanted to hear me talk?"
He looks around the bed. Hasn't changed one bit since the night in question—except, of course, for the addition of another primary occupant.
"Always goading me," Rocky sniffs. "You know very well reason for story."
Grace's jaw hurts with the force it takes to clamp down on any laughter that might bubble up. God, Rocky gets so cute when he's angry. "No, I don't know for sure. Past performance doesn't necessarily indicate future results."
"This time does. This time for sure does," Rocky says. "And we finished suit upgrade stress test today, so...put small human brain to work. Figure it out."
"Hmm." Grace frowns. Maybe. Thirty percent chance it turns into a smile on the way out. "No, I'm still not getting it."
Rocky reaches out and flicks him in the forehead. "Will bring up new model I made for specific scenario. Will jog your memory, I'm sure." And he climbs out of bed without sparing a second thought for Grace's core temp as he abruptly removes his heater without warning.
"Hey!" Grace twists around and watches Rocky scurry behind the whiteboard in the corner once again, and pull out—Lord help him—another anatomically accurate model. Of Rocky, this time. "I'm getting cold!"
Rocky launches a NASA-stamped packet of lube onto the bed before depositing the model square on Grace's lap. "No worry! No worry! Getting cold not part of calculations. In fact, calculations predict very warm temperatures...internally."
Grace grins. God, he loves him.
Rocky begins the Unfolding Of The Model—a very important part in the routine of their foreplay—but the welcome lump in Grace's throat prompts him to interrupt him. "Hey."
Even to Grace, his voice sounds scratchier, softer.
Rocky pauses and turns to him. "Hey."
Grace props himself up on his elbows and leans in, plants a kiss directly against the curve of Rocky's body. Right against the texture he knows so well.
Grace even bites him, a little.
"Gra-aaace," Rocky warbles.
"Teeth within the new stress test," Grace reminds him. "Teeth definitely within the new stress test."
"...Okay. Kiss again, please."
Grace doesn't know if he can grin any wider. God, he loves him, he really, really does. "Coming right up."
He reaches his hands forward and finds the welcoming grooves in Rocky's body, and Grace kisses him again, breathing and laughing through it.
Grace settles down onto the pillow, still holding onto Rocky. Never letting go of Rocky. "Okay," he says. "Show me what you've got for me."