Chapter Text
Three days later in the Don’t-Go-Crazy Room, safe on board the Hail Mary, Simon thinks he’s wrapped his shattered brain around most of it.
Waking up had been horrible– Grace had kept his word, to watch over Simon as he slept. He knows this because, as he’d burnt alive, he could hear Grace’s voice begging Rocky to come help them. Every inch of him shrieked as he finally tore back into consciousness, nerves wailing like they’d been incinerated along with the rest of him. He was nothing but dust and ashes as he clawed himself back into the land of the living. The world around him was as bright and raw as his skin, throbbing like it should be blistering.
The Light had eaten him alive. It has him still.
It was too much. Simon broke.
Dimly, like it was coming from another room and not from right beside him, Simon had heard the worry in Grace’s voice, if not the exact words. Rocky must have burst in, because alarmed Eridian warbles were suddenly everywhere. The pain, hot and dancing over his skin, started to fade into a dull ache, and then to nothing at all.
Simon just cried, and cried, and cried.
Days have passed on the Hail Mary. Simon hasn’t gone back to the sub or the red void once since he woke up that day.
He also hasn’t said a word that entire time.
In the Don’t-Go-Crazy Room, the waves on the screen in front of him are comforting, repetitive. He’s chosen the same recording as before, Grace’s favorite beach, as his background as he tries to run through the facts one more time– at least, how he understands them.
The Light and the Eye are a fragment and the whole, respectively. The Eye had sent him here. It sounds like that was an accident, or at the very least not intentional. It was conducting an experiment, whatever that means. Simon had disrupted it. Whatever he’d done deep below the surface of the ocean of blood on AT-5, it hadn’t been part of what the Eye had wanted. The Light had bargained clemency for him. Now, he belongs to it. It will call upon him again, it said. It won’t let him go, but it can’t reach him here. Just like the Eye can’t either.
Here. That’s right. Most importantly, the Hail Mary is real. Rocky is real. Grace is real.
A tear rolls down Simon’s cheek, the one split open by his now-mutated jaw. It seeps into the bandage holding it forcibly closed, and the track it leaves behind burns his already irritated skin with the salt. He’s holding his Real and Not-Real list, and it trembles in his hand.
On the first day after learning the truth, Simon hadn’t gotten out of bed. He’d stayed curled in a fetal position in his cot, completely unmoving and wrapped around the tablet containing all the records of the hell he’d died in and still come out the other side. Just breathing, in and out, eyes fixed on the wall as he tried to stitch himself back together. Both Grace and Rocky had tried to rouse him at different times, and then once together as a group effort, but Simon had just drawn the blankets over his head until they left him alone. He’d drifted off into a nap at one point, exhaustion weighing heavily on his aching eyes, and jolted awake in a panic when he realized what happened. He’d started crying again when he realized, for the first time on the Hail Mary, that his sleep had been dreamless.
He’d spent the rest of that day sleeping. He dreamed of nothing, blessed nothing, and cried some more every time he woke up.
On the second day, Simon refused to eat. He did allow himself to be provoked to leave the bed by Grace, shepherded to collapse in the alcove of the far lab window instead. He’d stayed tucked up against the glass for hours while Grace and Rocky worked quietly around him, Grace’s quilt draped over his lap. At some point, Grace had given him something they’d apparently been working on for a while: his own portable Eridian translator attached to a soft, slip-on cuff, so he can always understand Rocky wherever he goes. He can even put it on one-handed. His chest had ached fiercely, holding that in his hand.
Grace is real. Grace is real.
Simon had stared out the window, deep into space, and counted every single star he could see. He’d left long, streaky tear stains all over the glass when Rocky finally ushered him back to the dorm to rest again.
Today, Simon had woken up from a bad dream. He wasn’t back in the SM-13. He wasn’t in the red void. He was on Eden, still a child, staring up at the Last Tree. Mars, filling up the space beyond the Tree, beyond the honeycomb glass of the main atrium, vanished before his eyes. Fear had gripped his senses, but it was ordinary fear. Near painless in comparison to the aching terror that has become his constant baseline. Simon had woken with a start quietly, heart pounding, but still breathing. Without pain.
The mundanity of it all had sent him weeping all over again. It’s a wonder he still had a tear left to cry a moment ago. He feels like a dried-out sponge.
He’s been in the Don’t-Go-Crazy Room ever since, slowly going crazy.
It’s real. It’s all real.
Now what?
The metal catwalk beside him creaks, and Simon goes very still. He’s not alone anymore.
This is all real. He’s not alone anymore.
“You haven’t eaten in days, Heartbeat. Please, just try this.”
Simon’s eyes flicker to where Grace is standing next to him, concern practically radiating off of him like a presence of its own as he holds out what looks like some sort of nutrient smoothie. It’s true, he can’t remember the last time that he ate. Was it… the burrito on the day of the puppet show? That was over four days ago, and his stomach hasn’t stirred in hunger once. It’s just felt static, unchanging, ever since those bouts of nausea.
Lack of appetite, and no ill effects that he can feel. Healed and healing injuries, each more serious than the last, every last one that should have been fatal inexplicably…not. Blood that has been changed, altered irreparably, flowing through his veins. The Light is suddenly there, in his mind’s eye, whispering to him– You live because of me.
He shuts that line of thinking down before it can spiral further, stuffs his list into his pocket, and takes the smoothie. Grace visibly relaxes, like a puppet with its strings cut.
Simon takes a sip of the drink, letting the slightly chalky sweet taste coat his tongue. It wakes him up out of his haze, a little. More shared resources. On Eden, or on Mars, crossing this threshold would practically make him and Grace family. Maybe even partners. Obviously this isn’t how things must work in this universe, in this time.
…isnt it? Simon doesn’t want to ask. The thought still makes him feel warm, regardless.
Grace is real. He takes another sip of the smoothie.
The man is hovering again, shifting back and forth from foot to foot like he isn’t sure whether he should stay or go. Simon doesn’t blame him for hesitating; he knows he’s been acting strange without an explanation ever since the last nightmare with the Light. He hasn’t told Grace a word about it, despite the progress they’d made that day, and honestly he doesn’t want to.
But he does want to share a space with him again. He sets his smoothie down, and pats the catwalk next to him on the right twice.
Grace is smart, he gets the message. He sits down next to Simon on the catwalk, and for a while they just exist side by side, staring out at the simulated expanse before them. The waves on the pebbles. The clouds in the sky.
Predictably, Grace breaks the silence first. He runs a hand through his hair and chuckles nervously. “I’m not good at this. At…people.”
Simon just nods, taking in another mouthful of smoothie. This is true. Grace has said it many times.
It’s alright. Simon isn’t very good at people either. He never got the chance to be.
“I don’t need to know what happened. I’d like to, of course I would, but I don’t need to. What I do need to know is…are you okay?” Grace sounds a little distressed. “Like, did you…go too deep, like you were worried about?”
Grace is very good at asking very complicated questions, isn’t he? Simon doesn’t move.
“Because it didn’t look great from the outside, either,” Grace pushes on. He’s keeping his hands busy, like he usually does when he’s apprehensive about something. “It looked awful, actually. It was like watching someone drown. It broke my heart a little, to see it take you over like that. You don’t handle touch well, I know that, and I know we talked about shaking your cot as an alternative to try and wake you up, but it didn’t work. You had to come up on your own time.” He sniffs. “I’m sorry that you’re going through that. I wish I could help more.”
“You did.”
It’s the first thing Simon’s said in days, and his voice is gravelly from disuse and thick from the smoothie. He swallows one more time. “You did,” he says again, a little more even in his tone. “It helped. They’re better now.” And it's the truth.
It’s not like Grace actually did anything, realistically. This was something Simon had to do all on his own. But knowing someone was on the outside, looking out for him as best as he could? That means something, when you haven’t really had a person to do that for you in a very long time. And Simon isn’t going to let that go unaddressed.
Grace’s eyes are wide. “They're…better? How?”
Simon shrugs, and goes back to his drink. “Just trust me.”
He doesn’t know how long this reprieve will last, only that it won’t be forever. He hasn’t escaped his past, not completely, and on a lot of levels he probably never will. But for the first time since he started waking up here, he feels rested. That has to count for something.
“I do. Trust you, that is.” Grace looks like the admission surprises him as much as it does Simon. “Is that weird?”
“Yes. Yes it is,” Simon deadpans, intentionally trying to get a reaction from the other man. It works (Grace is so easy, really), and he’s rewarded with a short bark of laughter from deep in Grace’s chest. “You know, we’ve only really just met.”
“Eh, time moves faster in space, or something,” Grace says, waving him off dismissively. “Time dilation. Besides, for Rocky and I you’ve been on this ship for almost three weeks. Just because you’ve only been awake for one and a half doesn’t exactly cancel that out. You could also blame it on the whole only-two-humans-for-light-years thing, too. Or, I don’t know, man, maybe you just have one of those trust-able faces.”
Simon’s hand comes up to cradle his ruined cheek at that, touching under his ghoulish eye. He feels warm all over. He looks away, at the very interesting screens all around him.
Out of nowhere, Grace coughs and shifts uncomfortably. When Simon looks at him again, his face has suddenly crumpled.
“Speaking of trust, I have something else that I need to apologize to you for, Heartbeat. I think I’ve gotten us into an unhealthy pattern, and I want to stop it now before it gets any worse.”
A cold hand runs up Simon’s spine at that, and he shivers. He focuses solely on Grace, the scene around them fading away. What is he talking about?
“I think…I think I’ve accidentally implied to you that the way we interact is transactional. I was thinking back to some of our earlier moments, ever since you’ve woken up. Like, in our very first real talk, I tried to learn your name by giving you mine first. I told you that I would share theories about your mutations if you calmed down from your justified freak-out in the bathroom, when you first undid your bandages. I didn’t mean to, but I used your fear about the SM-13 data to get answers from you, too, about where you came from.” Grace looks deeply upset about that last bit especially, and he shakes his head.
“That isn’t…I don’t want you to think that I…um. I don’t really know how to explain it without feeling really scummy. Do you get what I’m trying to say?” He flounders for a bit, getting red in the face, then tries again. “I’m not doing things to expect something in return, is what I’m trying to say. Like…like this smoothie. It’s not to try and buy my way into, like, a conversation about what happened the other night. I don’t know if you think that, but I’m worried that you do. And that isn’t my intention, so I need to clear this up before we go any further.”
He takes a deep breath, like saying this all has exhausted him. “I’m sorry for the times that it’s already happened. I’m not going to do it again, I promise. You don’t have to do anything you don’t want to do here.” Then, in a softer tone, “Something tells me you’ve gotten enough of that to last a lifetime.”
Simon blinks. Oh. His chest aches. All he can do is nod his understanding.
You don’t have to do anything you don’t want to do here.
He’s reminded of something of his own that he’s been coming back to a lot, these past few days. “I have something I’ve been meaning to say, too.”
Grace cocks his head, and waits for Simon to find the words. Finally, he does.
“I’ve been trying to wrap my head around why you and Rocky would risk so much to save me. You said you couldn’t just leave me. You wouldn’t do that. It’s because you understand, right? The both of you, you know what it was like. Being sent to your own death. Knowing no one was coming to save you. You couldn’t let that happen to–” he chokes down the word me, and course corrects to “You couldn’t let it happen to someone else. Not if you could stop it. Because you know.”
Grace inhales sharply. “No. No we couldn’t.”
“And you don’t have to do anything you don’t want to do here, too.”
Understanding dawns, and Grace smiles softly, sadly. “No, we don’t. We wanted to do it. It was worth the risk.”
Apparently, drugged out of his mind on painkillers, he’d called Grace an angel in a first meeting he barely remembers. Acknowledging that before had felt too fragile, too vulnerable, but Simon mulls it over now. The man had saved him. Risked his own life for him. Watched over him while he was at his lowest.
Even half-conscious and out of his mind, he might have been right on the money after all.
Simon thinks about the tablet, waiting for him under his pillow on his bed in the dormitory. He thinks about the data on it, the lengths he went to just to secure it for his own peace of mind. He thinks about the Hail Mary being real.
Simon makes a choice. He takes a deep breath. “Your universe theory is correct, by the way. Just in case you were wondering.”
“What? Heartbeat, what do you mean—?”
“Simon.”
Grace is cold, when Simon reaches out to take his hand into his own. For the first time in as long as he can remember, the feeling of skin on skin doesn’t come with pain. It doesn’t make Simon want to run. Not immediately, at least. He takes another steadying breath and looks straight into Grace’s eyes, which have grown wide as the stars behind his lenses, and gently squeezes. Baby steps. This is real.
“My name is Simon.”