Chapter Text
Simon’s dead and he drifts. The red, it’s all-encompassing, devouring; it eats him and God does he want it to because if it’s a choice between his life, his shitty, little life, and his people, that space station, then he’s going to sacrifice himself.
Yes, a sacrifice. That’s exactly what he is. It’s what he was always meant to be—he was birthed on a planet of red, a God of desert, umbilical cord wrapped tight around his neck like a noose as he kicked and cried; of course he would die how he was born: desperate and covered in blood. It’s almost a comforting thought, to think that this was the plan from the start; that he was believed in by some deity, no matter what that may be, to save the remainder of his species.
Still, comforting thoughts are only so much help when your lungs are full of blood. When your arm has been ripped from your body. Does he even have a body any more? Or is it just red? Red. The red. The red. Iron coats his lips, burns his eyes. It reminds him of the war, the bloody massacre at Filament Station. He hopes this act of self-sacrifice cancels out all the harm he caused, all the lives he took as the butcher, fighting for a cause he half-believed in because it made him feel important. Special. Because he finally realised he was good at something, and that something just had to be inflicting pain. Because his Mother handed him a knife more times than she kissed him goodnight.
If he could laugh, he would. He got his wish. He was special. The man with the information to save humanity in the palm of his severed hand. Maybe they’d say his name, remember him, build statues and name rooms in his honour. Or maybe they wouldn’t. It was all the same to him, dead, surrounded by blood, none of it his own.
He’s dead. He drifts.
He’s dead.
It’s a pretty normal day for Grace, if he’s being honest. He wakes up to Rocky banging on the door, relaxes with him until it’s time to teach the pebbles, and then he goes back home (not Earth, never Earth), half-watches a movie, and half-wonders how many of the students he used to teach are dead.
He hopes Abby isn’t dead; she was a bit of a pain in the classroom, but he knew that she’d go far. Maybe she was president now, or a Supreme Court Judge...
“Grace! Grace!” Rocky comes barrelling into the room. It isn’t often that he uses the xenonite ball instead of taking the time to put on his much more modern suit, so it must be pretty urgent. Though Rocky’s definition of urgency can range from the planet about to explode to Grace watching an episode of Gilmore Girls without him.
“Yeah, Rock?”
“Blip! There’s a blip!”
Grace blinks. The twizzler (or, Eridian-made version of) he’d been absent-mindedly chewing on falls to the couch. “What?”
“Blip!” Rocky starts pushing Grace off of the couch, towards the door. “Blip on our radars! There’s life!”
Despite it all, Grace laughs at Rocky’s enthusiasm. “Alright, alright, let me—”
“No time!” Rocky pushes him further. Grace attempts to grab hold of the door frame, but it’s no use. Rocky pushes him out onto the beach, so excited that he doesn’t even shut the door behind them (something Grace will be teasing him about later, mercilessly). “Adrian has laptop and can explain! Run! Run!”
He quickly adjusts the frames on his face as Rocky bounds off into the distance; in his haste to follow, Grace doesn’t even consider that the life-form could be another human. There’s a 0.00001% chance of that being the case, after all.
The facts are this: there’s a man. A human man. In one of the quarantine rooms. The man, the human man, is drenched in blood—human blood.
His own? Maybe. The man (human man, human, human, human—) has a bloody stump where one of his arms should be, but to drench himself in that much blood he’d need to have had a bigger injury, a life-ending injury.
The man’s alive. He’s unconscious, but his chest—his human chest, harnessed human chest—moves. Grace can’t remember the last time he’d seen another person’s naked chest, yet here he’s forced to gaze upon one, drenched in blood, on Erid.
Because there’s a human on Erid. Another one. A man, despite Adrian’s insistence that he has different genitalia (thanks for that, Adrian!), if the beard and relatively flat chest is anything to go by. Though Grace probably shouldn’t assume that the human (human!) is a man, right? He doesn’t know. He thinks, selfishly, that it doesn’t matter, because no matter what they are, they’re a human. On Erid. A human...
“Grace alright, question?”
Grace startles, turning away from the man, the real, human, man, in the quarantine room, on Erid, and oh god, he’s going to have to clean the house because this guy will need somewhere to sleep, and—
“Grace.”
He snaps out of it. “Rocky.”
Rocky tilts his head. It’s a cute gesture, endearing, though the Eridian would probably tell him to ‘respect his elders’ if he said that aloud. His idea of a joke.
“You’re leaking.”
Grace lifts a hand to his face and, oh. There are tears. He huffs in frustration at himself, and wipes them away with the back of his hand.
“No, yeah, sorry Rock, I just...”
“Overwhelmed, statement.”
Grace chuckles. “Yeah. Overwhelmed.” He clears his throat. “How is this possible?”
Rocky does the Eridian equivalent of a shrug. Great. Even the hyper-intelligent alien rocks don’t know what’s happening.
“We don’t know how he’s here, but our primary focus is to nurse him to health.” It’s Adrian. Always breaking things down for Grace to understand when Rocky's...over-enthusiastic. “With your consent.”
“My consent?” He runs a hand through his hair and immediately regrets messing it up. “Why—”
Adrian takes a step closer to Grace. He and the rest of the Eridians are at least wearing the xeno-suits, making it easier for Adrian to press up against his leg; a grounding presence. “Life will change a lot. If we take in this human, statement.”
“Yeah, but—”
“You can take time. Think,” Rocky says, kindly, and it’s too much. A life is in his trembling hands.
“No,” Grace puts his palms out in front of him, “No, guys, we need to nurse him back to health. I—I can adapt to another person being in the house. It’ll be...exciting? Yeah, exciting. Please just...please do all you can. Please. Please.”
Adrian nods and scuttles away, probably off to run tests and other things Grace should be helping with instead of just...standing there. Watching the man.
“It will be okay, Grace, question?”
Grace places a hand on top of Rocky’s xeno-ball. “Yeah, bud. It’s gonna be all gravy, baby.”
Rocky nestles against his hand for a minute before withdrawing.
“...What is gravy, question?”
Iron. It coats his tongue, his teeth, like film. His insides burst; red covers the clinically white floor, dribbles down his chin, his chest. He gasps for air, finds it. Sweet, clean air. He vomits again; it’s blood, of course—he’s all blood. He draws a circle in the blood, like a child with finger paints, and spits copper onto his hand. When he takes in another breath, with clear lungs, it’s like breathing for the first time. He’s reborn.
He can’t look away from the blood. If he looks away, he’ll realise he’s breathing. Breathing in the belly of a monster, one and the same, where his only release will be agonisingly painful starvation.
Why didn’t he die? He’d repaid his debts, surely—though maybe this is purgatory. Maybe his sacrifice doesn’t take away from all the lives he stole, and now he’s doomed to exist in the belly of the beast for all of eternity. 'Pray that you stay dead,' it'd told him. He laughs shakily. Can he pray with only one hand?
Fuck. Was it not enough to die for people who couldn’t give less shits about him? Was it not enough to save hundreds of lives? To be torn limb from limb in an ocean of red, drinking rubbing alcohol to take away the pain of knowing he wasn’t going to see the surface ever again? His laugh turns into a cough, a loud, hacking thing. It hurts his ears and, shit, everywhere is so bright. Where’s the darkness of the SM-13? The hissing of its pipes? The droplets of blood and sweat licking his skin?
He’s cold. That’s what he realises. He’s cold. Maybe he’s in heaven? Is heaven meant to be so cold? He’s always thought that heaven would be a garden, that it’d be grass beneath his feet and trees ripe with fruit, if it even existed at all.
Suddenly, his head is on the floor. He cracks one of his eyes open the tiniest bit. Light, God, light. He shuts it again but it forces itself back open. There are sounds, not the clunking of the submarine but...chittering? Angels speaking, or other unfortunate victims of the beast? His eyes focus on a tall figure.
He’s in heaven. If nothing else, he’s now certain that he’s in heaven because there’s an angel in his sights, separated by glass, presumably so that Simon wouldn’t infect him with his humanity. The angel is the most beautiful thing he’s ever seen: eyes as blue as what he imagined ice to look like, hair as yellow-brown as emergency rations. Lips...the angel’s lips look to be as soft as the leaf he’d stolen from the tree of Eden, when he was but a child.
The angel’s stare is fixed on Simon, and he realises that this must be a test from God for not fully believing in him, or The Light for second-guessing his sacrifice, because Simon is undeserving of the attention of a being as lovely as the one in front of him. The one looking at him as if he were the miracle.
Simon sleeps and dreams of rough, tanned hands with no red beneath the fingernails. They caress his face, soft and gentle, travelling up to his hair and suddenly he’s underwater, breathing in blood, dying as angels sing beneath the surface, their crooked smiles bringing him peace.
It’d been a few weeks since the man had woken up, if only to vomit up blood and gaze, crazed, at Grace, before returning to unconsciousness. The Eridians took a week to run every test under the sun, making sure that the man wasn’t a danger to anyone, before moving him to a bed in a separate quarantine room, where Grace now sat at his bedside, reading him his own medical report.
“Severe radiation poisoning...that makes sense, what with the burns and all...no toxins in blood, now that’s surprising...” Grace puts the file down, and sighs, going to pinch the bridge of his nose before realising his glasses were resting there. “Fuck, I really should’ve done more.” He chuckles. “I mean, of course I trust what they’re saying, it’s just...I don’t know. I’m the human expert. Maybe I could’ve...” Grace puts his head in his hands. “I don’t know. I’m tired.” He chuckles again, wryly. "Not that you care."
“Grace need Rocky to watch him sleep, question?”
Grace jumps. “Jeez, Rock, how long were you there?”
Rocky tilts his head. “A while. Your help wasn’t required for human medical check, statement. Your data logs and information were help enough, Adrian said so.”
“I know, Rock, I just...” Grace looks at the man, asleep on the bed. He looks so peaceful, it’s hard to believe just a few weeks ago he was bathed in blood, his now near-healed burns oozing puss. “I can’t sleep. What if he wakes up?”
“Then Adrian will notify us, and we will come.”
“I—" He sighs, again. It seems to be all he’s doing, lately. “I keep having these dreams, Rock. Oceans of blood, a light, I don’t know...what if it has something to do with him?”
Rocky chirps something Grace doesn’t understand. “Dreams are stupid, statement. Illogical.”
Grace laughs. “Yeah, they are. Still, on Earth some people say that they have meaning, like, uh, if you dream about your teeth falling out, then that means that you’re anxious.”
If Rocky had a face, it’d look unimpressed. “Anxious about what?”
“Ageing, maybe? I always used to have dreams about turning up to school naked, I dunno what that means, but—”
“Means Grace is forgetful. Your brain...unreliable.”
Grace rolls his eyes, good-natured. “Jeez, thanks Rock.”
Rocky sings. “Good. You smile. Grace happy, Rocky happy.”
That gets a proper smile from Grace, who stands and stretches. “Alright, bud, you sharin’ my bed tonight?”
Rocky hops around, excited. “Yes, yes, yes, yes! Grace and Rocky sleepover!”
Grace laughs, and exits the room, though not without one final glance at the man in the bed. Dreams of oceans made of blood, men that should be dead found alive; it was almost...biblical? He’d never believed in God, in all honesty, but, the man’s presence had...thrown him off. It was a less than 1% chance that he’d ever see another human again, Grace knew this, he’d calculated it, and still...here one was. Right in front of him. Close enough to touch.
But he wouldn’t. Not now, not yet.
Simon wakes up. He’s in a bed, an honest to god bed with pillows and a comforter and everything. It’s so warm, so comfortable, so unlike anything he’s ever felt, that he almost lets his exhaustion drag him down once again, but his tiredness is outweighed by the feeling of being...watched. He looks down at himself, his arms—arms? No. No, no, no. This wasn’t right. He’d—he remembers the pain of ripping his arm from his body, the excruciating sensation of parting with yet another thing that made him human, he can’t...this must be a dream. A nightmare? A hell?
Fuck, he doesn’t know. He’s tired of figuring shit out. Whoever the fuck is up there, controlling him like a mother fucking puppet, can either get him some damn answers or put him out of his misery. He truly doesn’t care any more.
His arm is black. Metallic. Okay. That’s new. Why would anyone want to fix his arm? Surely he was less dangerous with one arm? Maybe his captors needed him at full capacity for some sort of sick experiment? Maybe his whole trip down into the blood was some kind of psychological torture method that the COI cooked up, and now they were gonna escort him back to his cell where he’d either hang himself with his shoelaces or rot? No, this was The Light, it had to be.
He looks at his other arm. There are wires, no, tubes, inserted into his veins. A stimulant, maybe? Or something to keep him docile? He doesn't feel very docile. He rips them out, waiting with bated breath for someone to barge in and beat him or inject him or—anything.
Nothing happens. Absolutely fuck all.
Okay. Interesting. He swings his legs around so that he’s perching on the edge of the bed. They’re heavy, his legs. Unused. Actually, he feels a lot weaker than usual; maybe they’re pumping him full of some kind of drug to sedate him...but then why give him the arm?
He groans, confused, tired, fucking confused. He attempts to stand but his legs buckle underneath him. As he kneels on the floor—and, shit, he hasn't knelt since it was in front of The Tree, his hands bloody, his lips whispering Hail Mary Full of Grace and begging for forgiveness—he realises he’s wearing someone else’s clothes: a pair of soft, albeit worn, sweatpants, and a t-shirt that says ‘I wear this periodically’ with an outdated version of the periodic table printed below.
Why would a shirt so fucking...stupid appear in his hallucination? Would Ava give him this? Maybe she wasn't dead?
He smells it, for some reason; it smells like someone else, someone masculine. It's...nice. Okay, so, he’s wearing a shirt that’s obviously a staple of some unfashionable fuck’s wardrobe, he has a new arm, and he was being...drugged?
He shakes his head. It makes no sense. Fuck, nothing makes any sense. He should be dead. He should be a corpse at the bottom of the blood fucking ocean. He shouldn’t be alive, sleeping in a warm bed, wearing someone else’s clothes. The fuck!?
He grabs the edge of the bed and slowly lifts himself up into a standing position. Stretches his legs a little. They’re stiff, but not broken. He lifts up his sweats; there’s a faint line of stitches across his thigh, amongst the burns. Another thing to add to the list of confusing shit from the past, what, two minutes? Great.
Slowly, but surely, he walks towards the door, surprised to find that the handle in his grasp pulls downward. The door opens. Are these people fucking stupid!? Do they even want to keep him here!? Well...not one to look a gift horse in the mouth, Simon slowly makes his way out of the door, and into a hallway.
He’s about to try his luck with turning right, when he hears noise: someone breathing, heavily, running towards him. Fuck, he can’t fight like this, he can barely even hold himself up. No, no. He’s a motherfucking butcher, if this fucker wants a fight, then—
“Oh my gosh, you are awake!”
His memories come flooding back. Unconscious on the floor, vomiting blood, an angel pulling him under and, shit, he was just thankful to die with such gorgeous company.
“Am I...” He coughs, his voice rough from lack of use. “Is this...heaven? Or are you COI?”
The angel gapes at him, flushed presumably from running. “What?”
A ball rounds the corner. There’s a rock inside it. A moving, talking rock, who the angel can apparently understand. “Ah, Rock, yeah, it’s...” The angel turns to him. “Sorry, just a second, he wants me to get the translator. We’re friendly, I swear.” He chuckles, awkward, and Simon thinks he could dance to the sound.
A cup of water is thrust in his hands before the angel leaves, and Simon chugs it, grateful for the easing effect it has on his throat. The angel quickly returns with an open laptop, and suddenly a robotic voice is asking Simon if he’s okay, question?
“That’s...that’s the...the rock? Speaking to me?”
The angel nods. “Yeah, I can understand them but this--” he brandishes the laptop proudly, "Is a translator I made when we first met.”
“Them...?” He asks. “There’s more of these...rock things?"
The angel chuckles. “Yeah, this is actually their planet. We’re the only two humans here.”
Simon gapes at the angel. He must’ve misheard. A planet and.... “Are you fucking with me? You’re...human?”
The angel—or human, apparently—looks himself over. “Last I checked.”
“Grace is human and Man is human! You can—”
The human, man, Grace, lowers the volume on the translator, quick. “Rocky, don’t...c’mon, man, remember what we said? Boundaries.” He turns back to Simon. “Sorry.” The Rock, Rocky (easy to remember at least) looks pissed off. Simon wonders briefly if it will kill him. “So, well, I’m Ryland Grace—”
“Doctor!” Rocky chirps, back at full volume.
Grace rolls his eyes, fond. “Right. Doctor Ryland Grace, and this is Rocky.”
Rocky gives him a little wave. Simon feels ill.
“Your name is Grace?” He asks, because he still isn’t entirely sure Grace is as human as he says he is. “Like...Hail Mary Full of Grace?” Hell, maybe he's back on Eden. He doesn't recognise this part of the station but, well, he did have a pretty gnarly concussion last he checked.
“How does he know name of ship, question?”
Grace waves off Rocky’s question. “I—yeah, like the...like that. Sure. Weird coincidence now that I think about it...”
“And you’re definitely human?”
“What, do I not look human or something?” Grace’s smile thins.
“You look more than that.” It slips from his dry mouth before he can stop it, before he can think of the repercussions, and that terrifies him. Simon isn’t usually a man of many words—what people don’t know they can’t use against you, after all—so for his lips to have loosened so, at the sight of another human (if he is to be believed) is...shit, it’s scary. He hates it. Hates this obvious weakness he’s so suddenly developed.
Still, he can’t hate the way a blush spreads softly across Grace’s face, nor the shy, dimpled smile he’s on the receiving end of. “Thanks...?” Grace coughs. “Umm...”
“Grace red. Like...what Grace say? Tomato?”
“Yeah, thanks Rock! Jeez.”
Simon’s unsure what a tomato is, but he has too many questions at the forefront of his mind to care, so he catalogues that one for later.
“What is new human name, question?” Rocky and Grace turn to him, expectedly. “If you do not remember I can provide—”
“Simon,” he interrupts, not really wanting to hear what name Rocky would pick out for him, especially if the rock chose his own. Plus, if these guys were Ava's lackeys, they'd already know his name, so they're...what? Figments of his imagination? Surely they'd know his name as well, then? Fuck knows The Light did. "It's...Simon."
Grace smiles. His teeth are white, though slightly deviated. “Well, Simon, welcome to Erid.”