Chapter Text
Grace is happy on Erid. This is not in question. The Eridians have given him everything he could ever possibly want despite the staggering resources it must cost them (to which Rocky says Grace, Erid owes literally all life to Grace so nothing too much, keep telling you this!). The biodome is near enough perfect, his own little slice of heaven. He loves the beach, he loves his little house, he loves his lessons and his pebbles and seeing Rocky almost every day.
He’s never bored, on account of having his fingers in every science pie the Eridians have going, and also because he has the entire contents of the internet circa 2019 at his fingertips (thanks Stratt). And he’s healthy, because the Eridians are extremely invested in that, so he gets a full medical every month. Some expected wear on the joints from the time he did spend on Erid, for which he has some knee braces and a xenonite cane, which looks kind of rad actually. But overall, pretty good for a guesstimated 53 year old.
So, he’s not unhappy. And he’s not bored. And he’s not unwell.
But he is… lonely.
He misses humans. It’s stupid. He doesn’t even like humans, aside from his kids obviously. Back on Earth Grace was a certified System Child turned Eternal Bachelor. He could name a handful of tolerable teacher colleagues, one drinking buddy, and a couple of peers he didn’t hate. Stratt and Carl are disqualified on account of murdering him, and Yao and Ilyukhina (who Grace desperately hopes were not also in on the murder, though he doesn’t think they were) are long dead. And that, unfortunately, is it.
You have no immediate family. You don’t even have a dog.
He’s never been much of a people person outside of the classroom. He’s just never needed people, relationships or intimacy in the way everyone else seems to need it. He’s always thought himself sort of… above it all? It sounds prigheaded out loud but that’s what he felt.
And yet. Here he is. Thinking about people… humans. About human faces, human eyes, and above all else, human skin. Which are some real serial killer vibes, but skin, hands, touch. His own hands don’t cut it, wrapping his arms tightly around himself takes the edge off but it’s not the weight and warmth of another human body, it’s not the same. Each year that passes the memory of what other bodies feel like grows just that little bit fuzzier, and its loss feels just that little bit sharper.
The thing is, he can go back to Earth if he really wants. The Hail Mary has been fully repaired and it wouldn’t take the Eridians long to breed up the astrophage needed to fuel the trip. And if Grace could take a quick jaunt to Earth and then come back, maybe he would do that, but it’s in fact a very long, decidedly one-way jaunt. Whatever wistfulness Grace has for Earth, it’s far outstripped by the thought of leaving Erid for good. He doesn’t want to leave. He just wants to stop feeling this way.
One evening, he and Rocky are holding hands (claws). Xenonite is amazing stuff, only slightly warm to the touch when Grace knows there’s all that heat, pressure and ammonia on the other side. Rocky engineered his little rock butt off to make the xeno-suits as thin and flexible as safely possible, all for Grace’s sake and god Grace is so grateful to him but he still, he still…
Paradise in his palms and it’s not enough. But he’s always been selfish.
“Grace okay, question?” Rocky warbles. He still uses the familiar speech pattern, even though they haven’t needed a translator for years.
“Yeah, bud. I’m good.”
“Grace say good, but Grace not sleeping well. Not eating well. What is wrong, question?” After a pause, Rocky says, “Grace missing humans again, question?”
He heaves a sigh, “Yeah.” Rocky knows about it, they’ve discussed it sporadically, but Eridian mega-memory and all that. Grace goes through phases; sometimes he’s so busy and excited by some new discovery that it’ll hardly cross his mind. And then sometimes it’s… like this. Rocky is right, his sleep schedule's all over the place and he keeps forgetting to eat. It just slips his mind.
“We could try to make skin for Grace to touch. Clone Grace tissue, might be doable.” But Grace just shakes his head. He has contemplated it, but he thinks owning a little square of cloned skin is… probably going to make things even worse. Rocky knows it too, but he says forlornly. “Rocky want to fix.”
“I know you do. I appreciate it. It’s okay,” he squeezes at Rocky’s claws. “It comes and goes, you know? It’s a lot right now but it’ll ease off again eventually. Always does.” And then it always returns. Like the ocean waves, tide in, tide out. When he frames it like an inevitability, like just another cycle, it doesn’t fill the hollow in his chest, but it helps it feel less jagged at the edges. Rocky is still thrumming lowly, so he reaches out to ruffle the top of his encased carapace, fingers sliding over smooth panels of xenonite. “It’s alright. I’ll be alright.”
There is nothing to be done. There is nothing more that he could ask for, and nothing else that he could want.
And then another human arrives on Erid.
-
“Grace must not take off suit,” Rocky says sternly. “No part of suit, not even gloves. Not gloves. Grace, you listening?”
“Yeah,” Grace murmurs, not listening. A couple of Eridians are scuttling around him checking all of the seals on the hazmat suit at his wrists, his ankles. He’s barely aware of them. Too busy staring through the panel of clear xenonite that peers into the quarantine hospital. Staring at the prone, lone figure laid on the bed like a lamb across an altar.
“New Human has pathogens that will harm Grace,” Rocky reiterates loudly. “Big harm, will make Grace sick sick sick. Do not want Grace to get sick, statement! Only doing this at all because Grace insisted. Must take quarantine seriously!” As Grace mumbles serious yep, the Eridian drags two of his legs over his front carapace. “Give Rocky strength. Affix gloves please.”
Grace more or less falls into the hospital room when he’s given the all-clear to enter. The Eridians took no chances, the hazmat suit is big and bulky, a veritable fortress between Grace and a room full of unknown microbes. He’s sort of glad the newcomer is stone cold unconscious because no-one wants to wake up to the Michelin Man looming over them. Grace’s best efforts to be small and unintrusive yield no success.
He sits unwieldy next to the bed. The stranger is essentially one big bandage; he’s told there was some sort of cancerous mega-tumour that had to be excised from most of his left side (and he’s told that no he’s not allowed to have a sample). His left arm is absent from the bicep down with what is thought to have been an avulsion injury. His radiation levels might have killed him if the Eridians had not developed a very recent, very acute interest in reversing radiation sickness. Compared to all that, the severe dehydration and malnutrition is a cakewalk to treat.
They’re not even sure if he’s going to wake up. What level of functioning he’ll have left if he does. He might be a vegetable. He might be psychotic. He might, with complete lucidity, demand to leave Erid at once without a second glance at Grace. But maybe, maybe none of those things.
From the side of his mostly-bandaged face one little curl of dark hair pokes out. Grace reaches out and smooths it between his gloved fingers, but its texture is lost to him. He gingerly touches the man’s right arm, breathing hitching at the solidity of it. Trails down a bandaged wrist, to a set of loose, limp fingers resting against bedsheets, and oh-so-carefully tucks his own underneath. He can’t really feel them, the suit is too thick. The team says he’s still running a low grade fever, but the warmth doesn’t bleed through the gloves.
Grace’s heart is too loud in his chest, his ears, behind his teeth. A tsunami of blood crashing through his veins. The suit is abruptly too much, constricting, suffocating. He pulls his hand back and frantically rips at the wrist-seal, trying to strip the gloves off, but they’re glued in place.
On the other side of the wall he hears Rocky furiously jangle, “I knew it! Grace!”
The medical team pull him out of the room before he does anything really stupid, and Grace lets them. Rocky absolutely chews him out for about an hour, and Grace lets him. When he’s back home his hands shake and shake and his heart threatens to unravel at the seams, and Grace lets it.
-
Grace is there when he wakes up. Out of the hazmat suit, thank goodness; he’s on prophylactic antibiotics and antivirals, so his insides feel like dishwater, but it’s a fair trade, more than fair. The Eridians don’t like that there’s nothing between him and the stranger except a syringe of emergency sedative (which Grace has promised he will use if needed, and is 100% not going to) but Rocky is here, Adrian is here and most importantly of all Grace is here.
The team have been waking their charge up with an agonising slowness to mitigate delirium; apparently he’s a nightmare to medicate, reacting either too much or not enough to every change they make. Grace is sat by his bedside and he’s trying very, very hard to keep his hands to himself but when he sees those closed eyelids flickering and those fingers start twitching, he can’t stop himself from grasping at them, however loosely. Skimming his thumb across the knuckles over and over like his own metronome, it’s as much to help Grace keep his breathing in rhythm. He feels he’ll start hyperventilating at any minute. His eyes are stinging something fierce. Come on, keep it together. But oh, it’s hard to when he’s watching a human come to life in front of him.
The stranger is trying to open his but they keep slipping shut again. His face contorts with the effort of it, and Grace’s chest lurches at the obvious distress. “Hey hey, it’s okay,” he calls out as softly as he can. He’s not yet sure if they share a language, but tone of voice is a universal construct. “Everything is okay. You’re waking up, just give it some time. Can you hear me?”
“Can hear but maybe not process,” come Adrian’s dulcet tones over the translator. Grace doesn’t need it but the stranger will, and there’s definitely worse voices to wake up to than Meryl Streep. “Remember Grace, wake slow slow. Will not be able to answer Grace yet.”
“WherumI?” the stranger rasps out loud.
Adrian sways back in startlement. “Oh, unexpected.”
Meanwhile Grace just about does a spin in his seat. “Where am I?” he parrots back, breathless in his excitement. He speaks English? Or just coincidental mouth sounds? “Where am I, is that what you just said?”
“Ffffuckin–” the hand around his suddenly tightens as with full-body effort, the stranger wrenches their own eyelids wide open. One eye is a fathomless dark, the other silvery white – glowing, almost – and set in a heavily bloodshot sclera. The mismatched set lands on Grace, gives him a look that straddles the line of awestruck and petrified, and then the hand clasped in his snatches away as the stranger leaps off the bed.
Well. Tries to. He in fact goes ass over teakettle onto the hospital floor. Adrian gives a startled string of notes that the translator doesn’t parse and tries to catch him, but Rocky gives an even louder string of Adrian no no and stops them. This is probably just as well, as the man twists into a hunched crouch, snatches up a fallen hospital tray that clattered to the floor in the chaos and wields it above his head like a weapon. There’s the discordant jangle of panicked Eridian doctors all around them, on the other side of the airlock, but quite aware of the commotion and contributing no small amount themselves. The stranger’s eyes rove manically back and forth for the source of the muffled noise, his breath coming in fitful spurts.
Grace, one shouts louder than the rest, Saviour Grace danger danger, New Human should not be able to move like that, so soon!
“It’s alright!” Grace calls back to them. He has his own hands held up in white-flag surrender. “Adrenaline is a hell of a drug. It’s okay, he’s just scared, everyone calm down.” Grace is, of course, far from the calmest person in the room, but he can pretend that he is, if only for a bit.
The man’s eyes snap back to him. “Sseee-ohh-eeye?” he asks in a heavy, throaty slur, every syllable a mountainous effort.
Grace… has no idea what that means. Maybe they don’t share a language after all. He presses one hand to his chest. “Grace,” he says slowly. “Grace. My name is Ryland Grace.”
“Grr—aaay—ss.” It really comes out as more of a growl than a word, but Grace is stunned he’s saying anything, let alone repeating words back. Rocky is skittering nervously between Grace and Adrian and the stranger’s wide, wild eyes track him with abject disbelief, before flitting back to Grace, then back to Rocky. “Deehhd?” he manages to say, “Dehd? Dead? Am dead?”
Grace blinks a few times, “No, you are very definitely not dead. We found you before you died.” We being very loose here, Grace had nothing to do with the Save Our Stars initiative or the Eridians that had found another human randomly in the middle of space. But these were high concepts to explain to someone freshly out of a coma. “I know this is very scary. I’ve been there, believe me.” When Grace woke up from his own starflight sleep, he would have given anything for another human to just tell him that everything was going to be alright. “We’re here to help. You don’t need to be afraid. Please, um, please can you put the tray down.” It looks like a flimsy hospital tray but the thing is still made of xenonite, which means it’s very capable of bashing Grace’s skull in.
The man does not, in fact, relinquish the tray, although his arm is starting to slacken – struggling to hold it aloft, Grace would guess. His chest still heaves with exertion, and he swallows a few times before he can speak. “Am I dead?” he says hoarsely.
Adrian warbles next to Grace, quiet enough that the translator won’t utter it out loud: Full speech back already. Grace something is very strange here. Yeah, they can agree on that. His memories of his own awakening are kind of fuzzy, but he definitely spent the first hour making screaming goat noises and trying to fight off Arm-ando like a drunk caveman. This is one hell of a speedy recovery.
His mind is already orbiting the mystery, but he tries to shelve it for the sake of the problem in front of him. “You are not dead. You were found very near death and we have been helping you recover,” he reiterates steadily. He suspects this is not the last time he will have to go over this, but that’s okay. His eyes sweep over the man, assessing for fresh injury. He doesn’t look too badly hurt from his fall, owed in no small part to Grace insisting as many tubes were removed from his person as possible in case of… well, something like this. He still remembers accidentally ripping his own catheter out and he Would Not Recommend it. But the man is tired, getting progressively more hunched over as the adrenaline ebbs away and exhaustion takes its place.
Grace steps carefully forward, ignoring the tension this elicits in everyone present, and holds out a hand, “Can I help you back to bed?”
The man stares at Grace’s hand like he’s never seen one before. “Am I dead?” he asks again.
“No, you are not dead, but you are very injured and need to recover,” he echoes with an infinite patience. He edges just a little closer, hand still extended and hoping he’s not about to get a tray-acquired wrist fracture. “Can I help you back into the bed?”
The man shakes all over. There’s a loud clang as the tray tumbles from his grip, which makes several watching Eridians jump; Grace would flinch too, but he’s very distracted by the sudden, slightly painful squeezing around his fingers. His hand not just taken, but snatched up like a lifeline thrown to a man aboard. Wide, wet eyes stare into his own. “Help,” the man whispers, so strangled it’s almost not a word at all. “Help. Help.”
Help, Grace’s mind echoes. The calm command he projected earlier is dissolving like sandcastles in the tide – that tide, that terrible tide that sporadically threatens to drown him. There’s a human here, a profoundly wounded, haunted human holding onto his hand and Grace feels helpless, obligated, thrilled and then repulsed at himself, all at once.
“Let’s,” he manages to stammer out, “let’s get you. Back to bed. Shall we?”
It’s a small mercy of the universe, he thinks, that the man passes out almost as soon as he’s laying down again.
-
“Conv–” the man starts, then stops. Shakes his head slightly. “…Simon.”
He’s sitting upright in the bed which, by the way, he shouldn’t yet be able to do. Lucid, which he’s not supposed to be, and holding a conversation which he should definitely not be capable of yet. The Eridians are stumped and a bit intimidated. Grace is too, but not nearly as much as he is fascinated. “Simon,” he repeats. “That’s a great start. It took me forever to remember my name, you’re doing way better than I did.” Those eyes – one dark, one eerily pale – flick questioningly over at him and Grace offers, “I’ve been in a coma too. Mine was a spaceflight necessity though, not for injury recovery. Your experience might play out differently to mine.” And to every other coma patient Grace has been frantically reading about, but he doesn’t say that part. “Do you remember my name?”
“Ryland Grace,” the stranger – Simon – says quietly, with a rasp that curls around the consonants. Grace’s pulse skips a little at the sound of it. When did he last hear his name said like that, without a translator?
It colours his tone, a touch of nervous excitement he hopes isn’t too obvious. “That’s – great. You’re doing great.”
Simon hunches over further, wordless, his remaining hand twisted in the bedsheets. With his head mostly unbandaged – save for his throat and a big patch taped across his left cheek – his loose, dark hair falls into his eyes. It’s about shoulder-length, has a slight wavy curl to it, and Grace is expending actual, physical effort not to take it between his fingers. He is aware that his itchiness to touch Simon is not normal, but that’s what 16 years of zero human contact will do to a person, so he’s trying to cut himself some slack. Not to indulge though, the last thing he wants to do is alienate the man. Grace is already very prone to alienating people without his new-found fixation in the fray.
Well—
Maybe—
“Do you want to hold hands?” he asks, then immediately regrets asking.
Simon lifts his head to squint at him, “What? Why?”
He flounders, “Just, for comfort. I–” haven’t seen another human in a long time. Nope, that sounds creepy, he’s not going to say that out loud. “–I want you to feel safe.” Terrible, no good thing to say.
Sure enough it earns him a further frown, the words bitten out, “I’m fine. I’m not a child.”
Ughhh why did he ask. Or rather, why didn’t he come up with a better excuse like checking his pulse or his temperature, or… curbing his disappointment and any more Bright Ideas, Grace smiles apologetically. “Sorry, no offence meant.”
Simon twists his head away with an indistinct mutter, and Grace tries not to feel like he’s taken a great big misstep. Fortunately there’s plenty else to distract the man, as his guarded eyes flick around the room, taking in the surroundings. For a hospital room it’s sparsely furnished, the Eridians don’t need medical monitoring equipment when they can hear most of their patient’s internal workings already. His voice is hesitant, “What station is this?”
“Not a station – well, not a million miles off. This is a biodome orbiting Erid, in the 40-Eridani system.” The man looks confused which is… maybe fair. Just because he’s asking coherent questions doesn’t mean he can necessarily digest the answers Grace gives him, although he tries to explain a few things anyway: “The others you’ve seen around here, that look like big rocks? Those are Eridians, native to Erid. An alien species.”
“Aliens,” Simon says hopelessly, then scrubs at his face with his left hand. “Yeah. Sure. Why the fuck not.”
Fun fact about Simon: he might not be from Earth. At least, not Earth as Grace knows it. The Exploration Team said he was found inside a metal box – Grace has now seen pictures and it’s only a freaking submarine – that suddenly appeared in the star system they were Taumoeba-ing, as in it flashbanged into existence out of literal nowhere. Some sort of transient wormhole is the leading theory. Impossible? Yep. More impossible than some sort of mirror Earth in an unknown star system with convergent-evolved, English-speaking humans that for some reason covertly sent a small deep sea vessel into deep space? Nope. Anyway, Grace has gotten deep into his theoretical physics of late, now it doesn’t seem quite so harebrained.
“We’ve discussed that I’m not a part of Eden, or the… C.O.I.?” As the man almost bleakly nods, Grace broaches the topic carefully, “And I’ve told you how you were found. Do you think… you may have come from somewhere else? And now you’re here, but here is very, very far away from there, where you were. And perhaps quite different to what you know.”
Simon balls his hand into a fist against his forehead, eyes slipping shut. “I think I’m dead. I don’t know why you won’t just tell me I’m dead, or what your deal is, but I do remember the dying part so, yeah.” He exhales harshly. “I guess I am far, far away, as in across the mortal coil. Afterlife type shit. Can’t work out why my afterlife includes musical rock spiders, but here we fucking are.”
“If this were an afterlife you’d probably have your arm back,” Grace points out lightly. “Seems like an oversight.”
A light scoff as his hand drops, “Yeah, tell me about it.” He’s silent for a moment, head still bowed. He’s not much of a talker, Grace has quickly discerned, the words he does share are spoken gruffly but quietly, even the gratuitous swearing. More habit than actually irate. Still, Grace is just wondering how to fill the silence without just rambling when Simon cautiously ventures, “Say I’m not dead. Say it is real… why rescue me? Why fix me up?”
He tilts his head, nonplussed, “Because you were stranded and you were hurt.”
“That’s not what I’m asking,” spoken through gritted teeth. “At least, at least be honest with me. For what reason? What do you want in return?”
In his lap, Grace’s fingers flex.
“I don’t want anything in return,” he says steadily.
Unfortunately, Simon also appears to be very observant, as his eyes snap to the motion. Then away again, furrowed brow with a mind working overtime. His shoulders are tensed, his hand still balled into a fist, the furthest thing from open. Grace reminds himself that this is likely an unconscious gesture and not a conscious rejection, even if it keeps skidding over Simon’s earlier words: What? Why? What? Why? “What,” Simon mumbles, and Grace manages to look up, “what happens when I’m fixed up, then?”
“That depends on what you want. Would you want to go back to where you came from?”
Simon almost violently shakes his head at that, but that was expected. Aside from the state that they found him in telling its own story, the Eridians have managed to pull information from some sort of console on the submarine. It’s strange technology – not analogous with Earth – and decoding the data is slow, but what Grace has glimpsed so far reads like a dystopian nightmare. He’d think it was pure fiction if Simon hadn’t reluctantly corroborated parts of it. “Then we won’t send you back. You can stay here in the biodome, or…” or you can leave me. The worst part of Grace demands he retract that or, so that staying is the only option available. But fortunately he still has a screeching conscience. “Or if you don’t like it here, we’ll work something out. You could–” Don’t say it. Don’t offer it. Don’t— “You could return to Earth, my Earth. It’s not beyond us to achieve.”
Everything about Simon is shuttered: his gaze, his mind, his hand where it clenches on the bed, and his voice: “What is your Earth like?”
Should not have given him the option, Grace thinks, and then hates himself for it. That’s some Stratt-level thinking right there. Each year that passes Grace gets less angry with Stratt, and he hates that too.
He forces cheer into his tone, “What is it like? That’s hard to summarise. But let’s start with some pictures on the laptop, and we’ll see what fun facts I can remember.”
-
In the reception area outside the quarantine hospital he hunches over in his chair, with his head in his hands. The spectacle has a small cluster of other worried Eridians around him, but only Rocky is close enough to touch, running a claw over his knee.
“He’s not gonna stay,” Grace says thickly.
“He did not say that,” Adrian chimes from Grace’s other side. “He only asked for information about Earth, not whether he could go there.”
“He’s from dystopialand where Earth doesn’t even exist anymore.” Maybe. Probably. Grace’s logic-brain detests the alternate universe theory but he doesn’t have a better one at present. “The option to return to a living Earth, even if it’s in worse shape than it would normally be, it’s still paradise in comparison. There’s absolutely no way he’s choosing to stay here over that.”
One of the Eridian doctors, well-meaning but not so in tune with humanity as Rocky and Adrian are, ventures carefully, “He can only leave if Erid helps fuel Hail Mary. If Saviour Grace not want, it not happen.”
“No,” he chokes out at once. The revulsion that seizes him is so strong it drowns even his most black-hearted thoughts and dims his world at the edges. “No no no, we will not do that. He’s not our captive, if he wants to leave then we have to facilitate. He has to have a choice, I didn’t have one so he has to, has to, he has to be able to say no.” He croaks on the last word and hunches over again. God, one thoughtless sentence and he’s on the verge of a panic attack. But if he closes his eyes he sees a sky washed with rainbow, he hears pursuing footsteps beating behind him, and he feels a needle in his neck.
Rocky trumpets something sharp that Grace vaguely parses as you idiot. The offending Eridian shrinks back. “Understand, did not mean to upset Saviour Grace. Apology apology apology.”
His friend spares him an attempt at an answer. “If Simon takes the Hail Mary then Grace will have no way home for future.”
Grace blinks his demons away and musters a wet smile, “Earth’s not home, Rock. Not anymore. I’m staying here.” Rocky trills and then sags a little in his suit. He wonders, is this how Rocky felt every time they discussed how Grace would get back to Earth? When Grace asked for time to think about it and Rocky said Yes think about it long time, did he inwardly shudder with relief as well? But he never at any point denied Grace the option to leave. Nor can Grace deny Simon. “He’s gotta choose to stay here too. And if he doesn’t then – then – then he doesn’t. That’s it.”
That is it.
-
He feels like two people: the bright, smiling Grace who visits Simon in hospital and goes through another round of earthly Fun Trivia, Fun Locations, and Fun Reasons For Simon To Leave Grace. Then when he’s saturated Simon’s mind with all that he saunters out of the hospital, mopes his way back to his house and then collapses on his sofa and stares at the ceiling for a few hours.
Then it’s class day and Fun Grace comes out again, playing lava with the pebbles and reiterating many of the same Earth facts he just told Simon. The pebbles ask Is there really a new human? Does Mr Grace like him? Can Mr Grace bring him to class? We want to meet! And Fun Grace laughs and says Oh gosh gee I don’t know if we can do that just yet, he’s still recovering. Anyway, about—
Then Ceiling Grace is back at his home, forcing himself to eat a bowl of soup because he has to eat something before he loses too much weight and Rocky keelhauls him.
His heart about soars when Simon asks to see the biodome, limps out there in his papery hospital gown and slippers and his IV bag. His heart flattens when Simon looks around the carefully-crafted bluffs and beaches, the artificial waves rolling onto the shore with an expression that is… honestly sort of terrified. His eyes land on the tree high on the hill. It’s technically a sculpture, made of a flexible xenonite so the branches will creak in the wind, but it has no bud nor blossom.
“Not a real tree I’m afraid,” he makes plain when Simon is still looking at it. A shudder goes across the other man’s shoulders. “Ah, sorry. They don’t have trees on Erid, that was their best replica. I have a little greenhouse though.”
“A greenhouse,” Simon says faintly. Then asks, “Adrian said there are no other humans here? You’re the first?” When Grace nods, his voice is even croakier, “Erid built all this just for you?”
Fun Grace runs a bashful hand through his own hair. Not long enough, his fingers whisper, which he ignores. “Yeah, for me. I kept telling them it was too much, though I’m not complaining.” Simon has heard Rocky Grace save stars, he couldn’t keep that one hidden for long, but he’s trying his utmost to downplay the whole planetary saviour thing, or he’s just going to be intimidating. Although with the way Simon looks, he’s not sure he’s been wholly successful. “It’s – it’s built up over the years. It wasn’t this big or grand to start with, they just expanded it over time. I think they liked the challenge, honestly.”
The biodome is very impressive. Wherever Simon is from, he says there are no planets there, he’s never set foot on one; he still hasn’t technically, the biodome is in orbit around Erid, but it has all the trappings a planet does, and things Simon has maybe never seen before. But it’s still no Earth.
The man abruptly wobbles in place. Grace moves before he can think better of it, all instinct, snatching Simon up by the remaining arm to steady him. Simon pulls the limb away like he’s been shot and so Grace is shot too, leaps back just as quickly as he leapt in. “Crud, sorry, didn’t mean to grab you that hard, I just – ah. Let’s get you back inside, maybe?”
He’s too quick to agree, too quick to turn away. He’s going to be a shooting star, Grace thinks. A transient marvel across the night sky, there and gone again, destined for a different square of the cosmos. Perhaps the memory of this human encounter, however fleeting it was, will sustain Grace for the remainder of his years. It’s going to have to.
Yeah. That’s Ceiling Grace talking alright.
-
He hears the faint buzz of words: No — no no no, we will not—
—have a choice. I didn’t—
—to be able to say no.
The conversation is all too familiar. He thinks it’s one of his auditory hallucinations, which have been on the uptick recently, but then he realises he really can hear those words out loud, a little tinny, like they’re being played through a crummy laptop speaker. He all but bursts into the hospital room, the source of the noise, and finds Simon hunched over a laptop being held aloft by a large, jade-hued Eridian. Both look over at his dramatic entrance – Simon with red-rimmed eyes and a deer in headlights expression.
“Adrian?” Grace says, strangled. “What are you doing?”
“Am speaking with Simon,” the soothing translator-voice conveys. “Answering question.”
What question, what— Grace tries not to look livid. “Can we talk, please? Privately?”
If Adrian has picked up on their misstep they don’t show it as they placidly leave the room, and the laptop behind. As soon as they’re out of earshot Grace takes a hitched breath, “Was that a recording of my conversation? When I said Simon was likely to leave?”
The translator is turned off. “Yes, statement. Obtained from hospital surveillance.”
He tries very hard not to yell at his best friend’s mate. “Adrian. When we had that conversation, that was a private talk, that was not to be shared with other people.” He shouldn’t be this upset, he berates himself. Keeping secrets secret has never particularly come up before because, why would it? There have been no humans to betray his confidence to. Adrian didn’t know better.
But it turns out that Adrian did, in fact know: “Yes. But was very necessary. Please do not be angry.”
This, of course, angers him. “How could it possibly be necessary–”
“Grace,” Adrian chimes softly, “Simon asked if he was brought here for Grace sake. If he belongs to Grace now.”
His fury warps into something aghast. “What? No no, of course he doesn’t!”
“Yes Adrian know this, and know that Grace know this. But Simon not know, and Adrian has no better words to explain than the words Grace used.” They sway slightly side to side. “Translator language so limited, not convey deeper meaning. Even when Grace speak to Simon he is speaking very careful, being gentle, but then also lose meaning. Video shows Grace speaking with deepest meaning, deepest truth. Simon needs truth.”
The ire fizzles away in his throat. He rubs his chest. “That’s… okay. Okay. I wouldn’t have picked up on him worrying about that…” it didn’t even cross his mind that it would be an issue. That Simon would wonder if he was one more thing that Grace had asked for: search the stars and bring me another human. “Did he really ask that? Did – did one of the doctors say anything to him?”
“Not know. Maybe. Some Eridians of opinion that Simon is here to belong to Grace.” As Grace splutters his protest, Adrian holds up a patient claw. “Not matter. Cannot control what they think. Adrian know truth and Grace know truth, and now Simon know too. You say he must have choice. Choice necessitates true information. This is why I show to Simon.”
“It’s not that straightforward,” Grace points out. “He already talks like there’s some sort of debt owed for his rescue. Now he’s seen me having a freak out about him leaving, he might feel too guilty and indebted to leave. It’s going to skew his judgement and his ability to choose freely.”
“Important thing is that he know free choice very very important to Grace,” Adrian reiterates, then waves the laptop around. “You talk with Simon. I go back and talk first so he not think you are upset with me.”
“I am upset with you,” he says, somewhat helplessly.
“Yes but you understand why Adrian has upset Grace so all good,” he is told almost primly by the giant rock spider. “Adrian do what’s best for Simon. Also like Simon lots, also want him to stay of own volition. You stay here now.”
It makes perfect sense, he supposes, that the mate of Rocky – who Grace now grasps is stubborn even by Eridian standards – would be just as much of a bulldozer. Grace can only let them cut their swathe.
-
Adrian waves him in after they’re done and Grace is weirdly afraid to go in there. But it’s not as though he can pretend Simon didn’t see Grace have a small breakdown on camera, thanks Adrian, so he’ll just have to deal with it. Maybe it’s better this way, he reasons. If Simon wants to leave, and this has probably even further fuelled the decision, it’s better to just have the conversation and rip the bandaid off. They can start making preparations, and Grace can start the grieving process for a man he’s only known awake for about two weeks.
So, he goes in. Sits down. Starts the conversation, because it’s unfair to put the onus on Simon to start it instead.
A breath, a tumble: “Alright, for the record I would’ve rather you didn’t see that debacle, but I do stand by what was said. You are not a captive here. You don’t owe us, me, anything. You also won’t owe us anything for whatever onward journey you choose to make. You need a little more time to recover just to make sure you’re going to actually survive the trip, few weeks tops, but as soon as you’re cleared we can get you all sorted out.”
“When you say you didn’t have a choice, what does that mean,” Simon utters lowly. It lacks the inflection of a question.
Oh fluff, he heard that too.
He runs a hand anxiously through his hair. Well. He didn’t want to come off as a big intimidating hero to Simon, right? And being a big ol’ coward will certainly take the shine off him. “I, uh. You know about the astrophage mission that led to me meeting Rocky, coming here. I wasn’t – exactly there of my own volition. The chosen scientist and their backup both died in a lab accident, I was the astrophage expert who wouldn’t need any training, time was ticking and I – I – I said no.” He heaves a deep exhale. “It was a one-way trip to send the findings back to Earth and then die in space, and I didn’t want to die, so I said no. Even though delaying the mission would’ve cost however many thousand lives down the line. I said no.”
Simon is looking at Grace like he’s seeing him for the first time all over again. He looks haunted. Grace tries not to wilt under it; he didn’t want to be an untouchable hero in Simon’s eyes, but the pendulum has swung hard in the opposite direction, now he’s no hero at all. “Then what?” he asks slowly. “What happened?”
He shrugs listlessly. “They stuck me with a sedative and an amnestic so I wouldn’t sabotage the mission, that’s what happened. Then I woke up on a spaceship with two dead crewmates and no idea how I even got there.” Simon is still staring, and Grace twists his fingers together nervously. “I only got anything done because Rocky showed up. He’s the saviour, not me. But – my moral failings aside – I wasn’t given a choice, just the illusion of one. It’s not a choice if the only answer is yes. So to me, it’s very important that we support you to the fullest, when you go.”
The man blurts out, “I don’t want to go.”
He gives a pained smile, “I don’t mean go back where you were, I mean go to Earth.”
“I don’t want to go to Earth.”
Grace blinks a few times.
“Why wouldn’t you want to go?” he asks, more baffled than he intends. Oh, the prospect of space travel is kind of scary. “Is it – I told you Earth is 16 light years away, but with relativity you would experience it as four years, which is very doable for you. You wouldn’t even need to be asleep during it, probably better not to risk it anyway. Mary has an autopilot mode so you won’t get lost. You’d only need to find a way to pass the time.”
“I don’t want to go, though,” Simon repeats. He frowns, “Do you, do you want me to go? Not stay?”
“No, I mean yes I would like–” he takes a breath. “It’s not my decision to make, that’s the point.” Simon has the look of a man who is not used to making decisions, or getting to make them. It occurs to Grace that foisting this sort of ultimatum on someone who is still very much recovering from their near-death is not totally kosher. He tries to wind it back a bit. “Okay, let’s. Just. Talk it out, before anything else. What worries you, about going to Earth?”
The man’s shoulders hunch over, “All of the people. Some of them might be like – might be nice. But most won’t be, ‘cause that’s how people work. I could get there and they put me in a cell, or a lab to dissect.”
Putting humbleness aside, the Hail Mary showing up at Earth again would be an event of worldwide significance. The Hail Mary being solely occupied by a completely unknown human (whether Simon explains the parallel universe thing or just fakes amnesia and lets Earth draw a more reasonable conclusion) would be… yeah. Grace can smooth the way though, if he sends some video recordings to say Hi it’s Saviour Grace who YOU OWE BIG TIME here’s my pal treat him nicely, then Simon ought to receive a semi-warm welcome. But it would still be a wary one. “Could be a luxury penthouse shaped cell. I doubt they’d dissect you.”
Simon issues a sigh, and then reaches up for the patch still taped across the left side of his face. Grace frowns, wonders if he should stop him, but there’s nothing manic or compulsive about the action. Only deliberation as the patch is peeled back, revealing… teeth. Very long, very spiky teeth, stretching almost the whole way back to Simon’s ear, shifting slightly as Simon looks back at Grace and sighs again. They have a translucent, almost glass-like quality, it’s familiar but he can’t place the animal. Not human though, that’s for sure.
“Oh,” Grace says faintly. And then, because he’s an idiot, “Can you eat through that?”
“M’gonna pretend you didn’t say that,” Simon grunts, and Grace ducks his head bashfully. But he does read something like relief in Simon’s features – had he expected more shock and horror, maybe? Grace would expect that too, if their positions were reversed. “Also here,” he waves irately at his neck still bandaged, “there’s some freaky gill things. And other stuff. It’s…” his fingers drift across the teeth. “…from AT-5, the blood moon. There was a big fuck-ass eel thing in there trying to eat my sub. Maybe AT-5 turns humans into that.”
Teeth, gills and Simon‘s mismatched left eye, less bloodshot now but still that startling, deathly pale. As a whole it makes for a decidedly fishy situation, pun not intended. The implications are fascinating. “Can I look?” Simon raises an eyebrow but tilts his left side over to Grace, who leans in. Past the row of needles he can glimpse a set of human teeth beyond it. So it’s a whole second jaw fused with his skull? That’s awesome. “It is like an eel! Morays have pharyngeal jaws used for capturing prey, then the second mouth for chewing–” Simon is staring quite hard at him, and Grace remembers to shut the fudge up and pull his hands back. “Uh, I mean, it resembles a moray eel, yeah. Your inner mouth still looks human though. Sorry, biology nerd, I didn’t mean to get overexcited.”
“Yeah well, I think the rest of Earth would be less excited about it than you are,” Simon tells him flatly. He leans back and re-affixes his patch, which is a shame, and goes back to looking like an odd human. “S’nice that your Earth has forests and mountains and normal oceans. None of that matters if I spend the rest of my short life on someone’s operating table. I want to live.” He bows his head, obscured by the fall of inky-black hair. Quiet, “I want to live. Doesn’t matter where or what I have to do for it. I’ll stay if… if you still want me to,” he gestures vaguely at the mutated cheek.
Something in Grace’s chest loosens. A tight knot he hadn’t realised he’d been tying over and over for the last few days. “I’d love for you to stay,” he says breathily, as though it’s not a whole confession. Then because he’s him, “I’d also love, uhm, and please can I clarify this will not lead to any dissection, but if I could have a few mouth swab samples to get under a microscope, I would really love that.”
The man scoffs. “You are fucking bizarre, you know that? But yeah, if you want.” A pause, then he adds, gruff-voiced, “I can eat through it. But it’s not pretty.”
As if, Grace thinks, and then wonders why he thought that.
“I said no too," he says then. So quiet the words are almost nonexistent. Spoken like a ghost whose death was decided for them, and Grace thinks oh. Oh you know that feeling too. "An' it didn't matter. The only answer was yes. But it matters to you. That's why."
-
Hospital or house, Grace had asked Simon as soon as it was feasible to move him elsewhere. With great guilt he must admit to skewing things in his favour. The hospital was fine, but it was surely boring to look at the same four walls every day and to feel constantly under observation. Arm-ando would be able to change bandages and administer painkillers in a less intrusive way. Healing at home – ahem, in a home-like environment – was thought to be more holistic. There was a spare room, plenty of space.
He knows the biodome, the sheer scale of it, is still daunting. He’s secretly glad he didn’t ask for a Mcmansion on top of it all, but a humble abode that he really hopes is not too unnerving to occupy. Everything has been scrubbed to within an inch of its life, bright and gleaming. “Okay, this is the main living room, there’s my medical bot Arm-ando, hello Arm-ando, this is Simon.”
“Good morning, Simon.”
He eyes the robot warily, then looks furtively around. “Everything’s so… clean.”
He scratches the back of his head, “Aha yeah, full disclosure, I did tidy up before you got here, it’s normally messier than this. I’ll try not to relapse but, uh, no promises there. Haha. Anyway. There’s, uh, there’s a kitchen there, use it as much as you like. Food storage there, that’s a free-for-all. And here…” The house did have a spare hobby room, albeit hastily expanded into a full extension with en-suite. Grace walks him through there now, to a room that is decidedly… beige. He didn’t know what colour Simon wanted. It sort of looks like a furniture showroom right now, but hopefully it’ll get that lived-in charm before long. He fosters a bright, “Ta-da! How is that?”
Simon’s fingers twist the hem of his shirt, “This is your bedroom?”
He blinks, puzzled. “No, this is your bedroom. Mine is over there,” he waves back through the living room. “I thought, if we were on opposite sides of the house I wouldn’t keep you up if I snore – I don’t think I snore but, well, no-one’s been able to tell me if I do or don’t, so–” he can feel a ramble snowballing. He pats himself down to try and abort it. “Yeah! Alright. I left you some spare clothes to wear until Adrian can get some more fabricated for you. Just hand it back to me if anything is too small or the science slogans are too lame. Sorry, all my clothes have a theme. How about you get changed and then I’ll, uh, I’ll get Arm-ando to look at you.”
Simon has brought with him the scarce few possessions that survived his rescue. Most of his clothes had to be burned but a few articles were just about salvageable after some serious quarantine-cleaning, and he hugs the bundle tight under his remaining arm. Head bowed and voice tight, a little choked. “Yeah.”
-
The greenhouse is… okay. In no way is he complaining, it’s the reason he doesn’t have to subsist on nutrient slurry, but the word greenhouse always conjures some lush tropical conservatory. Grace just has a tent with some raised troughs in it.
See, Grace likes plants the way a molecular biologist would – for their DNA, RNA, those beautiful building blocks that determine what an organism is and is not. Is he good with plants? No. He has an automated lighting and irrigation system doing the hard work for him, and the plants grow fine, enough to feed him, not enough to thrive. He keeps telling himself he just needs to put a bit more time and energy into looking after them, but then he never has the time or the energy or more realistically, the inclination. He is simply not a plant guy, and he’s made his peace with that.
He can already tell that Simon is a plant guy from the way he looks around the tent. The way his fingers skim ghost-light along the edge of the water-filled racks, wandering past spidery shoots of lentil plants, pinto beans and wheat – whatever Grace could salvage from burritos and other meals, basically, he started putting stuff aside as soon as it was clear his final destination was going to be Erid rather than Earth. It’s not the most varied diet in the world, but it sure beats the alternative.
He stops before a corner captured by a particularly tenacious tomato plant, the only thing in the greenhouse to defeat Grace’s black thumb, whose vines have grown so large and thick that it’s turned more of a tomato tree. His hand comes to tangle in the curly leaves in the most spectacularly gentle way, a reverent awe, like he’s sifting ambrosia.
Grace, abruptly, finds a clench in his throat, a twist in his chest, that colours more green than all the verdancy combined: envy.
He’s jealous of a plant.
The realisation is so simultaneously stunning and mortifying that Grace actually clasps his hand over his face. Oh my god. “Ah, I just remembered something back at the house,” his mouth autopilots. “I’ll just go – grab – thing. You wait right here, I’ll be two ticks.”
”Huh?” he hears from Simon, but Grace has already about-faced and power-walked his way back out of the greenhouse, and back to sanctuary. With each too-fast step and click of cane, a metronome in his head: don’t, don’t, don’t do this, we are not doing this. Grace would like to claim that he is a mature, thoughtful and level-headed person. Very unfortunately he is none of those things. Various memories of his own pettiness or ability to get irrationally upset come to the fore. He could blame this on his lack of human contact, Eridians having a vastly different set of social rules, but this is the equivalent of an Eridian being jealous of an inanimate rock; his strangeness crosses all species.
He barges his way into his bathroom where he can get a look at himself in a mirror. “Grace,” he hisses his haggard reflection. “This is stupid. You know it’s stupid.”
His reflection gives him a wobbly-eyed look. His fingers tremble where they grip the edge of the sink.
“Come on,” his voice drops to a plea. Stage three: bargaining. “We’ve just gotta be normal. It’s not that hard. He’s the only human in–” he bites off the sentence and drops his head between hunched shoulders. He doesn’t even know why he’s so upset, none of it makes any sense. “Don’t screw it up,” he mumbles at the sink. “Just once, for once in your life, god.”
He’s surprised when he steps back outside his bedroom to see Simon lingering unsurely in the living room, as opposed to still with the plants he was enamoured with. He looks over at Grace like a man expecting lashes. “Was it – I didn’t mean to, I wasn’t thinking. You didn’t say they were sacred.”
“Ah?” he asks. “No, they’re not sacred. They are where you’re from?” He’s told Grace a little about it, the empty world of great scarcity. Too few to rebuild, too many to feed. He feels even worse for his botanical envy. “…You can help look after the greenhouse if you’d like, I’m hopeless at it. I’m glad you liked it.”
The thing is, he is glad. The greenhouse would give Simon something independent to do, feeling useful is integral to one’s well-being, and it’s… something extra to stay for. Plus if he expands the greenhouse they’ll have more food, maybe he can nurture some of the more finicky vegetables Grace has never had much success with. This is all good, all true, it’s just that Grace – wants to be – if he could be even a fraction as beloved, then…
He is beloved. Rocky loves him, sheesh all of Erid loves him, that’s why they built the biodome for him. This is just Grace wanting what he can’t have, as per usual.
“I did. Thanks for showing me.” Simon’s hand fiddles about his left shoulder, an unconscious habit. He steps over towards Grace. “You’ve. You’ve got a leaf in your hair. Lemme get it.”
Grace blinks, remembering his reflection only as ragged, not leaf-strewn, but the thought is discarded when Simon steps closer to him. Still at arm’s length, but with that arm he reaches over and plucks at Grace’s hair, a deft slip of fingers against scalp. “Got it,” he says shortly, stepping away again. The leaf goes unseen, held in tightly clenched fist.
If nothing else, the gesture banishes some of his lingering black mood in favour of bafflement.
-
It’s a steeper learning curve than he’d thought, re-adjusting to another human in his space. No more tables blanketed in paperwork or leaving all his dirty plates in the sink or clattering around the house at insomnia o’clock. Simon is withdrawn as all heck, but that’s to be expected, and honestly he’s doing great for someone thrust into a completely unfamiliar environment. Grace manages to coax him out in the evenings by letting a movie play and studiously pretending that no-one is in the room with him.
During the day he has his classes and projects to occupy him. Most afternoons Rocky drops by for a chat, now exclusively whilst beach-strolling so Grace can talk about living arrangements unimpeded. Adrian shows up way more often too, but not for Grace – for Simon. They appear to have taken him under their big stony wing, so to speak, and they’re about the only Eridian Simon will have a willing conversation with. Simon talks more to Adrian than he does to Grace, in fact. Grace isn’t jealous about it. He’s not.
…He’s a bit jealous. He has a longstanding envy of Rocky and Adrian as well, even though Grace can confidently claim to be Rocky’s favourite human and second favourite living entity in the universe. Unfortunately saving the stars has made Grace an only marginally better person, and he yet remains prone to coveting whatever it is that he doesn’t have, even when he has just about everything. Simon is also not here to belong to Grace (whatever that would entail), even though he’s sussed that this is, in fact, the majority opinion of the Eridians who know about them. As Adrian said, the important thing is that Simon doesn’t believe that. And more importantly than anything else, that Grace doesn't.
But he is not great at social cues, less so now he hasn’t been around a human in over a decade. He stands way too close to Simon a bunch of times before he spots an uncomfortable flush on the back of his neck, and realises he’s completely forgotten what proximity norms are. Eridians just don’t have ‘em, they sleep in a big cuddle puddle. He legitimately has to look it up to remember how close humans are meant to be.
- Intimate distance 0 – 14 cm.
- Personal distance 46 cm – 1.2 m.
- Social distance 1.2m – 3.6 m.
Right, he’s definitely stood closer than 46 cm too often. He starts putting little markers around the house in places Simon is likely to linger. Simon is very quiet and private and nowhere near as touchy-feely as Grace is. Grace hasn’t asked to hold hands ever since that rejection in the hospital, which he spends a lot of time still thinking about. He doesn’t want to get verbally rejected again, so he makes some observations about how often he almost initiates or wants to initiate contact (average 31 times a day), compared to how often Simon initiates or displays a want to initiate contact (average 0.2 times a day). The results are, unfortunately, very conclusive; he needs to scale it way back.
No more than three touches a day, he decides. A nice hard limit to keep him in check, stop him from slippery-sloping his way into manhandling Simon all the time and creeping him out. By golly it actually works, and he manages to keep his hands to himself for the next few weeks. That Grace can and does keep tally of every touch is still hopelessly creepy, but at least Simon doesn’t know about it.
He pats Simon on the shoulder before he leaves for class that day, one.
Back home in the afternoon, he accidentally knocks into him while they’re both making dinner and nearly curses himself out afterwards. Two, what a waste.
He bides his time for the third, hoping to make up his deficit. Opportunity strikes when he hands a post-dinner mug of mint tea over and their fingertips brush. It’s like being hit with a lightning bolt. Three.
Simon’s eyes flick sharply up to his; Grace masks with an easy, apologetic smile before pulling his hand back. It’s tingling up to the wrist, clumsy as he returns to making his own mug of tea. Alas, with every high comes a subsequent low, the reality that he’s used up his three allotted touches and still has a lot of day left to go. He could just try for a fourth – nope, slippery slope. His spoon clinks rhythmically against the mug like a school bell at home time, his gaze distant with the memory of highscoolers fleeing their educational prison for the day. His smile is still fixed; he hopes it hasn’t morphed into a grimace.
It takes him a second to realise that Simon is still standing there, staring at him. He blinks out of his mournful reverie in favour of a puzzled side-glance, the spoon going still.
Simon sets his mug down on the counter with an inelegant clink and the slosh of mint tea over the side. “‘Jesus fucking Christ, Ryland,” he rasps, and then all but lunges forward to grab Grace by the hand.
This is like being hit with a lightning bolt. “Wha-!” he starts, but is cut off when he’s bodily hauled, by a one-armed man no less, over to the couch. They land in a haphazard sprawl, cushions bouncing everywhere, and he has no idea what’s going on. “What – what is–”
“Hol’ on a goddamn moment,” is the groused reply as Simon rights his lopsided seat, then positively drags Grace in next to him. “Alright there, fuck me. Is that better? Can you stop with the glass treatment now?”
“What glass–” he starts, before realising what Simon refers to. That perhaps Simon has also been cataloguing the self-imposed three-a-day tactile limit. “I’m – I’m trying not to be too touchy! You need space, I’m trying to give you space!”
He gets an incredulous look, “Did you at any point tell me that master plan? Was I supposed to telepathically work out that’s what you were doing?”
He throws his hands up. How is he in the wrong here? And after being so careful and observant, too? He used an evidence-based approach! “It was implicit! I’m trying not to overwhelm you.”
“You do that all day every day, it doesn’t fucking matter if you’re touching me or not,” is growled back, such that Grace’s nape prickles. “I’ve been here feeling like a goddamn leper when–”
“It’s not you.”
It just sort of… tumbles out of him.
And when he’s started, in typical fashion, he can’t stop: “It’s me, I’m the problem, not you. I talk too much, I touch too much, I am too much. I know – I know – so I am trying to be good, and to give you space, and not fudge up the only human relationship I’ve had in 16 years.” He didn’t want to frame it like that, as I like you because you’re literally my only option, but Simon is Grace’s only option, that or a lonely tide. “And it’s been so long that – that probably I’ve lost my baseline, for what’s normal and what isn’t. In my efforts to be normal, I have set myself boundaries, limits. But it wasn’t to make you feel like a leper. If I have then I’m sorry.”
Simon stares at him like he’s grown a second head. Great. So he’s fudged it up anyway.
He mumbles another apology and starts excusing himself to go for a walk, or more likely an impromptu ocean swim (can’t cry if you already have saltwater in your eyes, take that psyche), but Simon’s hand lashes out again and fists in Grace’s shirt, drags him back down the couch. Grace goes, struck mute and pliant by the action.
It takes a moment for him to actually speak, voice strangely hoarse. “They kept me in a concrete solitary for months. The only thing I had to look forward to was a waterboarding every so often. So, y’know,” his hand slowly relinquishes the grip, the rumpled folds of Grace’s shirt unfurling like spring petals. The words rough as frost, but melting. “The bar is real low. You don’t need to try so hard. Or treat me like I’m made of glass.”
“It’s not you,” Grace reiterates softly. All him, a sculpture just now realising its own fragility.
“Yeah,” he mutters, forlorn, but entirely inward-facing. “Yeah. Fuck. I didn’t think about that. I just thought you were fed up of me, then you gave me tea and I thought it was some swaddling bullshit, then–” he exhales through his nose. “Can we just, stop dancing around each other? I don’t care if you’re touchy. It’s nice, kinda.”
Grace’s heart, which cannot take these sorts of outbursts, climbs up into his throat. “It’s nice?”
“Yeah, your mandated fucking feather touches are nice. Could be less feathery,” he bites out. “I’ll – I’ll tell you if it’s too much. We can just talk about it and not make guesses.” Grace decides not to tell him about the evidence-based approach. “Fucking sit on the sofa, geez.”
Grace sits. Then startles, as Simon lays his right hand across the seat cushion, fingers slightly flexed. As Grace views him with confusion he mutters, “Is this what you want?”
It’s like a feast offered to the famished. Grace swallows heavily, pretends he isn’t ravenous. “It’s not a trade. You don’t owe me anything.”
“You gonna take my hand or what.”
He would like to say he has the self-restraint to graciously (hah) decline, perhaps reiterating that there are no expectations and no trades. But he is a weak man, a greedy one. It’s all he can do to take the proffered hand gently rather than snatch it up as his worst self demands, to oh-so-carefully fold their fingers around each other. The frothing tide under his skin recedes in bone-deep satisfaction. He is trying very hard not to pull any weird faces.
Maybe not with huge success. Beyond a waterfall of dark hair, odd eyes stare intently at him. A growl of a voice softened by uncertainty, “Are you eating my soul through skin contact, or something?”
Oh no, what is his face doing. He tries to school it into some sort of neutrality, too flustered to answer. Not too flustered to let Simon’s hand go, though. The moment he thinks of letting go his insides squirm in protest, his fingers clench ever more firmly, before he forcibly relaxes them again.
For his silence, Simon’s demeanour shifts, lurches from standoffish into almost fervent. The silver eye captures the false sunset with a strange, red gleam: “You can have it. No-one else wants it. You can have it, but you’ve gotta keep the rest of me.”
“I’m, I’m not eating your soul,” Grace manages at last. He feels very weird but cannot articulate why. It’s just not a very normal conversation to have. “You’re, once again, not dead. I’m very pleased that you’re not dead, and that you’re here.” Kept. He takes a breath, “It isn’t a trade. Remember that.” He still has to be careful. He’s not totally clueless, he’s still in a position of power relative to vulnerability, and he must mind not to wield it to Simon’s detriment.
Would that he could say he was being entirely thoughtful and altruistic about that one, but… no. Like everything else Grace does, it has selfish roots. The thought that Simon might not shrivel away from Grace and his obsessive tendencies at the first opportunity. That he won’t change his mind about staying on Erid. That maybe Grace does, in a sense, get his soul.
-
Given unfettered permission, does Grace touch way too much? Of course he does. He immediately leaps exponentially from three touches to six, then twelve, and he stops keeping such a close eye after that. The personal space thing he still has to be conscious about and use his covert markers, but the rest of it, oh it’s wonderful. A goodbye shoulder pat turns into a lingering slide. An elbow nudge every time they pass by. A squeeze to his bicep (which, goodness, the one-armed push-ups are paying off). Their legs slotting together during movie time and Grace, in consequence, not actually paying attention to the movie, just to the creep of pink that sometimes touches Simon’s ears.
It’s too much. He’s certain it’s too much and too close, but Simon said he would speak up and he never does.
Yet still. Still, still, still. Grace craves more. Should he not be satisfied? Does he not have what he wants – a Simon who wishes to stay, at least for now, who doesn’t hate his quirks, who lets him touch? Shouldn’t it be enough?
Grace snatches his opportunities, takes his fill every day. Goes to bed still hungry, despite everything.