Chapter Text
Simon honestly wasn’t sure how he got here. At every step he figured the universe would intervene to stop this from happening. He’s torn between being thankful and horrified that this worked. When Ava suggested it, he’d laughed, but she was serious and apparently she wasn’t even wrong! Because here he was holding a substitute teaching ID looking at his own face on the card. It wasn’t that bad, all things considered, the little picture barely showed his scars.
He thought his chaotic resume would be the first stopping point. The GED straight into the military into a bachelors that had nothing to do with education. A dozen odd jobs with barely any documentation that never lasted more than a couple months. It screamed unreliability, painted the picture of a man who was broken in service and stumbling through life as a civilian. Typing it up felt like a sprint through his past, tripping on every exposed root of his tangled history. Everything felt a little stupid while he was staring at the blinking cursor on the word processor. It helped a little bit that he was doing it in Jack’s room while he and David yelled at each other over some two-player puzzle game they were struggling through. He could vent about how ridiculous professionalism was, receive heartfelt confirmations, and when the letters on the screen started to swim Simon could just look up to see David fumble a movement and laugh until his sides hurt.
The application demanded he upload half a dozen documents proving Simon did in fact exist and was a citizen of the United States and had an acceptable level of education. He managed to drive himself to the library and walked in with a flimsy paper folder full of all the benchmarks of his life. It was a miracle that he even had his original birth certificate. If an envelope with the last words he’d ever get from his mother counted as a miracle. His mission came to a halt when he approached the copier and realized he had absolutely no idea how to work the damn thing. Ava was no help in figuring it out, but she did manage to heckle him into asking a librarian for help. She really did have a talent for convincing him to do things he did not want to do. He’d resent it if she wasn’t usually right in the end. How she could translate her exact tone through text was also impressive. Luckily, the librarian didn’t ask him any questions beyond what was strictly necessary and he was able to get everything he needed before taking fifteen minutes to hyperventilate in his car.
Then there was the background check. Walking into the office felt like he was asking to be arrested again. Simon’s juvie record might’ve been sealed, but that had to be suspicious enough to keep him out of a school. He’d shown up to the fingerprinting sweating bullets, furiously scrubbing his remaining hand down his jeans to try and dry off his palm. The lady who took his prints certainly hadn't helped, huffing in annoyance every time the plastic screen flashed red to complain that his fingerprints were unreadable. She took three copies of his ring finger, saying one of them had to be good enough. If he weren’t clenching his teeth hard enough to cramp his jaw, he might’ve made a joke about how at least she only had one hand to print. It probably wouldn’t have helped. Gallows humor might’ve been a hit in his circle of traumatized weirdos, but the average person didn’t always follow the way his humor worked. The “resting murder face” as Jack called it and his tendency to forget inflection when he was tired probably further hurt his chances.
While he waited to see if his five remaining fingerprints would hold him back from another job, he was sent a digital form to fill out instead of an in-person interview. Simon didn’t know whether to be thankful or despair. At least in front of another person he could get a read on just how bad he was doing. As much as his therapist told him he couldn’t let his interpretation of other people’s reactions rule his life, he knew that seeing just how bad someone flinched at his scars was a pretty good guide at how a conversation would go. A form couldn’t flinch. It couldn’t give him anything but questions. Literally. So he answered that no he didn’t have any experience with the online gradebook, yes he was willing to substitute for all grades, and strung something together about he’s adaptable and ready to enter a challenging environment. He had David read over it because he knew David doesn’t sugarcoat anything, ever. David said he was full of shit but also slapped him on the back with a smile which was the best reaction he could've hoped for. He hit submit and face planted into the couch while Ava and David bickered over what movie to put on.
Apparently one-on-one interviews wouldn’t be happening. Because he got an email announcing that training would occur the following Monday from nine to three.
That’s when Simon realized he had literally no idea what he was supposed to wear. The only help he had was the email’s insistence that open-toed shoes were unacceptable and that the dress code was “business casual.” He didn’t own open-toed shoes, but were boots business casual? Would anyone really pay that much attention to what was on his feet? Ava said the boots would be fine, but he needed a collared shirt. There was no way in a million years he would pull anything from his dress uniform, so he had to deal with his almost entirely secondhand wardrobe. He had a single pair of khakis that he never wore, but his only collared shirt was a polo that clung tighter than he wanted. His prosthetic is mostly for balance, the harness a comforting weight across his chest, and he’s never tried to hide the very conspicuous missing arm, but he definitely didn’t need everyone to see the exact outline of how the plastic arm anchored to him. David let him borrow a button-up shirt which was a couple inches away from qualifying as a dress and Jack fastballed a pair of cufflinks at his face that he only just managed to catch. He tucked in the shirt and finagled the cufflinks into place. With the khakis covering his boots, he damn near looked professional.
Simon parked among the rows of cars almost thirty minutes before the training session was scheduled to start. He’d never been to the building before, so he’d given himself double the expected time to get there. The beat up messenger bag in his passenger seat held all the documents he’d already scanned and uploaded to the application portal, his wallet, a metal water bottle, a sandwich bag of trail mix, a lined notebook, and far more pens than he could imagine using in a day. The leather of his steering wheel creaked under the flex of his fingers. He took in a deep breath, carefully peeled his fingers up one by one, and let the air out slowly as he flexed his hand into and out of making a fist. He’d literally survived getting blown up. He could fucking do this.
When Simon got home he’d faceplanted into the couch, boots hanging off the edge in deference to Ava’s iron rule over the living room. Time went fuzzy for a while as he let sensation wash over him, trying to let things exist as they were. His body was what it was and that was fine. Even if it hurt.
He returned to himself when Jack sat down square on his back. Under the barrage of questions, the best response he could muster was wedging his arm under his chest and shoving hard enough to tumble both of them onto the floor. The resulting wrestling match ended quickly, Jack wasn’t much for grappling, but Simon was glad for the normalcy of his weirdo roommates.
The next steps included a lot of filling out forms to register for the complex systems that meant he’d get paid. He also had to upload a recent picture of himself under the threat of the supervisor processing his employment taking one from his documentation. Simon didn’t have any pictures of himself, usually being the one behind the camera. Ava tugged his collar into place, shoved him in front of a blank stretch of wall and she, David, and Jack took turns trying to snap a decent photo. He didn’t look at whichever one the trio chose to upload, relinquishing his laptop and heading to his room to change. It wasn’t the most uncomfortable outfit in the world. The long sleeves were nice, even if the cuffs were a pain due to David having nearly half a foot on him. He did feel a bit ridiculous when he saw how many people at the training session were in jeans. Maybe the dress code was as bullshit as it sounded. From how he understood it, none of the people that technically supervised him would be seeing him during his assignments. Chances were that he could get away with wearing his normal clothes as long as he didn’t walk into a school with profanity on anything, but it just didn’t feel right. If Simon was going to do this, and it looked like he was going to end up doing this, he wasn’t going to break stupid rules and risk getting himself fired.
It probably shouldn’t have taken him actual days to finish the digital paperwork. A migraine hit him hard and he couldn’t really look at his laptop for more than a few minutes without feeling like his head was going through a pasta maker. The nausea kept him from simply pushing though. His roommates weren’t helping his productivity, seemingly finding any and every reason to pull him away from where he was shrimped over his laptop. First, Ava needed “someone actually competent” to help her pick up something for a coworker that had an interest in plants, which took several hours because Ava was nothing if not exact in how she gave gifts. Next, David needed his “eye for color” to review a design for his next tattoo, which actually meant designing the damn thing from a stick figure sketch that didn’t even have any colors. Then, Jack hauled him to the gym because he wanted someone who “knows his shit” when it came to boxing, which mostly led to the two scrapping on the mat in a way that couldn’t be called boxing by even the most generous standards.
Their house’s scruffy little garden seemed to be the only place he could get any peace. It wasn’t his garden by any means. The deal with sharing the house was that any place that wasn’t a bedroom was equally everyone’s space. However, they all kind of gravitated to certain areas anyway. Ava had her specifications for how they kept the living room because she wielded first impressions like a weapon. David defended the kitchen tooth and nail like his ability to navigate it entirely by memory was vital to his survival. Jack kept most of his tinkering projects in the garage in a state of organized chaos that looked only a little like he’d murdered a robot and used its components as decoration. Simon kept the garden. It wasn’t neat, or even pretty as gardens went, but it was Simon’s favorite place in the world.
It was the reason he lived here at all.
Ava, David, and Jack made enough to pay for the house without him. He’d known that when Ava offered him the fourth room and he wasn’t going to accept it at first. Pity made his skin crawl, even if it was the best choice he had at the time. Because he knew Ava wouldn’t take a point-blank no for an answer, he’d agreed to see the place before he made any commitments. At the time, he hadn’t had a good read on David beyond the fact that he was curt with everyone. Jack for certain hadn’t been open to him staying there, still on the ropes about Simon after he had accidentally snapped at Jack at their support group. He’d fully pinned Jack to the ground, damn near breaking Jack’s arm in the process, in a moment of panic after Jack had good-naturedly clapped him on the shoulder from behind as a hello. Stepping into the house had felt like entering enemy territory. Ava had charged forward to give him the tour, entirely confident in her mission no matter what opinions anyone else had about it. No matter how nice the actual house was, Simon knew he was going to refuse her offer. He’d decided that and his stubborn streak was wider than California was long. The garden was what made him falter.
A tree dominated the space. Simon stepped off the concrete patio into the dappled shadows. Unruly grass and weeds brushed against his calves, a ghostly presence through his jeans. Without even thinking about it he had his hand resting on the trunk, fingers spread to feel as much of the bark as possible. Voice carefully casual, Ava commented that the tree grew apples, but she wasn’t sure what kind. She figured the space could be half decent, but only if someone who knew what they were doing took over it. The silence that followed was smug on her part and resigned on his part. She had an infuriating habit of being right about things.
He’d filled two thirds of the space with as many vegetables and fruits as he could grow without them killing each other in competition. The last third was home to a handful of native perennials to attract pollinators. Not even the patio was free from the greenery, with several raised planters dedicated to herbs. His tomatoes were almost done for the year and he wanted to make sure the peppers he’d planted the month before were settling in, so it was nice that everyone respected his need to sink his fingers into the soil. In the garden, Simon was able to put his mind entirely on one thing. It forced him to be in the present moment without the pressure of the outside world.
Simon eventually finished his forms while sitting on the floor between the couch and the coffee table, laptop flanked by a mug of cold tea and a half-eaten stick of string cheese. He celebrated by flopping back onto the couch cushions and groaning from the very bottom of his heart.
“You dying in there?” David called from where he was in the kitchen already working on dinner for the night.
“Ya dying there?” Jack poked his cheek from his perch on the couch proper, barely glancing away from his game on the television screen. Simon contemplated trying to bite him. Jack had pretty good reflexes, he could probably dodge it. “I think Ava’ll kill you if ya die on her couch.”
Simon gave into his impulses and snapped his teeth. Jack swore at him, using the heel of his palm to shove at Simon’s temple and topple him sideways. Then it was Simon’s turn to swear at Jack for taking advantage of his weak left side, even though Simon could’ve stayed upright if he really wanted to. They must’ve sounded alive enough that David left them to it.
Ava got home right as David started calling out what he’d made for dinner. Simon sacrificed his string cheese to ward off Jack’s kicking feet, then chugged the last of his tea before rinsing the mug out in the sink and grabbing a plate. Jack and David were settling at the table, Jack relaying the story of his game with expansive hand gestures. Despite sitting through at least an hour of the gameplay Simon had no idea how accurate his account was and wasn’t going to question it. Jack had an ongoing mission to lie to David about every game he played, mostly to see when or if David would call him on it. Sometimes it was making up a mechanic and sometimes it went as far as completely fabricating the plot.
“Mail for Simon.” Ava dropped an envelope next to him as she headed to fix her own plate.
Simon eyed it as he stabbed a piece of pasta with his fork. He didn’t recognize the return address, but that didn’t mean much. He’s pretty sure the only people who might send him something without being paid to do it were sitting at the table. Might as well bite the bullet, he figured, and started working the envelope open.
The letterhead made his heart clench. A mean-spirited voice in the back of his mind started crowing that it was the death knell for his job prospects. This was the background check coming to bite him in the ass or his resume being too weak or them saying that his scars were too much. He forced himself to actually read the words on the page.
“I got the job.” Simon wasn’t sure if the words actually made it out of his mouth. The bottom of the page had a waxy ID card for him to pop out. He checked the envelope again and found a lanyard with a clear sleeve to hang the card in. “Holy shit, I got the job.”
“Fuck!” Jack shoved back from the table and scrambled out of the room.
“What’s wrong with him?” Simon turned to Ava but she too had disappeared. He turned to David who was on his feet and reaching into the fridge for something.
“You have to open mine first!” Jack skidded back into the kitchen, a large, lopsided. and brightly colored paper package hoisted high in the air. He plopped it onto the table with a grin.
Ava very calmly placed a much neater gift next to Jack’s. She wrapped gifts with military corners. “He doesn’t have to do anything Jack.”
“He has to finish his fucking dinner before I cut this thing.” David countered, placing a cake box onto the table and flipping the lid up.
“What’s happening?” Simon forced himself to put the ID card down when he could feel it starting to warp in his grip.
“It’s not a surprise party!” Jack drummed his fingers on the table and shimmied his shoulders. “We know you absolutely hate surprises.”
“How in the world is a party that’s a surprise not a surprise party?”
“I told you we were going to do something when you got the job.” Ava shrugged before tucking into her meal.
“Just think of it as a birthday.” David lifted the cake out of its box and put it in the center of the table. It was a dark forest green with little frosting trees on the side “You’ve got a bunch to make up for anyway.”
“You’re never gonna let go of that, are you?” Simon focused back on his plate, trying to fight down a blush. He’d never celebrated his birthday as a kid, or when he was in juvie, or when he was serving, which was one of several cans of worms that he and his therapist had been working through.
Dinner was good. Thankfully, the conversation drifted back into their normal territory. David managed to get Ava to actually talk about work, as rare a feat as it was a good show. Although her frustrations were equally split between clients and coworkers, only coworker stories ever came with names. The new guy she’d been put in charge of training came with capital I issues. He thought he knew everything and refused to listen to anyone who said otherwise. And if Simon saw Jack and David share a loaded look after that comment, well, that wasn’t his business. She gave him grace for not flinching at her scar, one of a handful in the long line of coworkers she’d trained, but if he didn’t start paying attention to how he was supposed to do something he was going to put a lot of people at risk for no good reason.
That got Jack onto a tangent about some bullshit modification someone wanted done to their car at the shop. He tended to get the more “out there” jobs while David handled almost entirely normal maintenance. Simon sometimes wondered if the owner was trying to scare Jack away. It had to be that or the guy genuinely just thought Jack was as good of a mechanic as he boasted himself to be. He’d seen them both at work but couldn’t see any real difference in their work. Not that Simon was any judge, his own handiness was almost entirely confined to around-the-house repairs, mending clothes, and basic first-aid.
Eventually plates were cleared and Jack shoved his gift at Simon so hard it thumped into his chest with a surprised oof. Simon rolled his eyes at Jack performing a drumroll on the table’s edge and dug his fingers into a loose corner, punching through the paper into a gap and keeping the package in place with his elbow as he tore it open. The technicolor pattern gave way to a different, slightly less technicolor pattern. Several, in fact. He kept ripping, revealing a mass of soft fabrics that were quick to escape their paper confines and slide out of the folded stack it had been when Jack wrapped it. Hooking a finger around a buttoned closure, Simon hoisted one of the shirts into the air. He made eye contact with a pixelated Sonic the Hedgehog, surrounded by several other characters he had much less confidence in naming.
“What the fuck Jack?” David snorted and Jack shook apart into a giggle fit. Simon rifled through the pile, spotting Spider-Man, Bowser, Hello Kitty, Kirby, and Batman. A few shirts were tropical florals, but the very bottom of the pile were some actually respectable neutral colors in subtle patterns or blessed solids. “Where did you even find these?”
“Raided a couple thrift shops, you know ya can’t throw a cat without hittin’ one ‘round here.” Jack beamed. “Grabbed anything your size. Or thereabouts.”
“These are ridiculous.” The last word broke into a laugh because Simon had never been entirely immune to Jack’s sense of humor. “Thank you.”
Ava’s gift was presented with less force. The paper she chose was thicker, so he had to peel the tape up with his nail. After sticking a dozen pieces into a stack on the table’s edge, he was able to unfold the cream-colored paper to find a cream-colored box. Luckily, the box wasn’t taped shut, but the cream-colored tissue paper almost made him laugh again. The thin cardboard gave way to reveal black leather. He ran his fingertips along the edge of the opening flap to find the fastening strap and traced the buckle with his thumb. It reminded him of the sheath that laid under his pillow. The satchel wasn’t pristine, but it looked solid and professional. Something felt like it was tugging at his optical nerves and he had to blink rapidly to dispel it. He had to clear his throat a couple times before he could voice his gratitude.
David stuck an electric tealight onto the center of the cake.
“You’re really committing to the birthday thing, huh.”
“Just blow out your fuckin’ candle Simon.”
It was childish, even though he’d never done it as a kid, but as Simon leaned toward the fake candle he considered what he would wish for. There were plenty of things he could ask for, the world was always fucked and he was dealing with the consequences of it alongside everyone else. He picked up the tealight by its fake flame, holding it against his chest to reposition his fingers to reach the frosting-covered power switch. He closed his eyes, watched the little flame flicker on the other side of his eyelids, and took a deep breath. He theatrically blew onto the plastic candle and flicked the switch to the equally theatrical cheers of his roommates, his friends.
Simon made a wish.