Chapter Text
“Eye movement detected.”
Something’s wrong. The sub is entirely dark, he can’t see anything. Maybe if he just turns his head he can find the camera button, illuminate everything just for a flash, figure out how to turn the lights back on again.
Or maybe he hit his head again and he’s gone blind. It’s only when he tries to blink his eyes that he realizes they are closed. Why can’t he open his eyes? His whole body feels heavy, as if his blood has been turned to lead.
Blood…
The submarine is filling with blood. He can’t breathe through the heat and the stench of iron. His skin is boiling away, fusing to the metal, as a horrible, wet tearing sound makes him want to puke his guts out. Pain like he has never felt before as the eel rips his ship apart and…
Simon wrenches his eyes open, only to snap them shut again.
“Ah, fuck!”
It isn’t dark after all. He peels his eyes back open and forces them to stay that way. The light is blinding at first, but Simon resists the urge to look away. Whatever the fuck is coming at him– the eel or that fucked up light or whatever other shit is down here– he’s going to be easy prey if he stays unconscious on the floor.
It’s only when his eyes adjust that it becomes abundantly clear that he is not in the sub at all.
The walls are white and clean, with various cabinets built into them. He isn’t lying on the floor but on a soft platform raised about three feet off the ground. Two other beds, like his but unoccupied, sit in equally spaced indents in the wall. A table near his bed holds gauze and medical tape and various surgical looking instruments. The space smells faintly of disinfectant. The gurgling of blood and sea monsters outside the walls is replaced by the faint flow of air from a nearby vent and the rhythmic beeping of a machine with wires trailing towards his body.
“Eye movement detected.”
Mechanical arms reach into his line of sight and Simon reels backwards. He tries to, at least, but the best his heavy body manages is to roll to one side before blinding pain bursts through his whole body. He can feel bandages across his face and neck, his right hand is wrapped up neatly, and his left arm…
Oh god, his arm.
His bicep is heavily wrapped but below that his left arm is completely fucking gone. The ripping sound of flesh repeats in his head and his stomach roils. He takes a shuddering breath– in and out– and then another, willing himself not to vomit whatever little might be in his stomach. He can’t afford that. He can feel hot tears filling his eyes, but he blinks them back. The beeping from the machine picks up pace.
“Cognition assessment: what is two plus two?”
The mechanical arms whir in front of his face again.
“Please remain calm. You have sustained serious injuries and are receiving medical attention.”
Simon shifts away as best he can, pain be damned. “Back off!”
To his surprise, the robot listens. It still hovers close by but the arms no longer reach towards Simon. One arm looks like it’s holding some kind of needle. Maybe it’s going to put him under again. He can imagine it now: going to sleep and waking up again at the bottom of the blood ocean. The COI must have gotten him out, somehow. They’re probably patching him up to go back down and keep working until the eel finally finishes him off.
But he’s alive. His arm is gone and his whole body is probably fucked up in ways he hasn’t realized yet, but he’s alive and he’s out of that godforsaken submarine.
Maybe Ava will finally have some pity on him. Maybe they found the blackbox, maybe he finally did something good. Maybe she would let him do work, any other work, to repay his debt to society, or just shove him back into a cell to rot for the rest of his life. Anything would be better than those haunting voices in his ear and the blood pouring in around him.
“Oh wow, you’re awake!”
Standing in the door is a man with glasses balanced atop tousled blond hair, around Simon’s age or maybe a little older.
“I’m sorry, I wanted to be here when you woke up. I swear I just stepped out for a second, but I didn’t know how long you would be out. You were pretty banged up when we pulled you out of your ship. You seem to have a lot of chemical burns or something from whatever that blood stuff was and your arm… I wasn’t even sure if you would ever– Sorry, I’m talking so much. I should chill out.”
Simon watches open mouthed as the man stumbles over his own words. He opens one of the drawers too hard, wincing as it rams against his elbow. He pulls out a pair of blue medical gloves. He’s wearing an orange jumpsuit tied around his waist and a t-shirt with lettering Simon can’t make out from this angle. He smiles as he turns back around.
He might be the strangest man Simon has ever seen.
“I should just start over,” the man says while pulling on the gloves. “My name is Grace. What’s yours?”
Simon blinks. He feels incredibly vulnerable, lying on his back as this energetic stranger stands over him. He wishes he could get up and make a break for it, but even the thought makes him dizzy. And where would he go? At least, at the moment he doesn’t seem in any immediate danger. If the man– Grace, apparently– tries anything, maybe he could grab one of the sharp looking instruments on the table next to him. On the left side of the bed. Fuck.
It isn’t until Grace speaks again that Simon processes that he had asked a question.
“Can you understand what I’m saying right now? Gosh, I should have thought of that before.” Grace slaps a palm against his forehead. “Not everyone in the universe speaks English, stupid leaky human!”
“Simon.”
Grace stops and looks at him. “I’m sorry?”
“My name’s Simon,” Simon explains. His voice is ragged and it sounds about as pathetic as he feels. “I can understand you.”
“Oh! Good.” Grace smiles. “Simon, is it okay if I take your vitals? Maybe take a look at those bandages? I could let Armando do it, if you prefer, but I know that he can be kinda unsettling coming towards you if you aren’t used to it.”
Simon eyes the many armed robot as Grace gestures to it. It waves its mechanical pincers up and down, metal glinting in bright light. Who knows what that thing would do to him if given the chance. A glitch in whatever shitty ass COI programming powered it and Simon could be down another limb. He looks back at Grace.
“Let’s just get this over with.”
He shuts his eyes tight as Grace reaches towards him, bracing for rough hands and a brusque exam, to be told if he’s well enough to be awake, he’s well enough to pilot the sub. Instead, Grace’s hands are almost unimaginably gentle, carefully avoiding the injured areas as he wraps a cloth cuff above Simon’s right elbow, looks into Simon’s eyes, checks information on a screen by the robot.
And he doesn’t stop talking.
He explains the results of every action he takes, from Simon’s blood pressure (“Still kinda low, but much better than before. You lost a lot of blood.”) to his temperature (“Not too high, which is very good! Means you probably aren’t fighting infections.”) and lets Simon know everything he’s going to do before he does it. Any moment between is filled with more nearly nonsensical ramblings (“I’m sorry I can’t do more. We’ve only got so much and I’m not a doctor. I mean, I am a doctor, but not like that, I’m not… anyways.”)
Simon watches open mouthed as Grace pulls out rolls and rolls of fresh gauze, carefully unwrapping the old bandages– not even soaked through with blood or grime– from Simon’s right hand. Underneath the skin is blistered and red and sticks to the bandages as Grace carefully peels them back. Even as the pain flares up his arm and Simon clenches his jaw to avoid crying out, he doesn’t feel as connected to the pain, to his body, as he did in the sub, but it instead feels muted somehow, cushioned against the heaviest blows.
Grace carefully applies some kind of ointment that tingles and cools the blemished skin and wraps it up in fresh bandages, as if the extravagance of the action against Simon’s broken body wasn’t the greatest act of waste. As if people didn’t tear each other apart to get their hands on stuff like this, as if he wasn’t a convict and a killer.
A tear slips unbidden down his cheek. He brushes furiously at it with the hand not currently occupied. Only when nothing touches his face does he remember the loss. He chokes back the sob that squeezes his throat.
Grace looks up at the aborted noise. “Are you in any pain?” he asks quickly, slipping down into a stool next to Simon’s bed.
Yes. Of course the answer is yes. He tore his own arm off and poisonous blood burned through his skin. But he can handle it. His body isn’t in as much pain as it should be and certainly in less pain than he deserves. He will not let any more precious resources be wasted on him, racking up his debt that is already far greater than he can repay.
“I’m fine,” he says instead.
Grace looks at him skeptically. “You sure?” He looks back at the readout the medical robot displays. “It looks like Armando gave you some morphine not all that long ago, so that should definitely be at least taking the edge off, but I could also give you some ibuprofen or acetaminophen to help with any more pain. Both, even. They shouldn’t interact with each other. You’ll probably recover faster when you’re more comfortable and–”
Who the hell left this man in charge of medical rations? That’s three medications– legitimate pharmaceutical drugs– that Grace has offered him in one breath, like it’s nothing.
Simon cuts him off. “How much of this shit is the COI hoarding away?”
Grace cocks his head to one side. “The what?”
A picture comes to Simon’s mind, from a book his mother read him when he was very small, back on Mars, before he had become a Brother. A confused yellowish puppy, with its head tilted to one side.
Cute, a small part of him thinks. Shut up, the larger part replies.
“The bandages,” Simon says slowly. “The medicine. No one’s got that shit anymore.”
“No, the other thing you said. The COI?”
“Yeah?”
“What’s that?”
Simon blinks. “Are you fucking with me?”
Grace shakes his head so fervently that his glasses slip down his nose. Instead of pushing them back up, he lowers them further so they dangle off an ear below his chin.
“No, I promise,” he says. “Is that where you’re from?”
“No, I’m not…” No one on the tow ship would make the mistake of confusing him as one of them. Every glare and insult spat on him on his way to be welded into a submarine spelled out incredibly clearly that he was nothing more than a ‘psycho Eden fuck’. “How do you not know…”
There are a handful of independent ships out there but you would have to be born at the bottom of a blood ocean to not recognize the Consolidation of Iron. Even then, with all the convicts they are apparently sending down there, it’s a hard thing to miss.
“You’re not COI?” Simon manages.
Grace gives an apologetic shrug. “No, sorry. Still don’t know what that is.”
The room is too clean. The air is too clean. Simon has never seen any part of any COI ship or station that isn’t covered in a layer of grease and rust and filth. None of the manufacturing looks anything like he’s seen before. The COI wouldn’t have these sorts of supplies. Eden certainly didn’t. They wouldn’t waste valuable machinery making a robot to sew up stitches. They wouldn’t have Grace with his bright, new clothes and his warm smile and…
Suddenly the far away walls are closing in on him. Suddenly the sweet smelling air is much too thick.
Simon clenches his fist around the sheet beneath him, bracing himself as well as he can against the bed as his heart pounds in his ears.
“Where the fuck am I?” he demands.
“Language.”
Grace slaps a hand over his own mouth as soon as the admonishment escapes it, his eyes ridiculously wide. Simon would laugh if he could breathe.
“Are you fucking serious?” he gasps instead.
Grace waves a hand as if to dismiss his previous statement. He pulls his stool forward so his knees are touching the frame of the bed. A hand comes to rest on the mattress next to Simon– close to his hand, but not touching.
“I should have started with that. I’m sorry, I’ve never done anything like this before.” He gestures between the two of them, though whatever “this” is supposed to be, Simon still doesn’t know. “You’re aboard the Hail Mary, my ship. We’re on the outer edges of the Tau Ceti solar system, about 12 light years away from earth, unfortunately– I don’t know how much of this you know, please tell me to shut up or ask more questions, whatever you need.”
Nothing makes sense.
Simon shakes his head. “What are you talking about ‘earth’?”
“Is that not where you’re from?”
He asks it like it is a real question. Whatever game Grace is playing, Simon wishes he would stop.
“The earth is dead. The stars are dead. I’m not fucking stupid.”
“I don’t understand.” Grace straightens up, his brows furrowing. He nervously moves his glasses to hang on his shirt and then immediately puts them back on his face. “Things are rough, sure, but astrophage wouldn’t have gotten that far yet.”
“You don’t understand?!” As if Simon is the one saying ridiculous things! “I don’t… I can’t…”
Either Grace is lying to him– a completely ridiculous baldfaced lie– or else… or else this isn’t real. He’s still hallucinating at the bottom of the ocean, slowly running out of air. None of his other hallucinations were like this– clear and bright and linear. Maybe he’s already dead and this is what comes next. But that can’t be right either. No hell could ever have this much gentleness. No heaven could have this much pain.
Nothing makes sense. His head spins, his vision is blurry with the tears that streak down his face and every breath feels like it is being punched back out of his body before it can reach the bottom of his lungs.
“Is there anything I can do to help?” Grace asks, hovering over Simon nervously.
It’s not real. None of this is real. He’s dying in a dying world where no one gives a fuck about him and fucking sea monsters have to fuck with his brain before finishing him off. But none of that stops him from frantically grabbing Grace’s hand in his own as he begins to slide it away to give Simon some space. The blood eel is probably laughing at him right now, but he can’t be alone again.
“Can you just… just keep talking?” he pleads. He’s pathetic, he knows. If this was real, if he was back in prison, or back on Eden, such signs of weakness would never be tolerated. “Please? I know it isn’t real, I know I’m going insane. I just can’t… Please, I don’t want to be alone again.”
He waits for Grace to laugh at him, to remind him there’s no point. For him to fade away and blood to start pouring in. But instead the bed shifts slightly as Grace sits on the end and the hand in his own squeezes back tightly.
“Yeah, sure,” he says. “No, yeah, of course. Umm… Well, first of all I just want to let you know that you’re safe. I promise, I’m real. All of this is very real.”
And then a singing rock walks into the room.