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“The biblical sin is greed. You are sinful.”
“I … just want to live.”
“To want is an indication of greed. Repent, sinner.”
Simon knew that he would go to hell when he died. Everybody had told him so. People had spat at him to burn there, some scathing and with twisted expressions, some screaming it at the top of their lungs. Others had said it solemnly, gravely, preachers speaking a prophecy: he would definitely go to hell for his sins. Simon had heard it so often that it had become his truth, even if he didn’t believe in it.
He generally believed in very few things, too few to call himself a believer. For that, he had met too many religious people – some who claimed that the Quiet Rapture had heralded the beginning of Judgement Day and only the chosen ones would be saved by the Higher Being, the rest damned for all eternity; to others who seemed to only be passively waiting for the end in the belief of a better life in the beyond.
Nobody had seemed to want to live. To care about living, not just surviving.
Simon did.
And because he so desperately did, clinging to the present and every chance at life, he gave a rat's ass about hell. It would wait for him, preferably for a very long time, as Simon fought tooth and nail not to die. That he would go to hell one day was out of the question.
Why, then, did Simon catch glimpses of heaven as he was dying?
“Don't,” he rasped, stuffing pieces of his torn-up clothes into cracks in the metal hull. His hands were trembling so badly that he could barely keep his fingers still enough to press the fabric into the holes and stop the constant trickle of blood into the SM-13. He had been doing so well with this assignment. He just needed to hold on a little longer. He had a real chance to survive, to regain his freedom. “Don’t take this away from me.”
The metal groaned in response, the grating sound rattling Simon’s bones. For a second, he thought he saw the wall fold in like a piece of aluminium foil, and Simon’s arms flew out instinctively to stop it, but – he only felt a dozen new jets of blood hit his bare skin, not the walls closing in on him.
Then the pipe exploded in a hissing mix of hot steam and blood, which hit Simon square in the face. With a pained scream, he stumbled backwards, bloodied hands flying to his eyes -
Thumbs wiped over his eyelids and moved to cradle his face, with fingertips reaching into his hair and holding his head securely in place. Simon’s first reaction was to recoil, to push the person in front of him away or lash out in panic, but the hands spread their fingers and pulled him in with unfamiliar urgency against a point of pressure that Simon recognised as someone else’s forehead. He froze, his own fingers wrapped around bony wrists.
“Breathe with me,” someone ordered him through the roar in his ears, and those fingers moved across the side of Simon’s face, fingertips kneading his scalp and holding his head together as if they knew that he was about to explode into a million pieces.
Simon’s hands tightened around those bony wrists, to hold onto them as to lifelines, but his attention was focused on the insistently repeated order to breathe, to imitate the gasps that the person in front of him exaggerated.
In.
Hold.
And Out.
Simon’s world was tilted sideways, but he anchored himself in that insistent touch against his head, the pressure of someone holding onto him as if refusing to let go, and that voice, and he rasped a breath -
The opposite wall of the submarine broke his fall, and gone was that touch, the voice replaced by the gurgling of blood leaking through new holes into the SM-13. Simon blinked hard, his chest heaving with the effort to keep breathing in enough oxygen to function, and only lost one second to think about what had just happened. His eyes flicked from the leaking wall in front of him to the control panel, on which the coordinates indicated his current position. His breaths came out hissing through his clenched teeth, the sound drowned out by the aggressive hiss of steam and the gurgling of blood.
His time was running out, but he could take the last photo and then return to the base and reclaim his freedom. It was entirely possible. And Simon was nothing but greedy – he’d do anything to continue living. He was a cornered animal fighting for the scrap of a chance to survive, his teeth sunk so deeply into it that taking it away would mean having to kill him.
Simon had to reach 675 on the x, 828 on the y-axis.
He had to.
He crossed the distance in one step and slammed his hands onto the control panel. He repeatedly pressed the navigation button forward, hurling the submarine ahead through the dark, his eyes pinned on the little navigation circle to see if any proximity indicators triggered.
The proximity indicator managed to blink once.
Something slammed into the SM-13 with such force that it sent Simon flying backwards. He hit the surface of the blood covering the floor and immediately sank under, and because he hadn’t expected it, he happened to inhale at the time of impact. Instead of the sting of iron, he tasted -
Salt. The water was incredibly salty and burned in his nose and on its way down his throat. Simon started coughing, his sight impeded by the water bubbles that escaped him to rise through the clear water.
Water, he realised. Not an ocean of blood, but crystalline, cool water as far as Simon could see. Which was the reason why he suppressed the next coughing fit, his eyes widening despite the burn. And he saw – impossibly bright light that fractured on the water surface, distorted by the waves rippling through it. He would only need to extend a hand to break through the water surface, but Simon was frozen in place.
He could come up with two plausible explanations for what was happening, but neither was very good. The oxygen metre of the SM-13 had been blinking red for a good while now and all breath control of the world couldn’t help Simon with oxygen deprivation. Severe lack of oxygen caused hallucinations, Simon knew, so it was entirely possible that his brain had lied to him to make dying less painful.
Impossible, in a sense, because the brain could only conjure up images and memories that existed in Simon’s world and light and clear water as far as the eye could see had never existed there. How was he supposed to know what it looked like if all he ever had were vague fairytales of times before the Quiet Rapture?
But the second explanation was even more absurd. Because maybe Simon was catching glimpses at the light at the end of the tunnel, the gateway to heaven. He had never thought about what it might look like – why would he? -, but it made sense that it would be the exact opposite of everything Simon had ever known.
It was … beautiful.
Just then, the pressure on his chest from the need to breathe became too much. Simon pushed up to break through the water surface, spluttering and panting and –
unable to see a damn thing in the darkness. He ran his hands over his face only for them to come away bloody, the taste of iron stinging on his tongue and clogging his trachea. It was everywhere now, coating his skin and dripping off his hair and running into his face.
Simon ground his teeth together and forced himself onto his feet and back to the control panel. The blood had reached the lower edge of the terminal and threatened to flood it, but Simon would navigate back to the base blindly so long as he got to the right coordinates and took the last photo first. He just needed that last fucking photo to live. It didn’t matter that his movement were sluggish and his knees weak and his breaths coming shallow and rattling. It didn’t matter that his head was throbbing and the pain in his body agonising. It didn’t matter that the pieces of fabric he had used to plug the walls were soaked and no barrier against the continuous stream of blood. It didn’t matter that the monster treated the SM-13 as its prey and might decide at any moment that it had grown tired of playing with the submarine.
“Fuck you!” Simon rasped, hatred bleeding into his voice, and slammed his flat hand onto the control panel. At least the control panel still displayed his current location and the coordinates in its sickly green light. Hurtling the SM-13 through the ocean at top speed, he muttered a stream of threats under his breath that it had better keep working.
The buttons worked as always and the submarine was as responsive to Simon’s input as always, despite the additional weight, the holes and the pressure imbalance. It charged forward recklessly, according to Simon’s instructions, then stopped and turned.
Simon let go of the control panel and turned too, probably too quickly. For a short, irrational moment, the world in front of him fell sideways as something scaly rushed at him, but as Simon caught himself with a hand against the wall and froze, the vision was gone.
Cursing the hallucinations under his breath, Simon stumbled forward, struggling against the blood that reached up to his waist now. He hit the button for the camera with his fist as he sank heavily with his shoulder against the wall for support. He must have closed his eyes to listen to the sound of the photo printing, because he blinked them open again to look at -
A photograph of himself. And not just any photograph. It was a plastic sheet on which his face developed seemingly out of nowhere, showing a face that was both familiar and unfamiliar at the same time. It was familiar because he had seen himself in pieces of mirror – the long, curly hair. The guarded, but intense look from brown eyes. The beard that covered most of his face but for the scar tissue where he accidentally cut himself.
The part that struck Simon was the glaring differences to what he expected to see. The Simon looking back at him from the photograph seemed calmer, softer somehow. Not because he was smiling – he wasn’t -, but because the look in his eyes had lost his haunted quality, he realised. As if Simon had found something akin to … peace.
Simon raised his gaze along the arm that held out the photograph for him to look at, up a broad chest to a brightly smiling man who couldn’t be anybody else but an angel. Joy was radiating off him like warmth from a fire. And like to fire, Simon felt himself drawn in, drawn closer to the warmth. Not that he could move from where he was standing, because the power of that smile rooted him into place so that all he could do was stand and stare. He dared not blink, lest the moment pass and be lost forever.
“Crazy cool, don’t you think?” the angel asked, and Simon felt that voice in his entire body. It scratched an itch in his brain that he didn’t know he had and shot from there through his every nerve down into the tips of his toes with a pleasant shiver.
Simon blinked.
It was real fire. One of the pipes leaked gas and had caught fire and the dancing flames threw wild shadows against the metal walls. Simon grabbed the fire extinguisher and tried to put out the fire, but of course the fire extinguisher was already empty. Still, the fire licked higher, as if mocking Simon.
“Stop taking everything from me!” Simon roared and smashed the empty fire extinguisher against the burning pipe, again, again. He just had to stop the flames from devouring what little oxygen was left for him. In his rage, he didn’t care about how he did it. He only cared about not losing any more than he already had.
Somehow, the pipe stopped leaking gas. It was dented to the point of tearing, but where there had been a fire just a second ago was nothing now. Not even soot on the metal. That little detail made Simon stop mid-swing.
His shoulders were heaving. His muscles were burning worse than his throat. He threw the fire extinguisher down, hard, and the sound of it crashing onto metal floor reverberated through the SM-13, echoing like laughter.
“Shut up,” he growled and pressed his hands over his ears, pressing his eyes shut.
The blood reached up to Simon’s chest. He wished the angel were here to urge him to return to base and reclaim his freedom with that pleasant voice of his. He dreaded to see the angel for all it would mean – his final failure, death, something new to –
“Gain,” he said, gently interrupting Simon’s explanation. “I decide to believe that.”
“Why?” Simon kept his eyes closed and let the voice wash over him. He had always had a difficult relationship with believing. But if Grace kept repeating his positive affirmations, they might just become Simon’s personal truth.
“A little bit of optimism a day keeps the shadows at bay,” Grace said.
Simon thought how
fitting it was that
the angel’s name
was Grace.
Something tore the SM-13 apart. The blinking light of the control panel caught the moment when teeth, sharper than needles, burrowed into the metal on both sides as if it were nothing more than a piece of paper, then the light blinked off and left, in complete darkness, only the sound of screeching metal being torn into halves.
Then – silence.
There was a weight pressing down on Simon’s shoulder. He couldn’t feel his arm any more, as all feeling was gone from a point just below his shoulder, but he believed that there was a weight on it. Why? No idea. But he also didn’t want to turn his head to his left and see for himself, at least not yet.
He was staring up at the ceiling. A lamp hanging low from there. A light bulb in its centre. A floor-to-ceiling window that showed specks of a grey sky and let in a lot of light to his left, just in his periphery of his vision. Curtains, too. When Simon blinked, it was all still there.
This must be heaven after all, not a hallucination. He could feel some sort of rough fabric on his torso, his leg. Just one leg, because the other one was significantly cooler as it wasn’t covered by the blanket on top of him. Simon could move and easily reclaim his blanket, he was sure of it.
He continued to stare up at the ceiling.
If this was heaven, that meant he had died on the SM-13. But was a dead person meant to feel so much pain? Simon had thought that the pain would stop once he was dead. Or that heaven would make the pain stop somehow because wasn’t it supposed to extend its mercy to everyone?
Maybe that was a lie. It made sense that the pain didn’t stop here. Why would it? It was the one constant in Simon’s life, always by his side like a second shadow. Now that he had lost his life, he only had his pain. What would be left of him without it?
Inhaling deeply, Simon turned his head to the left and felt his breath catch in his throat.
The weight on his arm was the weight of a person. Not just any person.
“Good morning,” Grace said. He had one of his eyes cracked open, the rest of his face nestled against Simon’s arm with a content curl of his lips. “Slept well?”
Simon couldn’t help himself. He lifted his other arm and reached out a hand to touch Grace’s face. He did so gingerly, giving Grace plenty opportunity to disappear as a part of Simon’s illusion, or draw back to rebuke him for overstepping against an angel. His fingers hovered over skin, unsure, then overcame the last bit of distance and brushed, light as a feather, over Grace’s cheek. He followed the curve of his cheekbones to the temple and from there down the slope to Grace’s jawline, his brows furrowed with concentration.
Grace was … real. He felt real. His stubble was scratchy under Simon’s touch.
“You alright, Simon?”
Simon’s nostrils flared. He raised his gaze from where his fingers brushed over skin and met Grace’s eyes, now open and watching him from beneath impossibly long lashes. Seconds passed without an answer, but not because Simon hadn’t heard it.
He was too caught up with the eyes. Not because of the fact that they were a captivating blue unlike any Simon had ever seen. Simon was captivated because he had seen the expressions that people usually had. The grief, the emptiness, the despair. The rage, the hatred, the mania. Everybody was scarred after the Quiet Rapture, each in their own right, and it nested in the corners of their eyes, their eyebrows, or the way they looked at things. More so, he had seen how people looked at him, all his life.
Not Grace. Not a shred of hatred or fury or disgust. He did have wrinkles in the corners of his eyes, a certain tightness to his expression that came with stress and concern and bad memories, but also softness and … affection that was directed at Simon for once.
Nobody had ever looked like that at Simon.
“Hey,” Grace said and caught Simon’s hand so that it cradled the side of his face. When he turned his head and pressed his lips against the ring on Simon’s finger, Simon noticed it for the first time. He wasn’t a jewellery person, never had been – it would just have been taken away at some point in his life, and Simon hated owning things when it only meant having to lose them.
Grace wore a matching ring on his ring finger. Simon could feel the metal press against his skin where Grace held his hand.
The implication of it all left him breathless. It could not be that he had died just today, could it? So that meant that this couldn’t really be heaven. Was this, then, somehow, impossibly, something … more? But – how?
“I … don’t know,” Simon finally admitted, giving a little shake of his head. He could not put into words how confused he was by everything, or ask how any of this could have happened to someone like him. A sinner like him.
But something in his voice, his expression, caught Grace’s attention. He stopped absently mouthing little kisses into the inside of Simon’s fingers. His eyes fixed on Simon instead, a look of worried assessment settling into them.
And oh, Simon was greedy, so very greedy. Maybe that was his greatest sin – to want so much, when everything could be cruelly taken away from him at any moment. All he had wanted until now was his freedom. To live.
But looking into these eyes, so full of love and worry for someone like Simon, Simon knew he wanted more. And that want was ravenous, the hunger tearing him apart from inside in such a sweet, aching way, so very unlike the pain that usually haunted Simon.
“What’s wrong?” Grace asked and moved to prop himself up on an elbow. Simon screwed his eyes shut and grimaced when, with the sudden rush of blood back into his arm, he felt a thousand needles beginning to prick his arm mercilessly. So that’s why he couldn’t feel his arm. A small price to pay, he’d guess. And more proof that he was neither dead nor hallucinating.
“I … I want to stay here,” he confessed. It didn’t even cover a slither of everything Simon wanted, but it would suffice for now. If he could just stay, it would be enough.
“Okay,” Grace said, his voice reassuring. Not at all like the preachers who had forced confessions from Simon’s lips before. Safe. “You stay in bed. I’ll be right back, okay?”
“Okay,” Simon mouthed.
“The biblical sin is greed. You are sinful.”
“I want to stay here. I will stay here for as long as I want.”
“To want is an indication of greed. Repent, sinner.”
“Shut it. Just fucking finally shut it. To want is an indication of living. If that makes me a sinner in your eyes, then so be it.”
Simon woke up to some sort of blinding light. He didn’t process that fact at first and only blinked up at the light numbly before his brain helpfully supplied the information that Simon was, in fact, awake.
Every inch of his body hurt.
He thought he vaguely remembered things. Mainly blood. Drowning on it. Blue eyes.
Ah.
“Hi. So um … don’t freak out, please. You’re safe. I don’t mean you any harm,” someone speaks up at his side. When Simon turns his head to look, the feelings that wash over him at the sight of a slightly dishevelled, fidgeting Grace telling him about the rescue are almost physical. Relief, gratitude, and affection are some that Simon manages to identify in that second.
“My name’s Grace, by the way,” Grace finishes the onslaught of words and stops. As in, his entire body goes still as he watches Simon for any kind of reaction.
“Simon,” Simon offers, then passes out again – but this time, content.