Chapter Text
Grace talks.
A lot.
It’s a good thing, because Simon can’t get his mind around the shape of most words. He still hasn’t admitted that he was silent on purpose for the literal fucking months it took for them to put him back in working order.
…fudging, not fucking. Grace winces every time Simon swears, so he’s working on stopping. It’s…a work in progress. It doesn’t help that he’s stuttering out most things, tongue feeling leaden and clumsy in his mouth, but cursing is easier to say.
Anyway.
They walk on the beach every morning. Simon still can’t conceptualize this place. So much open space, more than he’s ever seen before. When he first stepped onto the beach and felt the misting spray of the water he’d collapsed and broke down into a gibbering wreck. Later, Rock gleefully pulls up a video of sheep leaving the barn for the first time in spring, sprawling on soft grass and rubbing their fuzzy innocent faces on the green blades.
“Just like Simon!” Rocky says, doing that little hand dance that’s meant to pull any potential sting out of his teasing. It always works.
Simon’s lucky Rocky likes him. It helps that he had radiation poisoning, though he’s keeping that thought firmly to himself. Rocky’s crew apparently died from that, so Simon hit a sore spot for every Eridian, so it seems. The cynical part of Simon wonders if Rocky is using him as a squishy replacement for the care he couldn’t give his crewmates. After all, Simon is only valuable to Grace as another human to talk to and he’s only valuable to Rocky as a vehicle of second chances.
Those thoughts are forcefully shoved into the back alley of Simon’s brain and get their throats’ slit. It's a disservice to his new (only) friends in the entire universe. If there’s someone underhanded out of the three of them, it’s Simon.
Anyway.
They walk on the beach every morning - sometimes the three of them. Rocky chirrups about how he has five legs, and Simon and Grace and Grace’s cane put together also have five legs. That particular jab leads to all three of them spending the next hour dunking each other in the foamy surf. Usually though, the walk is just Simon and Grace, as Rocky is busy working on a thousand different ways to improve their lives just a little bit.
Despite purposefully letting himself rot in bed for months, Simon is stronger than Grace. So much so to a frightening degree. Grace apparently spent years slowly starving to death in a metal tube, which Simon can’t think about too closely without wanting to punch something. Meanwhile Simon is stocky- muscles used to hard labor. They had shit food in Eden, but it still had all the bits. Vitamins and shit.
The two of them sit on the gravel beach next to each other, sides barely touching. Simon wonders if he could pull a Rocky, who punts Grace to the ground and clambers all over him. His skin itches at the thought of pushing Grace down and laying on top of him like a weighted blanket. Shifting his weight carefully, he stares at the ocean and does none of that. Instead, he focuses his aching eyes on the far distance.
The Eridians doctors gave him eye exercises: look up, look to the side as far as possible. They fuc-fudging built him statues rising out of the ocean at different distances. He's supposed to look at each one for 20 seconds, blink, and then the next one.
Apparently staring at screens and things only a few feet in front of his face for most of his life fully wrecked his eyes. Who knew?
Simon stares at statues of fish and trees and good things, painted in colors Eridian’s don’t understand just because they want him to be happy. He tears up and he pretends it’s from the exercises.
Grace leans on Simon, most days. Simon tries not to show how sweaty and insane he feels when Grace’s arm rests on top of his own, like they’re in Pride and Prejudice (which Adrian loves and so Simon’s sat through three different versions of in the last week alone because holy shit he has people to do things with now).
They walk the beach. Grace talks and Simon grunts out responses.
No one here knows he was a fuck-up, miraculously enough. Simon was asked twice where he came from: once by Grace and once by his main Eridian doctor - a grey igneous stone with kind claws and a whistling symphony of a sound that led to Grace calling the man Kettle, which had stuck.
He stayed stubbornly silent both times.
They don’t know about the Quiet Rapture or the blood or that he’s a killer and they’re never gonna know because he’s not stupid enough to tell them. They know he comes from a different universe. Rocky told him how the Eridian’s found his submersible crashed on a local moon. The space program is booming on Eridian apparently. Rocky talked about some science mumbo jumbo Simon let wash over him like a tide.
Long story short he’s got some sort of plasma particle around him that shows he’s not from this dimension or whatever. He doesn’t care. The particles dissipated over time. Like a cuckoo from a nest, he tricked others to take him in and he’s going to do his damnedist to stay that way. The only times he thinks of home - of Eden and the blood and desperation baked into his bones - is when he wakes up screaming bloody murder.
A few weeks into his “waking up,” Grace invites him over for coffee.
“It’s not really coffee, or tea,” Grace natters in his cozy living room after gesturing Simon to a chair festooned with pillows. “It’s hot water with minor chemical manipulation to activate certain human taste buds. It’s an effort to keep us stimulated and mentally engaged, I guess. Which, I won’t complain. It used to be way worse. The first effort was this powder that just made things taste sour, and not in the fun way. But last week they whipped up this one I'm calling mint-adjascent and it’s pretty good. Well…”
Grace trails off, steaming kettle of freshly boiled water in hand. He does a little waggle dance that feels half his own affectation and half copied from the Eridian dance of happiness.
Soon enough there’s a thick ceramic mug in front of Simon, steaming and inviting. He takes a sip. It’s astringent and mildly tingly.
Grace sips his own mug, immediately yelps at the heat, sets the mug down on the table, and then picks it up again. “I wanted to talk to you about something kind of- It’s not ideal.”
“You kicking me out?” Simon says, gravelly and half serious.
“WHa- no!” Grace splutters.
Simon takes another deliberate swallow, heat searing. “Well as long as it’s not that, it’s all fine.”
Grace sighs, pushing up his glasses. “Well I think it’s fine but. Look, you’ve been on liquid food for the entire time you’ve been here, but the doctors think things are good enough for you to eat normally again. They haven’t said anything because Eridian’s are weird about eating. Well. Most of them, except for Rocky, that little freak-” he shakes his head. “I’m getting ahead of myself.”
“The food we have here is synthesized from the few plants sent along with me for enrichment and testing, the taumoeba, and well, from me. It’s grown in a lab, but I'm eating a lot of -uh- human based protein.”
Simon finishes his mug slowly, before crooking up his lips into a half smile. His ability to smile feels even more rusty than his shitty broken eyesight.
“You’ve got a dumb name for it, don’t you?”
Grace turtles into his collar. “I’ve been calling it me-burgers. WHa- Why are you laughing? I’m trying to be sensitive you jerk!”
It hurts to laugh. Like there’s still something growing in his lungs that he’s hacking up with every inhale. It feels so so good.
“Why not Soylent Grace?”
Grace balks. “How do you even know that reference?”
Simon reaches over and tips half of Grace’s forgotten cup of “tea” into his own empty cup. “Rocky’s movie nights. We’re on a dystopian kick.”
Grace makes a halfhearted effort to swat Simon away from his mug. The brief touch of his fingers (clean nails, soft pads of skin) make Simon’s hands tingle like his tongue. The now half-empty mug cools faster, so when Grace goes for a drink he doesn’t sputter and choke again.
“Rock’s such a bad influence. I know he was pressuring you about learning swear words from your dimension. He pretended he cared about the etymology of all things, as if he isn’t the bluntest engineer I’ve ever known…Anyway. Does it bother you? The me-burger thing? Because if it does, well I gotta be honest we don’t have a ton of options, but we’ve got time to maybe figure something out.”
Staring into Grace’s eyes - bright as any star and giving off more warmth, Simon thinks of those quack priests again - reading from torn bibles, saying the words of the eucharist. They'd hold up stale loaves of bread, the sourest of wines, and it would transform into the body and blood of Christ.
Whether or not that was a literal transubstantiation was up for debate and had led to one priest shivving the other in the mess hall when SImon was eight, but he remembers the crumbly feeling of bread in his hands, dipped into wine - given for thee. How it felt to eat something holy to make him new from inside out.
He wants Grace in between his teeth right fucking now. He wants Grace down his throat, in his guts.
He drinks the rest of his tea.
“Yeah. s’okay.” Simon nods, hair flopping into his eyes.
Time passes.
Simon and Grace play tag on the beach. Rocky and Adrian try too, but they aren’t persistence predators. The Eridians both end up starfished on the beach within a half hour, turning into obstacles for the humans to climb over. Rocky, will occasionally roll around to trip Simon up if it looks like Grace needs help. It’s good. Simon can’t remember the last time he’s done something for fun before, without anything else.
He goes swimming. The Eridians freak the fuck out. Grace doesn’t like swimming much. He likes staring at the water with a hot cup of something in his hand and a book in the other, but Simon likes the water. Maybe it’s immersion therapy or whatever the laptop says about pop psychology. The Eridian-made ocean is cold and refreshing - controlled by people who love Grace and, he’s come to admit, like Simon at least a little bit.
When he’s done he climbs out of the surf exhausted and collapses next to Grace on the set out towel. He shakes his too long hair and Grace squawks in fake affront. Simon allows himself to pretend he’s more tired than he is and collapse, bowed head touching the ground at Grace’s feet where he’s sitting. Grace usually tells him about the book he’s reading (not real paper - but something synthesized - an e-book turned real book so humans have something nice and tactile to touch.)
Some days, Simon overshoots things and ends up sprawled over Grace's legs. The feeling of rough cloth on his bare chest, warm human legs shifting under him, it's a lot. He hangs his head down so he doesn’t need to control his expression. The gravel of the beach is watered with more than the water from their fake wave pool.
Grace lives up to his name. He doesn’t seem to notice the change and lets Simon lay there as he tells him about supergravity whatever the fuck…fudge he’s going to teach his students. They stay like that for hours.
At night, Simon sleeps in a side room of Grace’s house. He has the option of his own house, or even having his coma room turned into a proper dwelling, but there are too many memories there. Those walls were his false heaven, which he didn’t realize how paperthin that happiness was until now, until his debates with Adrian over shitty movies, or the Eridian doctor he managed to trick into friendship and talk about plants with for hours, or until Grace.
One night finds Simon in the living room, hunched over another mug of “tea.” This one is citrus-y. Grace named it Tang-lite but Simon’s been calling it Ghost-Lime. They’re waiting to see which name sticks.
The lights are on. Neither of them do well in the dark even though the Eridian’s gave the dome a proper day/night cycle for proper sleep schedules. Neither human has been able to convince the Eridian’s that sleep cycles are made to be broken.
The window is open. The outside air is one degree Celsius colder than the inside air. There’s a cross breeze somehow. Neither of them do well with the doors closed.
Neither of them talk about either of these things.
Close to midnight, Grace yells from his bedroom.
“No! Don’t touch me! I don’t want to go. I don’t-”
He cuts off with a cry. There’s the rustling sound of sheets. Half a minute later, he stumbles through the door, into the living room where there’s more light.
Simon stays frozen. He was always more fight than freeze, but he’d never hurt Grace. Grace’s wild eyes and sleep rumpled sweats are showing his soft underbelly - something that in Eden would suggest the perfect time to push in a knife and twist. Simon wants to do the exact opposite of that.
The air is full of rasping breaths. Grace isn’t wearing his glasses, but he spots Simon anyway. He nods, tries to get control of his breathing. Fails.
Simon debates. He could call for Rocky - but Rocky is 20 minutes away on a good day, and it’s in the middle of the Eridian sleep cycle which means paralysis.
Think. Stop being stupid and think. Simon has no job, has nothing he’s doing to contribute for all that’s been done for him. How can he help Grace right now? Grace who has his arms wrapped around himself, who is pacing, and keeping his back to the wall, and pulling at his hair.
What does Simon wish would happen to him, when he wakes up feeling ready to drown?
Slowly, so slowly he’s barely moving, he rises from his chair. Setting down the mug, he keeps his hands empty, open and visible.
“Hey Grace,” he says, low and soft. “Hey Grace, come here.”
He gets close, beckons with his hands outstretched.
Grace hesitates, but then, steps faltering, he gingerly falls into Simon’s embrace.
The hug is awkward. Grace hugs Simon gingerly, as if he’s a poisonous sea urchin. Meanwhile Simon’s brain somehow clicks into the fact that this is a hug a minute into it and starts clinging on for dear life like a koala in a forest fire.
…Man, Simon’s got to stop watching nature documentaries with Rocky at 3 AM.
They end up slumped over on the couch. Simon’s on top of Grace. He presses his face hard into the softness of Grace’s shoulder and chest, hard enough his nose bends awkwardly. He keeps rubbing his cheek against him, fingers grasping at his back. It would be awkward if Grace wasn’t responding in turn. There’s wetness in Simon’s hair. He can feel the hitching breaths of Grace crying. It sounds like good crying though - quiet, relieved. The kind Grace gets when he hears how the Eridian sun is recovering, or when he gets claw marked statues from his students.
Simon crooks his legs, intertwining with Grace’s until he’s effectively locked him down underneath him.
“This is…” Grace babbles, “I mean I don’t want.”
Immediately Simon unlatches his leg, which just makes Grace shriek and cling harder.
“No! Don’t let go.”
“Okay,” It’s easy as breathing to press Grace down again. Everything soft slots together: warm and mammal comfort. “Okay.”
“I had a whole speech prepared, when the Eridians found another human. Some of them thought…well they thought two humans together would… and I didn’t want to say anything but…”
“They thought we’d have an Adam and Eve situation? Oh yeah, you’re a real ladykiller.” Simon says dryly. His sarcasm is only slightly undercut by the fact his voice is muffled in Grace’s neck and has no desire to move. If anything, he wants to lick, but that would probably be the opposite of where this conversation is heading.
“I mean, yeah, I guess. Eridians are social creatures, almost more than us - they have to sing together or go crazy, which is why Eridian ships are built to reflect voices and create the illusion of a larger thrum and social group.”
Grace has his teacher voice on which just makes Simon feel even more jittery. His biceps flex and Grace loses half a lungful of air as he’s squeezed. He pats soothingly on Simon’s back.
“Humans are more touch orientated than anything else, and so when they found you, a lot of them thought we’d fall into…something. If nothing else out of obligation. I kept thinking how scary it would be waking up from a coma to be surrounded by aliens wanting you to bond with someone. It’s like a bad Harlequin novel. And once I mentioned it, I thought things would be weird, so I never…but you should know I don’t. That is. I like this a lot. A lot, a lot. But I don’t necessarily think we need to- that is-”
“We’re not gonna fuck, Grace.”
Grace spasms at Simon’s bluntness. The feel of the muscles shifting underneath him makes Simon want to bite down again. One of Grace’s arm’s leaves Simon’s back, presumably to cover his eyes the same way he likes to fiddle with his glasses.
“Okay but you don’t have to do this either. Comfort me. We’re going to be roommates for the next 40 years, or more if we’re lucky. I don’t want you dancing around things, not saying things.” Grace pauses to breathe shallowly. “You don’t exactly say much, bud.”
Simon grits his teeth hard enough to strain the enamel. He debates letting go of Grace to have this conversation face to face. Then decides he’s not brave enough for that, and instead looks at Armando - who’d been watching their dumb human tussle on the floor this entire time.
“Where I come from. It’s bad. It's a bad place, only getting worse, with no Hail Mary to save it.”
Grace freezes. Simon squeezes harder and doesn’t let up as Grace relaxes into him.
“It was really bad all the time. And when I woke up here I thought, well I thought a lot of shi-stuff. And one thing I thought later on, was that I would do anything, be anything, if I could stay here. I’d kill whatever, I’d do whatever - to pay off my debt, for being here. But you don’t want that. No one here wants that.” Simon moves his hand up to rub at Grace’s hair just because he can, because Grace is allowing it. It feels like absolution. “I don’t ever want to go back to that place. I want to stay here with you. Whatever that looks like. I don’t need to fuck someone, to love them. Sorry.”
“Why are you apologizing?” Grace says, voice watery again.
“Dunno. Seemed the thing to do.”
“Well, stop.”
“Okay.” Simon paused, considered. “Can I lick your neck?”
“What? No. Maybe. No. Let me think about it.”
Simon fully relaxes on top of Grace, listening to the comforting beat of his heart. “Okay.”
“I’m glad you’re here.” Grace says. “I’m glad we’re both here.”
Simon grunts. There’s no word to describe the feeling bubbling up in his chest. The feeling that, Heaven or Rapture or no, him being here was a small miracle that he could never conceive of. That this embrace was better than any heaven his puny brain could construct. That he could provide comfort to someone, and not just be comforted in turn.
In the morning, Grace complains about back pain and they float the idea of building a bigger mattress before walking out in the Eridian-made sunlight.