Chapter Text
Having a new ‘resident’ on the Mary was... strange.
Even more unnatural was that he was pretty sure it was his soulmate on board. One that was light-years away from Earth. And who burst in like a demon about to drag both Grace and Rocky to hell, all bloody and monstrous-like.
After the initial wake-up, in which the man had seemed delirious and yet scarily conscious of his surroundings, going bonkers as soon as he saw his pendant and then passed out right after, Grace had waited a bit longer in the hopes of catching the man awake again.
But perhaps he had woken up by sheer luck (or pure instinct) because even after a few days, the man was still lying unresponsive in the med bay. He tried to monitor his healing as much as he could, but aside from listening to Armando's reports and reading the numbers from the terminal, he didn't truly know what to do other than twiddle his thumbs.
He wasn't a doctor. Molecular biologist? Astrophage? Breeding cells? Call him in, he’d dance with those babies at any time of the day. But disease and body health? Mutated metabolism and a failing immune system? Hell no. In theory, he knew a few things; in practice, he could just about put a band-aid on an injury and clean a scratch with antiseptic.
Still, Rocky insisted that he stayed by the man's side for a while, till he woke up. For the man’s safety, Rocky had said (he had intoned ‘soulmate’ but Grace had elected not to hear him).
What a farce! The first time the man had woken up, he would have probably tried to tear Grace's fingers off with his bloody teeth if he had the chance, fury madly glinting in his eyes. He hadn't looked human at all. If Grace hadn't seen the way the other's skin was rosy and pale under his straining muscles and black veins, he probably would have driven the screwdriver he'd had in his pocket straight into the other’s heart!
Instead, he had dumped that accursed pendant, which he had found around his neck for fudge sake, into the other's palm and then collapsed back on the chair, hyperventilating as the man fell back into unconsciousness. His skin had ripped in some parts, long lines crisscrossing everywhere he looked, a map of pain and suffering, and he was sluggishly bleeding red once again.
It was only when the man's features had ‘relaxed’ that he called Armando to try and patch whatever the robot could, and then sternly said he was muting his damn voice function for fear of scaring the man to death if he ever woke up to those stupid mathematical questions. If Armando had human eyes, Grace knew the robot would have looked deadpanned. The way he had silently slunk back into the wall had sounded almost like a pouting teenager being privated of his favourite toys. Whatever. Grace probably extrapolated a bit too much on every object of the Mary at this point. Solitude, oh dear solitude…
Grace had then spent some more time trying to calm himself, elbows on his knees, back bent forward, and his glasses almost falling to the floor while he looked at the man's hand, clasped tightly around the pendant. He doubted he'd even be able to wrench that thing away without needing to use pliers or just cut all of his fingers off from how tightly the tree sample was held. Not like he would try that, he wasn't that crazy.
No. What he agonised over once again was the fact that, after he tried to take a stressful nap after dumping the body into the med bay bed, he woke up with an extra weight around his neck. When he'd looked down, he had seen the pendant innocently lying against his chest like it was at its rightful place. He didn't remember wearing any jewellery before, and the crude way the resin had been designed spoke of a handmade pendant rather than the more perfunctory but elaborate accessories he had seen inside a small ornate box while he was riffling through the Mary's storage.
It hadn't taken a genius to know it was once again a soulmate shenanigan.
That thing was worsening each time it happened.
A bit of blood in his pocket? Why not. A bandage appearing in his bed? Not ideal, but alright. The map inside the box? It was a bit more random, but at its worst, it was suspiciously innocent.
However, now he had a whole pendant suddenly popping around his neck? A whole body dumped inside the storage room?? That was worrying and absolutely terrifying. It entrenched every little study scientists had ever managed to theorise and demonstrate back on Earth about soulmates. The consensus had been that the soulmate shenanigans were inexplicable with science, more in the range of ‘magic and paranormal affairs’, but it never broke (too much) universal rules of physics!
Some thinking links? Yeah. Some small teleportation tricks? Sure. Mimicking movements based on their own body? Why not!
Now, a pool of blood and a body???
And how did the pendant 'innocently' aim perfectly right for his neck and ‘conveniently’ fall around his shoulders, gently tucked beneath his chin without snatching his glasses or awkwardly resting on his head? It felt more like someone had put the jewellery on him than soulmates dumping each other's things like every other happenstance. Even the dreaming sharing had been messy!
This didn’t look messy anymore. It looked deliberate, out of proportion, and… unnatural (soulmates were natural, right?).
And then, the coup de grace to his ever-growing pile of worries: that man was indeed his soulmate. The way he had reacted to that pendant had been damning enough.
Grace didn't think more of it, slamming the door shut and planting his feet on the ground, willing the door to stay closed. And then he let himself grieve for a bit more over the dawning nature of that man’s fate tied to his by destiny’s design. That man probably was dangerous, smelled trouble and danger. Grace probably should have left him to die instead of listening to his pleas while still covered in gore. It would have made everyone happier and everything much easier. What was he to do now? He wasn't made to tame a beast.
He wondered what was worse, having an unreachable soulmate light-years away from him, or a monster for a soulmate.
Ultimately, what did that mean? Was his soul so rotten that his 'match' could only be a mutated thing?
Well, despite his best intentions and his promises to Rocky, he hadn't been able to stomach one and a half days with the man's resting body nearby.
At least it was confirmed that he had some super healing going on. He didn't know if it was a good idea to let it do its thing. A fully rested, healthy and powerful body against a normal human being (weak and squishy by Rocky’s standard) and an Eridian whose hamster ball was the only thing preventing said being from dying in a toxic atmosphere.
Yeah, they would be fine.
Still, after the second day of no response, he had thrown his arms up and walked away from the med bay.
Rocky had looked at him reproachfully and refused to talk to him for a few hours, ignoring all of his attempts to engage in friendly conversation, which made Grace feel even worse. He tried to explain to Rocky that he just couldn't stay idle like that, that he was useless when the man was passed out, probably in a coma. The Eridian ended up relenting, chirping back to him after Grace's voice trembled, on the verge of sobbing, weighed by the feeling of isolation and the sudden silence treatment by his last one good thing inside the Mary.
It still didn't erase Rocky's disappointment in Grace, and that hurt much more than anything else, but they were back to exchanging ideas and watching movies together. He was also allowed a tight, long hug, and Grace finally felt a lot better through the mess of his emotions.
It plummetted once again when he was in the commander's room, though, when Mary said with a sort of prudence and caution, which he hadn't expected the voice to have, that there was ‘suspect movement detected in the lab department’. Sharing one glance with Rocky and dutifully ignoring the Eridian's ire, Grace had decided to go back down the lab, leaving Rocky to seethe alone, but protected in the commander's room while he went to investigate, already expecting the worst.
He should have expected that it would come out bloody, literally so. He hadn't expected a smooth conversation or much cordiality, but he had been hopeful. In a way, it did. And in so many other ways, it had sucked.
First of all, when he had come down the commander's room and slowly made his way towards the med bay, he stumbled straight into the other man, and God did he look horrible. If the very first time, all the gore was pretty much concealed by the thick layer of blood, and when in the med bay, Armando had been quick enough to patch and conceal most of his injuries with bandages, his robotic arms zipping everywhere, now there was nothing to conceal the extent of the gore.
Even with the relative cleanliness of his skin, there were just so many gaping holes and bloody wounds that he even had one on his cheek. Added to that the man's glare and the way he panted, heaving and coughing blood, he looked like a dead man walking.
And then their stilted conversation. It felt a bit one-sided, to be completely honest, or perhaps they were having two very different conversations at the same time. Grace was not a monster. He had seen the way the man was trembling and about to keel over anytime, and so he had tried desperately to convince him to go back to the med bay, and then just on the floor of the lab, because how did he manage to drag his mangled body up the ladder without breaking every one of his bones to shreds?
His fears of having welcomed a monster more than a human were put to the test when he saw the 'man' rage on, slamming his fists on the desk and dumping everything on the floor like one of his kids throwing a tantrum, kicking the back of their classroom table whenever they felt that their punishment was unfair.
But then, guilt and empathy were thrown into the mix and made him swallow back his own anger when he saw that same man slump against the chair, despirited when he said he didn't know, he truly didn't know, about that black box. And then he began to cry, and Grace just...
He sighed and thunked the back of his head against the wall behind him, slightly cursing when he inadvertently let the laptop he'd put on his lap slip to the side and almost noisily collapsed to the ground, again.
He quickly looked up, shoulders raised against his ear as if caught red-handed, but either the man was truly out cold, or he had managed to mitigate the noise enough that aside from a small sleepy snort, the man stayed lying on the ground, unresponsive.
He eyed the soaked bandages worriedly. He was no doctor, but still, he would have preferred the bandages to be changed (preferably by Armando), but stuck in the lab like this, his options were pretty limited, and he feared leaving the man a second time. He had already broken his promise once, he would not go against his words a second time.
At least the blood seemed to have stopped spreading.
.
.
.
Annnnd, back to overthinking again as soon as his eyes landed on the man's prone form.
The speed at which he healed truly was astounding, and the scientist in him couldn't help but be awfully curious about the phenomenon.
He shook his head, berating himself for the awful thoughts he's just had. There was a whole difference between analysing and testing the astrophage and on a human being.
...Or, was there...? After all, the astrophage had been considered an alien, a living being, made of water, right...?
He looked at the ceiling and abruptly stopped his line of thought like a sharp slap to the hand.
The man clearly was human. The way his face had crumbled into deep sorrow as soon as he heard of this black box's fate couldn't be faked. Whatever the man had gone through, it painfully showed, literally and metaphorically so.
And so he put a hand on his chin, elbow digging into his lifted knee and waited. The sluggish wounds had already begun to close, and Grace was only slightly disturbed by the normalcy with which he had said that.
He sighed.
And he waited.
.
.
.
So the third time was always the charm, he supposed, because Grace saw some shifting from the prone body at his side not long after. Perhaps it had been a few hours, though the laptop had completely died by now and couldn't display how much time had passed. He only knew because of how much his back hurt from sitting on the floor without stretching.
He watched as the man moved. He had turned at some point in his sleep so that he was facing Grace, but strands of his hair concealed his expression, obscuring most of his face. Still, he could see from afar that the biggest stretches of torn muscles and flesh had healed, and now there only remained streaks of bubbly red skin, like fresh rosy scars. One diagonal cut the man's face in two, crossing both of his eyes.
He gulped at the reminder of the gruesome sight he'd been greeted with when he’d entered the lab.
When the man began to blink, one arm squished beneath his cheek and the other curled against his chest, Grace forced a smile on his face, trying to radiate warmth, comfort and reassurance that he didn't feel at all.
"Hey," he said, not really knowing what to say more. He scrambled for ideas: "You slept for a while, that's good," he lamely finished.
The man froze at his voice and his half-lidded eyes snapped open, directly laser-focused on Grace. He tried his best not to be spooked by the black and red pupils, nor the way the man was staring at him, a myriad of emotions flashing across them. He hoped there were more positive than negative. He watched his face contort in a grimace of pain, then it suddenly slackened, before tensing back, then once again it relaxed in brief relief before settling on something more calculating and carefully neutral.
Grace felt another wave of guilt hit him. If the man had been anything but human, he wouldn't have been able to read anything on the man's face. Yet, here, it was all displayed like an open book. There was hurt, there was fear, there had been anger and insult, challenge and defiance, weakness and pain...
He felt particularly bad at having doubted the man's humanity, driving one more nail into the man's coffin when he had asked, in a small, suspicious voice, if he had truly been human.
He cleared his throat and tried to slowly cross his legs and he scrunched up his face when the back of his knees and his hips refused to cooperate. He didn’t even feel his butt anymore…
"Seems like you healed quite fine, I don't have much medical equipment, but from what Armando said, he didn't even need to use all our resources, your body did all the job for him," he said instead, trying to find a way to begin a conversation without feeling too forced.
What he said was also very much true: he had been surprised by the scarcity of the man’s needs even on the verge of death. He had kind of dreaded having to use a good portion of their valuable medicine stored inside Armando, though he knew they were aplenty for the whole trip to Erid, but instead, the robot had just wrapped the man in gauze like a mummy and pretty much called it a day.
Perhaps he should have worded it differently, because instead of sounding relieved, the man’s expression turned thunderous, but he didn't say anything. He just brought his arm close to his face, slowly turning it and flexing his fingers.
Thankfully for both of them, the skin stretched, but did not tear.
"Do you... remember anything?" Grace asked again, after a moment of silence.
"What are you going to do with me?" the man demanded instead.
Grace should probably feel a bit more frustrated about the bluntness of the man's voice, but he could almost feel a deep tiredness and fear underlining his words that made Grace back down after being interrupted for the third time in a row. In three different encounters. In a row.
Though, to tell the truth, the man did raise a good question.
"I don't know," he truthfully answered and before the other could speak again, he barrelled on: "I'm going to repeat myself but I wasn't really given a choice. You just appeared there," he pointed at the storage room's door and the man slowly followed where he was pointing at after one last long stare, as if wondering if he was going to regret leaving Grace out of his sight for a few seconds, "You literally appeared there. One second, I was minding my own business, then poof, I got a bloody bag of flesh at my feet."
"And what-"
"I also have questions for you," he cut off once again, but quickly amended, "Listen, you're safe for now. As long as you don't attack us, we won't harm you. We aren't..." he gestured at his own face to try and encompass the whole bloody gore on the other's body. "We don't want to be involved in your mess, but you... You were in a dire situation. We weren't going to ignore that," he shrugged, losing his vehemence as he talked.
Grace could still hear the man's broken plea as if he were still having a nightmare. Gosh, the last time he'd slept, he dreamed of something tinged in red. It hadn't been a peaceful sleep.
But he supposed that if he had ignored the man and left him to die in the storage room, there would have been more than someone whispering pleas in his dreams.
"Ah, and please, give back the screwdriver. The least we can do here is no weapon at all. That includes any sharp and pointy objects," he said while stretching a palm up expectantly.
As expected, the man's expression soured instantly.
Did he really think Grace hadn't realised his favourite screwdriver was missing from the mess on the desk?
Well, perhaps he would have if he hadn't been clutching at it when the man had dropped from the recesses of someone’s guts and onto his pristine, cosy storage floor. He didn't keep track of all objects in the Mary despite the ship being small enough, but the screwdriver had been his only reassurance for the first few days since the man came in.
While staring back at the man with unblinking eyes, he silently scrambled to try to remember every blunt or dangerous object in the vicinity.
Thankfully, other than lab equipment, there wasn't really much thing that could be used as weapons... Even the cutlery he used for eating was plastic, since most of their food was packaged, dried things that lasted years without an expiry date. And at least, the small flammable gun was in his bedroom and thank god the man would have to climb up a second ladder before attaining it. He mentally grimaced at taking advantage of the man's handicap, feeling like the lowest scumbag on Earth for thinking that, but he did not want a weapon near any of them.
"The screwdriver, please," Grace repeated a little bit tenser than before. God, please make the man see the way he did: they wouldn't be able to do anything if any of them held something that could hurt the other...
The man glared back. Silent.
Refusing to cooperate.
Sighing frustratingly, he muttered a small 'alright' and shifted to be a little bit more comfortable seated on the floor. His butt and lower back screamed at him in retaliation, but he straightened himself and very narrowly avoided clapping his hands in the way he did every time he needed to get back to seriousness after a wayward question in class, a desperate attempt by his middle schoolers to skip their tests and exams. Instead, he stopped himself just midway through the motion and gently placed his hands palms against palms, like he was almost praying.
Or begging. The second interpretation was very much appreciated.
Internally, he was a little bit.
"Okay, let's start on an easier basis," he said after letting out a long breath under the man's unwavering stare. "I'm Ryland Grace, hi. What's your name?"
"... What are you playing at?" he only shot back.
"Please work with me, I'm trying to be cordial and to make it work," he snapped back, but closed his eyes and asked again, "Please. Would it hurt you if I knew your name?"
Probably caught in a corner, between staying cordial and admitting that he was famous enough that his name would trigger Grace in the worst way possible, he reluctantly answered: "Simon."
Uh, that was a pretty... common name. Grace blinked. He truthfully had expected a more… Obscure and scary name? Not Simon the Rabbit from children’s tales that some of his mid-schoolers liked to watch.
"Okay, Simon. We're on the Hail Mary, a small spaceship that's going towards Erid as we speak. We're not a danger to you. My friend is called Rocky, we're only two aboard, and we haven't encountered anyone aside from you since we began travelling. As you probably saw, there is no weapon here."
He made sure to slowly get up, telegraphing each of his movements was slow and obvious to the other. Not too slow to sound as if he was belittling the other, but slow enough like he was still unsure about how the other, Simon, would react if he did more than a few steps to the side.
Whether the man accepted it or decided to ignore it entirely wasn’t really clear, but Grace would take whatever he could as long as the man stayed relatively calm.
With both his hands visible, he began to show that his t-shirt was... a t-shirt, and that there were no protrusions under it, nothing hidden or concealed behind, he turned his pockets inside out and even went back to sit and removed his sneakers and socks, wriggling his toes at their newfound freedom.
"I am wearing nothing," he finally exclaimed when he did his thorough investigation. "You, on the other hand, are holding something that could threaten mine and my buddy's safety. I swear I'm not going to hurt you, and I want to be sure you won't hurt us. Please give back the screwdriver."
He stretched out his hand again. He felt a bit underdressed now, having pockets unturned, feet out and feeling the cold of the floor seeping inside the soles of his feet (yes, he was sensitive to the cold, he couldn't help it! He missed his scarf, beanie and gloves during the chill morning at the crack of dawn). He truly felt like an idiot as well, expecting the other to casually drop a potential weapon while not being certain of the other's innocence either.
That much blood never boded well. He knew the risks, his experience from watching so many movies would have told him to just sedate the man and be dealt with the thorn at his side once and for all, but… he just trusted his instincts more.
And right now, they told him that the man was more than a beast and a mindless monster. And if worst came to pass, he knew Rocky was actively listening to everything that happened, just beyond the lab door that led to the commander's room. While the man had been passed out and Grace had sworn that he wouldn't leave him, sticking to his side, Rocky had grown worried as minutes passed by without Grace coming back. And so he'd ambled back to the lab after a long hour. He’d been silent enough, and peering over the entrance, he’d seen Grace sitting on the floor and against the wall, bent over his laptop.
Upon seeing him, Grace had waved his hand and pointed downwards towards Simon's limp form, mouthing the words 'I'm fine, I'm watching over him'. The Eridian had hummed happily, but when he had tried to come inside the room, Grace had vehemently shaken his head and then mouthed a 'still spooked and injured'. Rocky wasn't able to see the obvious red stains on the blankets surrounding Simon, but he probably saw more of the man's insides, or the extent of his injuries, because he froze in his steps and finally turned around. Thankfully, the translator on his lap had his mic completely broken, but was still able to display the translation on screen, which said: "Will watch too, be careful, statement," and then he'd walked away, probably out of sight but certainly close enough to the door if anything happened.
So yeah, he wasn't too worried. Having a movable boulder that weighed almost two hundred kilograms at full running speed would probably squash Simon before he did serious damage to Grace.
Still, he sighed again when Simon only looked at Grace's hand, a slight hesitation in his eyes, but still predominated by wariness. He supposed he couldn't blame the man for being too cautious.
"You know that I'm going to stay like that until you give it to me, right?" he said in his most disappointed voice possible, hand flopping to the ground in frustration.
"How can I be sure you're not lying?" he only said back.
At least, the man seemed to have lost all of his brutal edge. Either sleep had managed to wake him up from his lucid nightmare, or the lack of pain, which had been evident during their two last conversations, had cleared his mind. He still looked awfully roughened up and not easily swayed. He also didn't spit blood on the ground or make another mess on the floor. Grace forced himself to solely look at the other man, and not at the huge stains that probably soaked his chair and around his desk.
That chair was probably unsalvageable, poor thing, he had loved lounging on it after a long day of research.
"And how can I be sure that you're not going to murder us in our sleep?" he parroted sullenly.
They glared at each other in silence.
It dawned on Grace that Simon hadn't denied his previous statement.
"We won't hurt you," he tried again.
"Sure. Then I won't either," Simon snarked back.
Grace scowled, Simon sneered.
.
.
.
Fine, he admitted it. He was the one who lost the staring battle.
He had legendary patience with kids, waiting silently with a mighty stare for his class to calm down so he could begin class. He tuned out loud, complaining parent while trying his damnest to convince them that no, they shouldn't get their children out of the education system because schools were ‘part of the government trying to convert their golden babies into soldiers’, and no mingling with other kids didn't mean that other children would try to jump on each other like horny teenagers, there were mid schoolers for fu-
And so on and so forth.
So yeah, Grace was used to stubborn people talking nonsense. That's what also cost him his place at the UNESCO, and taught him to tone down his big mouth. It taught him to give up when he saw there was no leeway, and he had to take a different route.
Right now, it felt like he had just met his match! Not in terms of sense and maturity, but in terms of being a stubborn son of a mother!
So yeah, he broke eye contact first, and he did not miss the way the other man tilted his head a little bit up, as if knowing perfectly well that he had won their little game-
It wasn't a game! It was a life-or-death threatening situation! Grace was actually trying to make the conversation advance, to lay down some basic human decency aboard his spaceship. Why did people not understand that when they entered someone else's property, they had to abide by the host's rules? He had tried to teach that to Rocky, who had more or less agreed but just did not respect most of them, which Grace attributed to the fact that Rocky wasn't technically human.
Simon, on the other hand, was clearly human in the fact that he behaved and talked and thought like a human being.
So why was Grace the one having to compromise?!
He briefly looked up at the ceiling, asking for patience, and readjusted his glasses once more on his face, more a force of habit than a necessity at this point.
He didn't know how long they were at it, but based on the way his feet were beginning to freeze, numb from the cold, he supposed they were in for a long while. He strained his ear to see if he could hear Rocky shuffling around, or a musical note that would indicate the Eridian moving, but only silence answered him.
"What do you want?" he finally blurted out, feeling more and more out of the loop and just... tired of all of that ridiculous face-off.
This wasn't how he had thought his day to begin, nor end. He missed the comfort of his storage-living room, since he hadn't been able to enter that damn place even though he scrubbed it clean and raw a few days ago. It felt like the iron stench had permanently gotten in the walls and each time he poked his nose inside, the smell was back, faint but still present and enough to make him shudder in discomfort. So he'd relocated to stay with Rocky at the lab or in the commander's room, which was not the most comfortable place to relax.
…Far from it actually. Staring at the radar and the line displaying their slow travel was… not a good way to spend his day.
This wasn't how he was planning to spend the rest of his travel to Erid: anxious, on his guard and restlessly looking over his shoulder in case he was about to die a frightful death.
And so he looked once again at Simon's face with the most deadpan expression he could muster, watching him try to work on the question he'd just asked.
"What I want...?" he repeated, frowning heavily.
Grace looked at him, bewildered and, honestly, a bit offended.
"Yeah. You don't want to give the screwdriver back, you don't want to answer my questions, you don't want to be healed apparently because that's what I'm trying to do, and you don't want to believe I'm telling the truth," he said, thrusting a finger up with each statement, "So, what do you want?"
Simon opened his mouth-
"And if you say you want your freedom, I heard you the first time. But I also want to be free from worry and that starts with this," he pointed at the man's pants, where he knew the screwdriver was. "Give it back, we get you healed and checked up, you get your freedom, I get my peace, bingo."
"How did you..."
Grace stared once again. Simon dutifully closed his mouth.
Still, he did not relinquish the screwdriver, damnit, but at least, the man had begun to slowly ease himself into a more comfortable seating position, back into the wall and limbs slowly stretching outwards, compared to his curled up position from before. The red patches around his eyes had not receded, but the red lines crossing on his arms were almost unpreceibtible now.
"So, you've got any answer? Because if you want something, we're not going to manage anything until then, you know?"
Not hearing an immediate answer made Grace almost angry and frustrated even more.
Without truly knowing what to do and fed up with sitting on the cold floor, beginning to shiver from the cold, having chucked off his wool cardigan on the side as proof of his good faith, he wrenched his glasses from his face, looked at them for a few seconds, and held them up in between them.
"Do you want my glasses? I can't see anything without them. You can even ask me how many fingers you have, I won't be able to answer. Is that what you want? So I can have my screwdriver back?" he waved the glasses around.
He didn't lie. While his vision was the worst up close, he also struggled to see much beyond a two-meter radius. Probably one of the consequences of reading too much late at night during his student days, bent over his papers and experiments, and then spending too many overnight hours grading all of these middle schoolers’ tests while helping with this or that school program until he fell asleep on his desk.
“I know you have a weapon. I literally stripped off to see that I’m harmless and you won't be harmed. What else you want me to do? I’m not asking for much, am I?! And we're not leaving till we get this figured out!”
He gestured at himself wildly, beginning to ramble without truly knowing what to say. He knew how to handle children. Not how to talk a man down from raising a weapon at him and de-escalating a tense encounter. He didn't want to infantilise a grown man, he knew it most likely would not be well received, but what else could he do but offer some trade?
Give him a sort of feeling of comfort, of reciprocity and common interest.
If Grace could be quick enough, he could dig his fingers into the man's face and the skin would easily give, inflicting enough pain, or worse, blind the man long enough to pin the other and retrieve the screwdriver himself. Not to mention the loss of balance and the asymmetry of the man's limbs could be used in his favour. A kick to the stomach, even bootless, could potentially crack a rib or two from how tender the man's body was.
But he was not this kind of man. First of all, he didn't like fights, he didn't even know how to throw a punch meant to hurt, only to protect, and even if he did manage to wrench the screwdriver from the man's hands, what would happen next? Terrible things, surely. And the fragile peace they'd managed to settle on, thanks to the man passing out, would be like a rug pulled beneath both their feet and sending them tumbling into a catastrophe of broken limbs and more blood. Inside the Mary, with the Taumoeba samples and Rocky and their only way to save Erid.
So yeah, no, he had to do it peacefully.
Easier said than done.
The man probably felt that if he were to give out the screwdriver, he'd be at a disadvantage. Like being stripped of their last line of defence against an enemy. So Grace can only try to match this level of weakness if he could ever hope to persuade the man that they were on equal grounds.
(He would not mention Rocky, but thankfully, either the Eridian trusted Grace with his half-baked plans, or he trusted his ability to neutralise any threat before the other could even move. Grace figured it'd be a mix of both, and he himself trusted Rocky with his life.)
"I can't give you much more if you do not give me something in exchange. Do you understand? Please do," he was rambling on and on and on, but he hoped the hysterics in his voice would translate to his growing sense of helplessness in the wake of their standstill.
He couldn't see much aside from a silhouette and the man's general features, but he thought he saw the man frown. Or perhaps he was grimacing or was shocked. Or anything else. He couldn't tell.
On instinct, he squinted his eyes and was about to put his glasses back on his nose, muttering a 'this is getting ridiculous' and about to call for Rocky to perhaps knock the man down by surprise (one of their last tactic they'd talked about while the man was first uncounscious, only used as a last resort scenario if the man was truly out for their blood), when he saw movement in front of him.
His heart almost jumped out of his throat in fear when he saw the man approach him with unnatural speed, suddenly looming over him, and he went to plaster himself against the wall in instinct, before the man's silhouette became clearer, a confused frown adorning his features. He lifted his hand towards Grace and slowly, he offered his palm up. A poor mirrored version of Grace’s first offer.
Dumbfounded, Grace let go of his glasses, putting them into the other's hand.
Before he could even regret his actions and ask for his glasses back, Simon's hand came behind him. Grace tensed, but slowly, the screwdriver was put back in his now empty hand.
And then Simon slithered back to his corner of the room.
From his blurry vision, Grace could see that he didn't lie back again: he stayed crouched, body ready to launch to the side if Grace ever came his way or something attacked him. He could guess that his eyes were slowly blinking, focused on trying to find any suspicious movement, slowly closing in on him.
The screwdriver in Grace’s hand felt weirdly warm inside his sweaty palm. He curled his fingers around it, saw the man shift from afar, but Grace made sure that he would only grip the object so that the pommel was standing straight and upwards, the pointed tip tilted downward. Then he put it gently on the floor and pushed it far away, making sure it crossed the floor until it clunked against the other side of the room. Away from both of them.
Silence followed. Grace could hear his own bated breath.
They both seemed to wait for the whole sky to fall on their head.
When the three-minute mark passed, and no one got blasted to pieces, it felt like a click echoed in the background. A metaphorical hitmark. A silent agreement.
Grace tried to smile. It came out tentative but broad, expressing all the relief he felt at the moment. Thank God he wore a black shirt because he did not need anyone to see the sweaty arcs forming under his armpits from the heavy tension in the room. He could almost visualise the brewing clouds slowly clearing in the air.
“What will you do in the med bay?” finally came the man's mutter after a while, startling Grace out of his self-congratulatory little mental singsong.
Grace realised that this was not a sign of trust, but of a truce. A tentative olive branch, which he scrambled to take with both his hands.
"Right! I just want to change your bandages and check your level of blood poisoning. You got some colours back, but I want to make sure nothing is in the way," he blinked himself out of the happy little trance he was in and shook himself to settle back into a more serious talk.
He pointedly eyed the rags that leaked blood under and around Simon's body. Not that he could see them, but the red colour was striking against the common white of the lab.
He had tried to enliven it all a bit with a few decorations, some taped notepads and sticky notes with a few different fluo colours, but the whiteness never completely receded, and he didn't want to blast through all of their resources for the time being just for the sake of his own comfort.
Instead, he had focused on writing some cheesy, corny and empty quotes about life and uplifting song lyrics he'd found in the Mary database and taped them a bit everywhere, like 'What doesn't kill you makes you stronger', or 'Don't look back, you're not going that way' (he had hesitated putting that one up, but in the end, he forced himself to anyway. It was both frustrating and cathartic to write it down. Not very pleasant to reread it once in a while, though, but if it hurt, it meant he still had grounds to work on. And so the post-it stayed).
(The worst of them all had been self-made ones: 'Keep Calm and Be Significant' with its twin just below, 'Keep Calm and Maintain Homeostasis'. He was very proud of those two.)
Still, the fluo colour now clashed with the muted, dark brownish blood coagulated on the wall and the corner in which Simon had slept. The blankets were now bundled and squished against the wall, after a few violent tosses during the man's restless sleep. Grace had hesitated trying to hold him down for fear of the man hurting himself, but thankfully, he had calmed down before he had come to a decision and didn't move anymore after his back was plastered against the wall.
It gave Grace a sour image of what the man had lived through before coming inside the Hail Mary, but he swallowed back any suspicion for now. He would get his answers in due time. For now, the man was tethering the edge of ‘fine’ and ‘absolutely mangled’.
"Can you get down the ladder on your own?" he asked instead.
Simon shifted, probably to look at where the ladder was.
"Sure," he said with so much nonchalance that Grace couldn't help but snort.
Not really mocking but disbelieving because yeah, sure. His bones had been about to burst out of his skin not even a few hours ago, and now he said he could easily take down a ladder? Walking down stairs was always harder than going up. Now, with a perpendicular ladder? Unbelievably stubborn and asinine.
He didn't mention it out loud, though. He guessed it wouldn't be very welcome advice and just merely nodded.
"Can I trust you at least not to kick me if I go first?" he asked.
Grace was pretty sure he could almost feel the shock radiating from the other man. He probably had expected Grace to tell him to go down first. Which would have put them on another dead end for a few more hours, back to glaring at each other without progressing a single inch. So no, Grace didn't ask him to go down first, but again, he also didn't mention Rocky just beyond the lab door if the man ever tried to make a run for it. Call it... silent deception. What he didn't know couldn't hurt him.
The man slowly nodded at Grace's inquiry, to which Grace lifted a finger and wagged it in warning.
"I trust you on that. We've come so far, please don't make me regret it," he said as he slowly crouched and then stood up.
He couldn't help but crack his back, wincing as he felt a few pops. Goddamnit.
He didn't get a verbal answer, so he turned towards where the man was still seated, looking up silently at Grace.
"Was I clear?" Grace insisted, putting his hands on his hips and jutting one on the side, tapping his feet.
Simon scoffed, but he still said a low, "Sure, yeah."
And then he slowly got up. Grace looked at him, shuffling his feet and feeling like scum for not at least offering the other a hand, but by the pained scowl the man sported, huffing and puffing out strands of wild hair away from his face, he knew he would only get anger and disdain at being offered help. Grace figured the inhuman speed at which he came into Grace’s face was mostly a show. That idiot probably burnt all of the energy he managed to recover from his small nap.
Instead, he just made a few steps towards the ladder and waited by the hole, picking at his nail while attentively listening to the man's fumbling, politely looking to the side.
The descent was more than awkward.
Grace hesitated before he reached the bottom of the ladder, wondering if he could stay close to the middle so that he could somehow try and prevent Simon from falling if he ever accidentally missed a bar, but when he looked up, all he saw was the man's hard gaze looking at him from the hatch’s edge.
Guess that was meaningless thinking then, and he reluctantly fully descended before looking up and making a 'come here' motion with his hand.
Simon took his time and just… skipped the last three bars, letting himself drop to the ground and making Grace's soul almost fly out of his body in fright. He prepared himself for the squelching sound of flesh giving away under the man's feet, bones cracking and a grunt of pain...
But none of that happened. Instead, the man landed on his feet, stumbled a bit, a bit unbalanced but quickly recovered his balance and then looked expectantly at Grace, a small prideful glint in his eyes, smugness radiating from all over his body at having survived his descent.
They went to the med bay with Grace shaking his head like a resigned parent looking after his charge.
Simon still had difficulty moving (which was even more frustrating to watch after the man had just casually thrown himself down a meter-high fall without so much as a warning), and even though the corridor to the med bay wasn't too long, it made the walk excruciatingly slow. Even worse was the deep silence surrounding them.
So Grace cleared his throat and began to explain what would happen. Just some standard scanner, no IRM (did they have any in the ship?) or anything restrictive, reapply bandages, give some nutrients in his body, yadda yadda yadda. He only repeated what Armando had told him the first time when assessing Simon's body, but if said man noticed his hesitant yammering as a way to fill the silence, he didn't mention anything.
He almost instinctively tried to right his glasses upright on his nose when he realised that they weren't there anymore, and he couldn't help but look at where Simon was walking beside him, a little bit behind. His glasses were hanging on the man's collar, absolutely useless to the man in question.
Catching his line of sight, Simon rolled his shoulders.
“You could have taken the screwdriver from me when I was asleep," Simon suddenly remarked and took Grace by surprise, cutting off his rant about the speed of the blood coagulation process. "Why didn’t you do it?”
Grace wasn't going to admit it was because he had been scared pantless that the man would snap his eyes open as soon as he got too close and chew his head off if he found Grace hovering close to him.
So he shrugged noncommittally and said, “Didn't seem fair. You would have freaked out, wouldn’t you?”
Simon didn't really smile, even with the corner of his lips twitching up, but his expression eased a bit.
It didn’t lose its tense edge, but it seemed more genuine and sincere.
He much preferred that to the bloody, toothy, sombre grimace from last time.
Grace will take that as a win…
.
.
.