Chapter Text
“Are you sure?” Grace asks, as if the fourth time is going to get a different answer from the first, second, or third.
To his credit, Simon does glance at the hatch Grace is hovering next to, some tiny part of him wanting to believe being in there could be better this time around. The med bay is as cramped and isolated as the SM-13 though, and given their last trip down there, Simon can’t imagine associating the place with anything remotely resembling relaxation.
“Yeah, I’m sure. You guys go. I’ll be down when I’m tired,” he lies, and tells himself the way the words sit like rot in the pit of his stomach is just that his body hasn’t quite made sense of the food here yet.
Not for the first time, Grace’s expression does something indecipherable. For as often as they misunderstand each other, the guy has a remarkable talent for leaving Simon feeling like the veneer has been peeled off what he was saying so that Grace could suss out what’s actually going on. He’s like one of those butterflies pinned to a board or something. A moth, maybe, something more strange than beautiful.
Whatever Grace finds must satisfy him. He abruptly offers up a lopsided smile. “Okay. Well, goodnight, then. C’mon Rocky.”
With that, Grace and Rocky head for the sleeping quarters, their descent marked by fading conversation.
Is bullshit.
“Doesn’t matter. Just let him be.”
Simon doesn’t actually mean to eavesdrop. It’s an impolite way to repay the kindness Grace and Rocky have shown him, so Simon sets off in search of some other distraction. The lab is decidedly not a great idea, and no matter how much wonder a universe full of stars holds, he’s never really been made for being idle for that long.
But… there are parts of the ship he hasn’t seen yet.
Simon sighs softly as he eyes the ladder headed up. It’s not like there are any other solutions forthcoming, so he eventually grabs the nearest rung and begins to haul himself up. He’s not sure if he’s mended in any appreciable way, but at the very least, keeping his balance comes a little more easily.
The first room is as confusing as it is disappointing. There’s a grating directly over the hatch that Simon ends up having to crawl out from under to get into the room, and the room itself is defined more by absence than anything else. It’s just a dark, blank space, without even the med bay’s drawers and cabinets to suggest what it’s used for. All the claustrophobia of being down there, and none of the interest, so Simon immediately moves on.
Now, this is more like it. Simon looks around in wide eyed curiosity as he climbs into the cockpit. It’s not a large space, but it’s hard to mind. There must be dozens of screens full of readings that mean… okay, they don’t really mean much to Simon, but they obviously mean something.
Two chairs are attached to tracks like the one ‘Armando’ slides back and forth on. One and a half chairs? One of them is a metal chair frame, but most of the actual seat appears to be melted. He’s not entirely sure he wants to know what happened.
The view out the window grabs Simon’s attention before he can think too much on it. There, amidst the endless stars, sits a large ringed disk. Erid, he assumes.
It’s nothing at all like any frame of reference Simon has. Before it blinked out of existence, Simon used to watch Mars out the windows of Eden, rust colored and deeply battle scarred, marred with white smudges at the poles. There are quite a few depictions of Earth on Grace’s quilt, obviously inaccurate, but he gets the gist of it. Green landmasses cluttering up blue oceans.
But Erid is just… sort of blank. No land masses. No water. Just blueish clouds Simon assumes must be the atmosphere. One side is bathed in starlight, the warmth of it making the atmosphere seem to glow. The other is so dark it seems almost absent, nearly invisible save for the chunk it eats out of the blue and amber rings wrapping around the planet.
On closer inspection, it’s not entirely blank. Instead, the cloudy atmosphere appears to settle in bands, atmospheric currents on display in shades of blue, streaked through with white. Regardless, it leaves the planet beneath all that cloud cover a mystery.
Simon practically has his face against the glass, straining to get a better look (as if another inch or two could possibly make a difference at this distance), when a sound from below startles him. He jumps back, stumbling over the singed chair shaped frame, just barely catching himself before falling over entirely.
So much for stealth. It shouldn’t matter. It’s just the three of them, except Grace and Rocky had gone to bed. A while ago, Simon thought. He can’t think of any reason they’d be looking for him now, which leaves… something else. His stomach clenches painfully as he stares at the open hatch, half expecting it’s going to be full of blood. Or worse.
Whatever it is, he sure as fuck doesn’t want to deal with it here. Maybe it’s just his imagination or at least something he can fend off. Whatever monsters haunt the blood ocean, surely they can’t get him here. Probably. Hopefully.
Cautiously, Simon peers down the hatch to find a figure crawling out from under the grating below, and breathes out a sigh of relief. It must be Grace, but given his apparent solution to hauling blankets up the ladder without losing use of his hands, he mostly just looks like a suspiciously fluffy blob. “What… are you doing?”
A muffled answer comes from under the blankets. Simon assumes it’s an answer, at any rate. It’s definitely some sort of vocalization, even if he can’t quite make out what.
Rocky cannot be in sleep room with Grace and other room with Simon.
“Turns out Rocky is pretty distraught he hasn’t worked out cloning yet,” Grace jokes as he - honestly pretty gracelessly - wriggles out from under his blanket pile, dumping it all in a heap on the grating. Rocky’s body language had seemed a little less lighthearted though, so Simon figures the little guy must take this ‘watch everyone sleep’ thing really, really seriously. Which… oh. He had assumed Grace passed out in the lab accidentally because he seems the sort to get carried away with a project, but maybe it was a calculated thing, for Rocky’s sake (and Simon’s).
“I’m not sleeping, though,” Simon protests weakly because for how much effort he’s put into not being an inconvenience to these two, he’s sure doing a bang-up job of it.
“No. Obviously,” Grace agrees entirely too quickly for Simon’s frazzled nerves to trust. He mutely watches Grace shake out the blankets, draping them across the grating until it looks like something that might actually be pretty comfortable to sit on. Grace does exactly that, pulling some sort of device from his pocket with one hand and waving Simon over with the other. “It’s just, we’ll be home tomorrow, and in all the excitement, I forgot to show you the best room on the ship.”
Simon doesn’t know that he actually buys that, but sits down all the same, keeping a careful few inches between his body and Grace’s. Grace pushes a button on what Simon realizes up close is a remote, and suddenly they’re no longer swallowed up in darkness. Instead, they’re surrounded by sound and light and movement, as if they’ve been picked up and dropped on the flat stone bank of a river, fed by a massive waterfall spilling down from a rocky cliffside. The whole place is a forest of some sort, their vantage point cradled by steep hills and some sort of tree Simon has never seen, but it’s the waterfall that gets his attention, leaving him staring, wide eyed, at the endless force of it all.
“Oh… shoot. I didn’t think. I forgot what I’d had it on last. We can change it!” Distantly, Simon realizes Grace is talking to him, kind of frantically, actually, but it’s only the last bit that actually sinks in.
“Wait, don’t!” Simon blurts out before he even realizes he’s spoken. Maybe it should be harrowing after where he’s been, but water and blood are blessedly distinct, and he’s never seen so much water in his life. Not even before most of the universe blinked out of existence. “It’s beautiful.”
“It’s the Lewis River Falls in Washington. I never went, but seeing it here, I kind of wish I had.” Despite the wistfulness of Grace’s words, he looks happy, hugging his knees to his chest and staring at some place that might as well be out of a fantasy novel for all Simon recognizes it. “You mentioned Earth was gone, but if you tell me where you lived before, maybe I can find some footage of it. If you want.”
Simon doesn’t answer at first, unsure what to say. It seems like the C.O.I. doesn’t exist here, and if Eden does, it’s certainly not the oppressive, looming thing it is in his universe. Simon wouldn’t want to see anything to do with either of them, anyway.
Grace seems to take his silence for displeasure, holding his hands up in surrender. “I didn’t think that through. If Earth is gone there, maybe it’d just be painful. Sorry. I- sorry.”
“I’m not from Earth,” Simon points out, not sure why Grace looks at him like he’s grown a second head.
Despite something about this clearly being difficult to swallow, to Simon’s relief, Grace accepts him at his word. “Where are you from, then?”
It’s another opening. He could tell Grace the truth about where he ended up, or about Eden at least. No matter how many times he tells himself it’s not important, that it’s not who he is, Simon can’t entirely hold off the guilt as he offers a more technical truth. “Mars. Before everything disappeared.”
“Mars?” If Simon didn’t know how utterly brilliant Grace is, he’d think the guy was living under a rock or something, because surely their worlds aren’t that different? “We colonized Mars? Well, you did? We haven’t even sent people there.”
Grace asking questions. Not good for sleep.
“It’s just a… fine. It can wait. Seems like a whiteboard kind of conversation, anyway.” The pained look on Grace’s face at the prospect of postponing learning about something is so comical Simon mostly forgets to be relieved that he’s dodged digging into his past for the time being.
“It’s okay, anyway. I’ve never seen this before. I can see why you like it,” Simon offers. It may not be home, but it is beautiful, and the rushing water is more soothing to listen to than Simon would have expected.
“Hang on. I have an idea.” It’s all the warning Simon gets before the room goes dark and quiet again. He’d be concerned if he hadn’t caught the edge of a smile just before the screen went blank. It’s not dark for long, and when the room lights up again, they’ve been set down somewhere else entirely.
Home.
“But I thought you said humans in your world haven’t gone there,” Simon murmurs, though he can’t tear his eyes away from the screen to look at Grace.
“Didn’t have to for this. We’ve got these remote controlled vehicles we call rovers. They take video and send it back.” There’s no sound, but Grace’s voice is a comforting accompaniment as Simon takes in the view. Rust red hills and valleys stretch out forever, giving way to a tawny sky. It’s vast and empty, but Simon can almost picture the network of biodomes that kept them safe from an unlivable atmosphere. A couple of decades isn’t enough to wipe out the memory entirely. How could it, when it was the last place he ever belonged?
It’s a compilation, each leaving a welcome sort of ache in his chest. Deep, slate colored sunrises and sunsets, echos of ancient rivers and lakes. Where someone might see a wasteland, all Simon can remember is the place it became. There’s no going back, but for a little while it doesn’t feel quite so far away.
“Thank you.” Simon settles in to watch. There’s nothing to lean back against, but hugging his knees is comfortable enough. This relaxed, he doesn’t even really startled when he realizes they’re back to back, Grace’s shoulders just barely brushing against his.
“Sorry. I didn’t mean to get quite so-” Grace starts to pull away, and for all Simon is sort of afraid to touch him, now that he’s here, it’s an awful thing to relinquish.
“Wait.” Simon doesn’t even realize what he’s done until his hand is curled lightly around Grace’s wrist. He lets go immediately. “Fuck. I… I just mean it’s fine. You can stay if you want. It doesn’t bother me.”
“Oh.” He doesn’t need to see Grace’s face to recognize the pleased lilt in his voice. It’s followed by a firmer pressure as Grace settles against his back. There’s comfort in the warmth of another body against his own - a reminder that he’s in a real place with a real human being - without the overwhelm and anxiety of being held.
Thank you feels both too vulnerable and wholly inadequate, so Simon simply wills himself to relax, choosing not to pull away, and hopes that is message enough.
“It’s probably not really the same, but I thought…” Grace trails off, already selling the magnitude of what he’s done short. Simon can’t glare at Grace like this, but an annoyed huff is enough to at least give the guy pause.
“You gave me something I never thought I was going to see again,” he points out, because it leaves nothing for Grace to argue with. “So, shut up.”
There’s a brief pause where Simon desperately wants to melt through the floor, afraid Grace mistook his choice of words for… what they probably sounded like. To his relief, Grace laughs, shoulders shaking slightly against his own. “Point taken. Shutting up.”
The translator's voice suggests Rocky must have said something, but Simon doesn’t catch it… or the lighthearted bickering it leads to between Rocky and Grace. It’s just oddly comforting background noise as Simon commits every detail he can of his lost home to memory.
---
On a wagon bound for market
There's a calf with a mournful eye
High above him, there's a swallow
Winging swiftly through the sky
A soft bed, a familiar voice, gentle hands dragging through his hair. He knows this place, even in the dark. Simon sighs, a corner of his mouth pulling up, one eye cracking open to peer up at his mother’s face.
"Stop complaining!" said the farmer
"Who told you a calf to be?”
Only, everything is a blur. There’s a face that could be her face, framed in dark tendrils of hair, but he can’t see. Distressed, Simon grabs for the hand in his hair, but there’s nothing there. Of course there isn’t. How could there be when she’s been gone for more than half his life? He sits up anyway, squinting at the blur anyway, in hopes of catching a glimpse. “Mom?”
There’s no answer. Just a melody he must have heard a thousand times. Simon scrubs his eyes with the heel of his hand, and finally his vision clears, but the blur suggesting a place he’d once belonged sharpens even as the voice grows distant, drowned out in screams and the cacophony of fighting. There’s still glass from the explosion embedded in the palms of his hands as he’s shackled and shoved along to pay for everything he had tried to stop.
“Why don't you have wings to fly with
Like the swallow so proud and free?"
The voice distorts along with the world. The metal tile under his feet runs red. Everything runs red. He knows that voice, and there is no comfort in it.
Simon would run, if he only could, but he looks down to find a body that is and isn’t his. He is merely a passenger as roots and branches reach for the beckoning light.
It saw you, Simon! And it will never let you go!
---
Simon sits up, hand clutched to his chest as he tries to catch his breath. The dream sticks to him, tacky and suffocating, but this is… he knows this place. The screens are dark now, but Simon recognizes them from the night before, and that’s something.
“Fudge, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to scare you.” Grace holds his hands up in surrender while Simon’s shuddering breaths begin to even out. Simon glances down to find that, at some point, a pillow had been tucked under his head. A blanket must have been draped over him too, given it now pools at his waist.
“You didn’t,” Simon mutters, rubbing his eyes as he tries to get his bearings. “It was just… nevermind.”
Yeah, he could do without sharing that particular nightmare, actually. Grace’s expression scrunches a little, doubtful, but he doesn’t argue, much to Simon’s relief. “Well, I’d have let you sleep longer. It’s just that I didn’t think all the jostling would be very fun to wake up to.”
“Jostling?” As if to help Grace clarify, the ship lurches, jostling Simon off to the side. There’s a grinding noise that crawls menacingly down Simon’s spine, like the hull being peeled open or something. “The fuck is that?”
“Just docking. It’s all pitch black down there, and with the atmosphere and everything… Nevermind. It’s not that important. We’re not landing. There’s an elevator,” Grace rattles off, openly pleased like he has no idea how menacing half of those words sound. Still, it’s hard to be intimidated when Grace gets up, smiling as he offers Simon a hand. “Welcome to Erid.”