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There's blood in his boots.
Really, it's everywhere - builds into puddles on the floor, mixes with the plasma dripping from the walls, causes the ship to sway and creak, fills every square inch of the world beyond his slowly leaking prison cell - but somehow, it's in his boots now. His socks squelch with every step as he paces the five foot walkway he has available, back and forth between the button and the console, listless and aimless. Sweat drips down the back of Simon's neck and soaks into his tunic, and he pushes the sleeves up-and-down, trapped in his own body heat but craving the minuscule comfort it provides. His trembling fingers swipe at his brow, and he winces as his callouses rub against the ragged cut on his temple. Pain thrums under his skin, a pervasive malaise mingling with the nausea churning in his stomach. His mouth tastes like bile and dull, wet iron.
Not for the first time, a burning anger overwhelms his nerves, and his impulse takes over before his brain can; blood splatters over the console as he drives his fist into the rusted metal, and Simon hisses in pain, shaking out his hand. The action does little to quell the roiling aggravation that split his knuckles and pounds against the inside of his skull, but only exacerbates the drowning sense of despondent rage filling his lungs. Even if he can find his way out of this seventh circle of Hell he's fallen into, who's to say they'll even bother pulling him out? He had gone back, gotten a fleeting glimpse of freedom withheld from him through blood-tinted glass, and the Commander dropped him anyway. If by some miracle of an impassive god the C.O.I. finds it in all their supposed wisdom worth the risk to save a violent criminal like him, who's to say he'll end up free, or even alive? He thinks of his brother's audio log, knows that this is meant to be his execution, the bullet in his skull like a wounded, rabid animal. A death less violent than he deserves and long enough to be torturous. It is so very nearly mercy, and that is worse than the electric chair. Seething, Simon heel-turns to bandage his split knuckles before he breaks his fingers punching another piece of machinery.
His foot catches on the still open maintenance hatch and the red-slick floors steal his traction from beneath him. He crashes to the floor, and his forehead is the first to shake hands the bloody metal beneath him.
For a moment, everything goes black.
There is no time in the Iron Lung. He could've been out for seconds, minutes, hours, days, longer, but nothing indicates any passage of time at all when he comes to, mind hazy and sight altered. Everything Simon knows feels foreign and dark around him, the ship that had become so familiar frighteningly unrecognizable in his smeared vision. Gunshots ring out against the metal walls, and he lets slip a pained groan, pain pulsing behind his eyes, and his fingers curl over his ears habitually, even as the sound does not dampen. There's a pair of hand-stitched black flats directly at his eye level; not gunshots, simply external footsteps on salvaged steel. His heart nearly stopped, fluttering too quickly to register, but the sound of his own rushing blood in his ears eclipses the high-pitched whining it competes with, becoming nearly indistinguishable from the burble of the ocean he's trapped in. It takes thirty seconds, maybe more, but he recognizes those flats, the edge of a muted green canvas skirt.
She kneels down, legs folded underneath her, without acknowledging the way it stains her clothes and smears across her pale olive skin. Her hands, well-manicured but rough from her days tending to The Tree, cup his jaw, too impossibly gentle to be real, just on the slight side of cold, and tilt his head upwards. She smiles at Simon, a kind, open expression he'd forgotten seeing but he knows he doesn't deserve. His lips tremble, and a single, slurred word falls from them, barely a whisper.
"Mama?"
"Hello, Simon," she says, her voice the warm, slow lilt he'd dreamed about, which shone through his shuttered memories like a starlight he'd never gotten to see. Her dark hair in its singular, neat plait lying over her shoulder, tired and mild eyes with a slight squint as she smiles. Black, just as his are, nearly void-like as she gazes down at him. Pinprick tears gather in his eyes - his body has not the moisture content to produce more. Her brows, thick and dark, like his, furrow. "My little love, what's the matter?"
Arms weak and unwilling to hold his own upper body aloft any longer, Simon allows his head to fall into her lap, arms folded beneath himself in a way that causes only mild discomfort. He ignores the sensation; what is another moment of discomfort in a life rife with pain? Turning his head, he barely stifles a whine when pain radiates through his temples, but it becomes a half-muffled sob as she begins running her fingers through his greasy, knotted hair, encouraging it to straighten under her touch. The tears begin to run down his cheeks, soaking into her skirt, and pressure builds in his ear canals to the point his only recourse is to cry harder, just tiny, hiccuping keens like that of a sickly infant, clinging to its mother without any relief. It will die and it could not possibly know, existing without the faculties to realize its pain is indicative of a short life. It is not the fault of the infant for being unable to understand, and it is not the fault of the parent for being unable to explain.
He wants to understand, and to explain; desperately, urgently, he must, yet cannot find the words to do so. Simon wants more to beg for her to tell him why he has been so unlucky, why his entire life must be a fool's errand with no end. At one time, he would've been proud to die, to become part of Eden's soil like Father always taught him. The Consolidation had spoiled all that - there is no honor in his death now, just another meaningless execution in a sea of red. Dying has become failure and failure has become loss, and losing to the Consolidation is worse. Living instead begets struggle which becomes rebellion, and while life is no win for him, it is a certain loss for the Consolidation and the Commander in particular, and so he will willingly suffer tenfold simply to spite a woman who has decided him unworthy of a life he barely possessed. More than anything, Simon wishes he could express this to her: his desire to live, to honor the blessed curse she gave him. The ceiling light halos her darkened silhouette above him, and this must be god, he thinks, his kind and gentle mother still willing to hold close a deformed beast such as himself - for is giving of life from one's own being not an indicator of power, and what is power if not a prerequisite to godhood?
He fists his hands in her skirt, and there's blood on his hands, staining his nail-beds red and drawing the scent of copper to his nose, so strong he dry-heaves, and his hands barely catch him before he's vomiting blood on the ground. It drips from his lips, thick and dark and chunky, but he's trembling too hard to wipe it away, like a full-body earthquake. Brow furrowed, he looks up, glances around, skin burning with the memory of human touch.
"Mama?" he mumbles, his only prayer, repeated like a penance, unable to find anything else worth saying. The speaker crackles to life noisily, and he grits his teeth as it grates against his oversensitive ears. "...wha'?"
It's a split second of silence before it screeches to life, her voice angry beyond belief and loud beyond rationality.
"I AM NO MOTHER OF YOURS," she shrieks, her voice enveloping every inch of him, suffocating his gasp of pain and the whimper left in its wake. "HOW COULD I HAVE SPAWNED YOU? NOT I, NOT YOU, THE ABOMINABLE BUTCHER I SEE BEFORE ME. WHAT A VILE CREATION YOU ARE, CONVICT."
"Pl'se," he begs weakly, but she continues as though she can't hear him; perhaps she can't. Just as a sycophant is to a god, what is a child to a parent but a being to hold your voice, as your voice is gospel and your word is law? Still, every inch of the verbal lashing lands like a real blow, his muscles flinching every time she repeats his own opinions back at him. "'m s'rry, Mama-"
"NO," she howls, louder than the thunderclap at the end of time, and a similar cry rips from Simon's mangled larynx, a weakened echo of her own decree. He sobs, cries, screams, presses his hands over his ears as hard as the pressure behind his eardrums can bear, but her voice consumes all, sees all. It produces not only from the speaker, but from the chamber around him, from the puddles on the floor and the seeping cracks in the welds. "NOT MY SON," she says, "NOT THIS TERRIBLE, UGLY CREATURE GETTING WHAT IT DESERVES. NO, NOT MY SIMON, JUST A FILTHY CONVICT, DISGUSTING CONVICT, CONVICT, CONVICT CONVICT CONVICT-"
"-CONVICT!" the Commander screams, her voice peaking like the screech of metal on metal, inescapable and migrainous. Simon, shaking, pitiful animal he is, whimpers and shies away from her voice, rocking on the balls of his feet. The blood in his boots squelches with the motion. His head is aching fiercely and tears are slowly drying on his cheeks, and the blood is still there on his hands, staining his skin, marking him with death just as he always is and always has been. "Christ, what have you been doing for the last five minutes, I've been calling for you! You know the rules, you have to answer when called or else we won't know if your sorry ass is still alive, and we can't risk pulling you up just for you to be sleeping on the job. Convict, do you copy me!"
"...I'd like t' go home now," he whispers, pushing himself to his feet with a wobble and a suppressed sound of pain. Don't show your weakness, his mind whispers, show them your teeth, not your fear. "Surely 'm done, I've done enough, I'll go back t' prison, I don' care anymore."
The Commander is quiet for a moment.
"...I'm not sure that's possible anymore."
This is god, he decides, his ruthless and righteous mother directing him forward even from his own mind, closer to his meaningless death at the bottom an ocean of blood. An execution born of his own fault.
This is the recompense he must pay his god; Simon prays she may accept him once he finally serves this atonement.
"Tell me what t' do then."