Work Text:
He was sealed inside iron and memory—
a coffin that hummed like a dying star,
drifting through the blood-dark ocean
of a forgotten moon.
Simon did not choose heroism.
It was bolted around him,
riveted shut with consequence.
A convict folded into a cylinder of rust,
breathing recycled fear,
charting the floor of an unknown sea
by sound alone.
The porthole was blind.
The gauges flickered like nervous eyes.
Every lever he pulled
was a question asked in the dark.
Outside, the ocean pressed in—
thick as guilt,
red as confession.
It wanted him small.
It wanted him silent.
Instead, his pulse answered back.
He listened to the oceans hollow choir,
to the metallic creak of pressure
testing bone and bolt alike.
Each photograph he captured
was proof that terror has a shape,
that even the unseen
casts a shadow.
They called him expendable.
They called him necessary.
They called him criminal.
But in the narrow chamber of that vessel,
where breath fogged steel
and seconds tasted like copper,
something gentler endured.
Behind the intensity of the circumstances,
Simon for sure had a deeply human heart.
It beat not for pardon,
not for applause—
but because it refused to surrender
its rhythm to the void.
He remembered sunlight as rumor,
remembered wind as myth,
remembered a sky unsealed by rivets.
Memory became rebellion.
Hope, a quiet contraband.
When the ocean roared against the hull,
when the iron lung groaned like a living thing,
he steadied his hands.
Not fearless—
never that—
but stubbornly alive.
In the end,
what the abyss could not swallow
was not his body,
nor the fragile machine around him,
but the small, incandescent insistence
that even buried beneath miles of blood,
a man can remain more
than the worst thing he has done.
And somewhere in that crushing dark,
between the screams of metal,
Simon had endured—
a heartbeat
wrapped in iron.
