Work Text:
Simon hadn’t really known what to expect back when he’d first reached out to the light at the bottom of the ocean… and nothing really could have prepared him for what actually happened.
Back when It had tried to communicate with him at the bottom of the ocean It had used stolen voices. It had used the words of the doomed passengers of the SM-8 for Its own purposes, an impossibly tantalizing lure to draw Simon closer and closer to Itself until he was inevitably twisted the same way. But back then It had been purposeful, intelligible, perhaps even tapping into the very memories of the SM-8 researchers themselves, but when Simon tries to speak with It now-
-can hear us me I we want talk joy listen listen too far come back happy I we want greet speak consume-
Its voice is far too loud in Simon’s head, ricocheting around his skull like an endless echo. With each word - are they words? Or simply impressions of Its emotions? Does It understand emotions? Does It understand how this world is not meant to contain It? - Simon feels like the fragile threads that hold his sanity together are slowly snapping.
It’s like standing on a rock in the middle of the ocean, trying to make sense of the language of the waves crashing around him. He once again feels like an ant next to a tree, craning his neck back trying to see the top of it when he can barely see more than the barest outlines of its roots.
“I can’t understand you!” The words are torn from Simon’s mouth, raw and ragged. His hand comes up to clutch at his head like it might be able to hold the splintering fragments of his skull together.
Pain lances through his head, and his chest tightens. It feels similar to the agony he felt trying to leave the bloody pool, though now instead of drying up he’s drowning in it. The whispers he’d heard before in the back of his mind are a roaring waterfall now, crushing him under the weight of their impossibility.
“Stop!”
He can’t cover his ears against It, nor can he seem to block It out in any way. His body jolts involuntarily, jacknifing back up into a sitting position. The minute his head leaves the water the voices dull. It’s not much, not enough, but Simon pushes the voices as far away as he possibly can, shoving them back into the corner in the far recesses of his mind that he used to keep them.
Slowly, painfully, the voices in his head recede as It seems to realize that Simon is not intent on responding again. It backs off reluctantly. Maybe part of It understands that Simon won’t be able to speak to It if It keeps pushing, a child realizing that they can no longer play with their toys if they break them.
Simon wonders if It learned that lesson from the SM-8. Sure It might have the flesh and blood and echoes of the doomed researchers, but It didn’t truly hold their minds or spirits. They were little more than puppets for It now, a fleshy mass of teeth and disembodied limbs to blindly flounder around the ocean.
It didn’t want that. It wanted a connection.
Do you believe in god?
What good is a god with believers, without those to commune with? It could be the most powerful being in the galaxy, in a dozen galaxies, and It could still be completely and utterly alone. Divinity is only valid in comparison to the mundane. Simon had only caught a glimpse of It and It of him, but It had still latched onto Simon with all the tenacity of a starving dog with a bone.
If a god is not worshipped…
Simon has no idea how long It has been around, if It had ever really had what he would consider a ‘beginning’, but clearly It had not many, if anyone, to speak to for a majority of Its existence (if It even measured time, fucking hell). And despite Simon’s fear of It - and god, does he have a healthy amount of fear, enough to make his stomach churn and enough to make him want to dig his nails into his flesh until it comes away in strips - he can’t help having the barest shred of sympathy.
He’s no stranger to loneliness.
Simon’s spent countless days rotting in the bottom of a cold, dark cell, pressed against the metal walls with his arms wrapped around him like it might offer him any amount of warmth. The only human contact he got was a tray shoved through a slot in the door, and the guards glaring at him like he was scum scraped off the bottoms of their boots.
It’s been a while since he’s seen the stars
He didn’t see them in his cell, and he didn’t see them in the Iron Lung. That one light shining at the bottom of the ocean is the closest he’s gotten to light at all that wasn’t just the droning fluorescent bulbs and control displays inside the submarine. And Simon, god help him, is drawn unwillingly toward that illusion of warmth with all the suicidal insanity of a moth to an open flame.
If a god is not worshipped…
There’s a murmur in the back of his mind - maybe a curse, maybe an apology - and Simon hates it as much as he craves it. Part of him is still reaching for that light, that voice, the one thing in the universe that doesn’t look at him and see all his mistakes (or perhaps It does see them and still wants him anyway).
“This is so fucked up,” Simon mutters.
The loading bay is dark. The bloody water around him is dark. The inside of the sub is dark. The only light he can see is the one burning in the back of his head that he knows getting too close to will burn him from the inside out.
Can’t get too near, can’t go too far.
He’s bound by blood to something far greater than him, something that needs him just as much as he needs It. It’s a deadly dance, an orbit between two doomed planets where one won’t survive their inevitable collision. He needs to find a way to cut the connection, to sever the tie before the death spiral reaches its tragic climax, and yet…
-I see you SimonSimonSimon all you are all you are not all that connects you to me I we us threads tie you to universe your life your death your beginning middle end every end of universe your light your darkness all of you I we me us want see more all everything-
“Shut up!” Simon snaps, his skin feeling too tight and ill-fitting, “Don’t-!”
Don’t promise me things you don’t mean.
Simon grits his teeth as he pushes the voices back further and further, until they are nothing more than a steady drip in the back of his head, a ripple on the edge of his psyche that his small but never still. Maybe it had been a mistake trying to reach toward something he can never fully understand, maybe an ant is a fool for circling a tree, and yet he can’t fully regret it. He needs to know… he needs to know if he is truly meaningless to the universe.
If a god is not worshipped… does it die?
“Well, good mornin’, Sunshine,” Jack says dryly.
Simon isn’t sure when exactly he’d fallen asleep. It’s something he rarely does anymore, usually spending the night hours with his eyes closed as he pointlessly counts his heartbeats as the hours blur together into an indecipherable mush.
But he must have managed it at some point, since the last thing he remembers is trying to push away the voices in his head and now he’s being greeted with the cutting burn of the fluorescent lights of the loading bay and an unimpressed Jack tossing him his morning nutritional block.
“Your fish food,” Jack says, wiping the chalky residue on the sides of his wheelchair. He seems to remember a beat too late that Simon has only one hand. “Ah, shite.”
Simon manages to catch the block, thankfully, something he’s gotten a lot better at since he first returned to the surface. At one point he thought he’d never be able to adjust after losing something like his whole arm, but necessity was the mother of invention and all that. Simon’s had to get quite a bit more creative lately, but for the most part losing an arm has shockingly hampered him less than he’d thought it would.
“My bad,” Jack mutters, looking contrite as he rubs the back of his neck.
“It’s fine,” Simon says. He takes a bite of the block, and it crumbles under his teeth. They move past the awkward moment quickly enough with a couple nods of mutual understanding. “You look like you came here for some reason other than just breakfast though.”
Jack grimaces. “Yeah, see… I want you to know this wasn’t my idea.”
“Don’t like how you’re starting off with that,” Simon says dryly.
“Look, I’m not gonna beat ‘round the bush,” Jack says, “They want a skin sample.”
Simon’s brow furrows. “Well, that’s nothing new.”
Honestly Simon’s lost track of how many samples the scientists aboard have taken off of him at this point - skin, hair, blood, and pretty much anything else they could think of. Usually whenever the testing began Simon would just placidly sit there while they poked and prodded at him. He might object more if he still felt the sting of the needles and knives, but for the most part the test were more a nuisance than anything. It also probably helped that he healed up pretty fast these days, any puncture wounds or incisions from knives fading within a matter of minutes.
Back in Eden such a thing might have been called either a miracle or sacrilege, but for Simon now it was just a fact of life that went hand in, er, just one hand with the rest of the strange biological changes he was currently dealing with.
“Yeah,” Jack draws out the word, “This one’s a little special.”
Simon’s face screws up in confusion as he tries to figure out exactly what the other’s words mean. He crams another quarter of the nutritional block in his mouth and chews as he mulls it over. He swallows and says, “What, do they want the one arm I have left or something?”
He means it as a joke, something to break the strange building tension in the room, but then Jack grimaces. “Well, they don’t want the one still attached.”
There’s an awkward silence.
“Oh, you gotta be shitting me,” Simon deadpans.
He reflexively turns to look back across the water to where the Iron Lung sits. Though he can’t see it from here, he knows his left arm is still inside, practically welded to the pipes beneath its palm and still morbidly flush with life.
Involuntarily, Simon shudders as he recalls the ticklish phantom sensation of his missing limb. He automatically starts reaching for flesh that isn’t there, though he manages to still his hand as soon as he realizes it’s moving. The motion doesn’t go unnoticed by Jack though, who’s lips thin.
“‘Fraid I’m not,” Jack says, “Wouldn’t have asked for it myself though.”
“It doesn’t- it’s stuck there,” Simon says.
He’s not really sure how to describe the situation, but he’s sure most of the scientists have at least seen what’s happened to his severed limb, even if they’ve not run any tests on it up to this point. It’s not something that’s going to come loose by prying at it with a knife or eve a crowbar. It might as well be welded in place for all it’s budged in the past couple of months.
“Yeah, that’s what I told the daft bastards too,” Jack says dryly. “They don’t seem to care.”
“How the hell do they even expect me to…?” Simon makes an indecipherable motion with his hand.
“I don’t think they thought that far,” Jack says. He leans forward on his elbows. “Look, I’ll just say you tried and it didn't work and they can piss up a tree if they got a problem.”
“What do they even want it for?” Simon asks.
“Well, far as they told me, that’s the largest sample of living flesh they can get from you,” Jack says, “They wanna see if it can survive outside the pool if they keep it in a container of blood.”
Simon blinks, eyes widening. “Wait, so if they can manage that-“
“Then you might be able to get out of there,” Jack says. “I was just gonna build you a box and have done with it, but they convinced me that sendin’ you into cardiac arrest again might not be the most ideal testin’ method.”
It’s sound logic despite everything. Considering the near-death experience Simon had the last time he’d left the pool, they’d be better off just risking the death of his already severed limb that was still inexplicably ‘alive’. That said…
“I’d probably need a saw or something to cut it free,” Simon says with a grimace.
Even though he couldn’t feel pain now as far as he could tell, that didn’t mean he relished in the idea of testing his conditional immunity. He also couldn’t completely push away the… mental hangup he had about literally cutting into his severed limb. It makes his stomach shudder in the most unpleasant way just thinking about it.
Then again, if he could overcome his initial squeamishness, this could very well be his one and only chance to start testing whether he could fully leave the bloody pool. It wasn’t a guarantee, Simon was pretty sure this would blow up in his face like nearly every decision had since he was first sealed inside the submarine, but even the slimmest chance was better than none at all.
…Right?
“You can’t really be considerin’ it?” Jack asks incredulously.
Simon hesitates for a long second before replying. “I want to see the stars again.”
Jack’s face twists. Simon can tell the other partially wants to call Simon an idiot, but then before the insult can escape his mouth, he pauses. Complicated emotions war on Jack’s face. Simon wonders if the other is recalling his own time trapped in the medical bay, trapped in his own body, as an uncaring universe rushed past him.
Finally Jack makes a frustrated noise. “Fine. I’ll get a saw so you can chop your damn arm free. God damn.”
“Thanks,” Simon says.
Jack rolls his eyes. “‘Thanks’ he says, for me givin’ him the opportunity to slice his arm up. You know, the longer I hang out with you, the more fucked in the head I get about my perception of what’s normal.”
Simon laughs. “Don’t worry, I don’t think I’ve been anywhere near normal for a long time.”
Jack disappears for a while. Simon’s not sure what procedures the other might have to go through to request a saw strong enough to cut through bone - if his arm really is flesh and bone anymore - but it does bring him some level of amusement to imagine Jack heading down to engineering to request ‘some sharp shite to cut the bastard’s arm loose’. It’s taking longer than Simon expected such a request to take, and part of him worries that perhaps the scientists had gone back on their word.
Maybe they’d found some other research path to chase, and Simon’s potential freedom from the bloody pool he lives in had taken a back seat to pursuing their more viable breakthroughs. In such a situation, Simon couldn’t necessarily blame them, time was of the essence after all to find some kind of solution for the predicament humanity had found itself in, but he did wish that for once he wouldn’t end up being the collateral left behind in order to take that step forward.
But then again, he might just be spiraling. There was little else to do after all.
Simon perks up when he hears the groan of the doors to the loading bay. His head whips around, fully expecting to see jack with an oversized saw of some kind, only for his expression to freeze when he sees who’s just entered the room.
David looks uncomfortable, half shuffling forward like he’s considering bolting the second he has the slightest excuse to. As he draws nearer, Simon watches the other look literally anywhere around the room aside from Simon himself. The clomp of the other’s boots echo damningly loud against the metal floor, and Simon finds himself shrinking inward as much as he can.
Their last conversation had been… well, not a day had passed since that Simon wasn’t hit with waves of guilt or self-loathing regarding it. He already carried the weight of all the deaths on the Filament Station on his shoulders. No amount of ‘I tried to stop it’ was ever really enough to make him feel absolved, even after all the years in prison.
Somehow it was even worse to be around someone directly affected by Eden’s actions, to look into the face of a man who had lost family in the devastation Eden had left in its wake. It was one thing to hear numbers and statistics, it was another thing entirely to look people in the face and see the ghosts Simon himself had created reflected in their eyes.
A heavy silence hangs between the two of them.
Eventually David reaches into his bag and pulls out a nutrition block. It answers Simon’s initial question of what the other is even doing there in the first place (he hadn’t thought so much time had passed that it was already the lunch hour, but time did get a bit hazy when left alone in the room, even with a clock present), but raises many more. Over the last few days either Jack or Ava had taken over Simon’s feeding times, seemingly without too much complication. Simon had honestly thought David would just avoid him forever, only coming in when their interactions were completely unavoidable.
Judging by David’s reluctant expression, he clearly had thought the same.
Before the awkwardness can stretch on for too much longer, Simon reaches up to take the nutrition block. He doesn’t take a bite of it though, his appetite practically nonexistent in the wake of this unexpected turn of events. He should probably thank David, but his tongue is stilled by the fear that anything he says could end up going off like a landmine. Unfortunately, that leaves Simon stranded in the middle of the field, warily eyeing the ground and trying to determine where the safest place to step next might be.
Thankfully, David seems to realize the best thing is for him to make the first move. “I…” The word is overly loud in the echoing room. “I wanted to… apologize.”
Simon can tell that just saying that seems to cost David. The other’s face is pinched like he’s just swallowed something sour, and each word is pulled haltingly from the other’s throat. The delivery itself is so stilted that it takes Simon a second to actually process what the other has said, though when he does his eyes widen.
He pauses, wondering if David is going to say anything more, but the other’s lips are pressed into a thin line. “You don’t- I mean, you shouldn’t have to apologize,” Simon says.
Part of him wonder if Ava put David up to this, if she’s sick of the two of them skirting around each other when there are ‘bigger things at stake’. She’s made no secret of her frustration with David’s standoffish behavior, and Simon is sure she’s had conversations with the other about his reluctance to interact with Simon.
David remains stone faced, jaw working before he speaks again. “I don’t have to,” he says, “And frankly if I didn’t want to, I wouldn’t.” He raises an eyebrow, “No matter how much Ava got on my case.”
And, well, as far as Simon knows David he knows that that much is probably true as well. Ava could tell David to get his shit together until she was blue in the face, but David was the kind of person that all of that would slide off him like water off a duck’s back. There was no amount carrots or sticks that could make his stubborn ass do anything he didn’t want to do, which meant…
Holy shit, this guy actually wants to apologize
Simon thankfully doesn’t but the words out loud, but his expression must be disbelieving enough that David picks up on it. The other rolls his eyes.
“Don’t look so surprised, Con- Simon.”
And that nearly knocks Simon on his ass. David had been so adamant about not using Simon’s name before, it had become a point of contention between the two until it finally exploded in the bombshell of David’s loss coming to the surface. He’d used Simon’s name back then, hurling it in Simon’s face like it was something he didn’t deserve, but now he actually looks contrite enough that all the past vitriol has vanished.
“…Why the change of heart?” Simon asks cautiously.
David’s not the kind of person to play a prank – not one like this at least, and he’s pretty sure the other has no ulterior motives for once – but Simon has no idea what might have prompted this kind of action. As far as he knows, nothing has changed between the two of them, what with David avoiding showing his face around the loading bay entirely, so anything that might have swayed the other’s opinion was completely independent of Simon’s involvement.
The other man lets out a long exhale, and in the process he seems to deflate a bit. He then squares his shoulders and looks Simon straight in the eye. “I hate you.”
Simon stares back, nonplussed, but then David continues.
“I hate you, and your freaky little cult, and frankly anyone who thinks that ‘breaking a few eggs’ is a necessity in the course of saving humanity,” David says, “Your little family of doomsday believers went out and decided that a whole station of people were expendable, that the sacrifice of thousands of lives were necessary to make some kind of point. I think that’s bullshit. And frankly I think you think that is too.”
He stares at Simon pointedly, but doesn’t seem to expect a response.
“However,” David says with a long suffering sigh, “That also means that what we did to you is bullshit. How much is an ‘acceptable’ level of expendability? A hundred lives? A dozen? One?”
Simon remains silent because really he doesn’t have an answer for that either. It’s something he’s mulled over for hours on end in the shell of the Iron Lung. Obviously he wasn’t the only one who’d been sent into the ocean’s depths, but was it a necessary evil?
The fact of the matter is that the stars and the universe itself is slowly disappearing, and their options as a species boil down to either lying down and accepting that fate, or grasping at any possible option to rage against the dying of the light. As far as Simon is concerned, he supposes he could have gone with the first option, but that would have just left him rotting in a prison cell for the rest of his life, and in the face of that decision he’d firmly decided to take even the smallest chance to grasp that freedom he so desperately desired.
For all he’d been furious with his the Consolidation of Iron for the shitty position he’d been put in, he knows he would’ve taken the chance even if they’d been more honest about his chances of survival or the strange things he might encounter beneath the ocean’s surface. Because at the end of the day…
Simon wanted to live
“I think you understand how valuable life is,” David says, surprising Simon. “Back when I heard you were the one chosen for the mission I was… well, I don’t know if ‘happy’ is the word, but part of me was glad it was you.”
“That’s… understandable,” Simon says.
“I’d been told all these stories,” David continues, eyes boring into Simon, “Your reputation precedes you.”
Simon grimaces. Though he was no stranger to the morbid nickname he’d been so generously ‘gifted’ by the Consolidation, that didn’t mean he liked it. Every time it was used was like a knife driven through his abdomen, a reminder of the many, many skeletons he dragged in his wake.
“When someone is called ‘The Butcher’, it’s easier to think of them as something else,” David says, “Like you were some kind of monster straight out of a storybook that took my brother’s life.”
“I’d hate to hear what they were saying about me,” Simon replies dryly.
Even in the prison he’d heard whispers and rumors from the guards in the hallway. Each of them were more outlandish than the last, twisting Simon’s past until it was something beyond recognition even to himself. There were some days it had been hard to remember what exactly he had been guilty of when he’d become a dark presence in seemingly every story the public could come up with.
It had been an odd feeling to be half human, half myth. The fear in the eyes of those who spoke with him reflected some grotesque boogeyman that Simon knew he wasn’t… at least, he knew he wasn’t on his good days. On his bad days, the days where the guilt and self-loathing rose high enough to choke him, suddenly the monstrous version of him that dogged his steps didn’t feel so far off.
“But,” David’s voice snaps him out of his rumination, “Then I heard you.”
Simon blinks. “What?”
“I heard you,” David repeats, “I heard you in the submarine when you were probably starving and dehydrated and dying of, well,” he waves a hand toward Simon, “And you sounded… annoyingly human.”
“Annoyingly?” Simon doesn’t know whether to laugh or not.
“Yeah, annoyingly,” David grumbles. “I can hate a man who’s done horrible things. I can hate a man who’s locked in a cell far away. I can hate a man whose face I don’t have to see every day. But it’s hard to hate a man who’s begging for his life, who’s desperate and terrified and struggling for air in every sense of the word. It’s hard to hate a man who’s begging for a way out and so fucking determined to live.”
David glares at Simon like this revelation is just another horrible, inconvenient problem that Simon has dumped in his lap that needed to be solved.
“So…” Simon isn’t really sure how to respond to the other’s words.
“So,” David says, “That’s why I’m apologizing.”
There’s a drawn out pause.
“I…”
“You don’t have to accept,” David says, “In the way I wouldn’t accept your apology either.”
“Alright,” Simon says, since he supposes he can make that much of a concession.
He doesn’t hate David, not in the overly personal way David hates him, but he does hate how David was complicit in sending him down to the bottom of the ocean to become whatever he is now. It’s strange, the mixture of resentment and guilt that swirls through Simon’s stomach. And in some way he realizes why David and he will never really be able to be okay with each other… and why they’re still able to understand each other.
“I’m willing to put all the shit we’ve done behind us to move forward,” David says.
And Simon understands that this is neither forgiveness nor condemnation. It’s an olive branch on both ends, an acknowledgement that they’ve both hurt each other in the worst ways possible, but also that their lingering grudges will do neither of them any good. Because at the end of the day the world is still ending, the stars are still dying, and neither of them are willing to just roll over and accept that.
Simon lets out a long breath. “Let’s keep moving then.”
Jack returns exactly one hour after the awkward understanding Simon had come to with David. Thankfully the two of them don’t run into each other as Simon’s sure that would have led to even more uncomfortable confrontation, but he’s still feeling relatively optimistic when Jack re-enters the room… at least he is until Jack is brandishing a saw in his face.
“Here you go,” Jack says, handing the blade over to Simon. Simon takes it with a flip in his stomach. Jack pulls a large plastic tub off the back of his chair then. “And this is where the blood is goin’. Hopefully it’ll be enough to keep your-“ He grimaces, “Arm alive long enough to get down to the labs.”
He looks about as unnerved by the whole thing as Simon feels. For a long moment they just stare at each other, as if silently daring the other to move first.
Eventually Jack sighs. “Well, I can’t be the one to go get it.” Simon isn’t sure if the other is actually sorry to be handing (no pun intended) the task off to him.
“Right. Okay. I’ll just…” Simon trails off, turning back to where the Iron Lung awaits him.
The walk back to the submarine feels twice as long as usual despite him walking it multiple times every day. Even with the lights in the loading bay on, the sub is considerably darker, only illuminated by the emergency lights that line the hull and for some reason refuse to go out. Simon walks through the hole in the side, up toward the helm and-
Well, it’s still waiting there.
Simon has tried to avoid looking at it ever since that first day he’d been brought back onto the ship. It was just a little too unnerving, a little too morbid, to think very hard about, not to mention the strange phantom sensations he’d gotten back when he’d first tried touching his own severed limb. He still didn’t seem to be able to feel pain from it, though he was really going to be putting that theory to the test considering what he was about to do.
He looks down at the saw blade, then back to the severed limb.
“It’s already off,” Simon says, half chiding himself, half trying to work up the confidence to step closer.
Simon moves closer to his severed limb, lips thinning as he takes in its clammy, grayish pallor and the black veins that wrap around it. If he tries hard enough he can almost pretend its fake, like some kind of plaster cast of his arm. It helps a little.
He lets out an explosive sigh before he shifts the saw under his armpit before reaching out to touch the severed limb again. Simon can’t help the involuntary grunt of discomfort he makes when he feels the same strange sensation of his missing arm. Looks like he’d still have to deal with that.
He tries to peel his fingers away from the pipe they’re melded to, to no avail. They remain stubbornly cemented in place, fused to the metal like they’d always been part of it. He tries to slide the flat end of the blade under it, but that doesn’t work either, no gap apparent between his limb and the pipes.
Unfortunately, it doesn’t look like the blade he’s been given is tough enough to cut through the pipe itself. It’d probably need to be some kind of automatically powered saw as well, something with the speed and sharpness needed to get through the metal.
Simon grunts. “Okay, so I guess we have to do this the hard way.”
He starts with just his pinkie. Simon’s brow furrows with concentration as he awkwardly wedges the blade between his smallest finger and the pipe. He feels the strange tingling sensation again, which intensifies as Simon finally gets enough courage to cut the smallest bit through it. He really hopes he’s just cutting through maybe a few layers of skin and nothing really… important.
As he slowly works the blade down the length of his finger, he feels one of the strangest things he has ever felt in his life. It feels like he’s dragging a knife down his own hand, running dangerously down the length of his finger, though never deep enough to pierce the skin. His hand, thankfully, doesn’t start bleeding or doing any other strange thing, which is for the best because Simon isn’t sure if he’d mentally be able to handle that if it did. It’s slow work, but eventually Simon manages to get it to the point where his finger is free.
When he hesitantly reaches out to examine the finger, it doesn’t look any worse for wear. Under different circumstances it might almost be comical to see an arms stuck to the pipes, pinky up, but Simon can’t really find the humor in the situation at the moment. He still has four more fingers and his entire palm to finish, and just the pinky alone had probably taken him about ten or fifteen minutes to get through. He can practically hear Jack complaining already.
Simon sighs. This was going to be less easy than he thought.
Much, much later, Simon is walking back across the platform toward Jack. The other looks like he’s completely forgotten what he was waiting for in the first place, though the bucket he’d brought is now full of blood. Jack himself is fiddling with some kind of project, though he quickly looks up when he hears Simon’s footsteps approaching.
“‘Bout time!” Jack mutters with a scowl, “For a second I thought I was gonna start growin’-“
He breaks off when he sees what’s in Simon’s hand. The saw dangles from a couple of Simon’s fingers, but he’s fully holding onto-
“Shite,” Jack curses, seemingly without even thinking about it.
He looks a little pale as Simon stops in front of him. Simon passes Jack the saw first, which the other takes reluctantly. He glances at the blade first, as if he can’t help himself, and seems relieved to see no blood on the end of it. He quickly drops it into a bag on the side of his chair before looking at the other object.
“What you needed, right?” Simon asks, holding up his left arm.
“Yeah, fuck, a’right,” Jack mutters, which is about as disoriented as Simon has ever heard him. He scoots the bucket closer to Simon, and Simon drops his arm into it. Jack grimaces as blood splashes out of the bucket. It’s deep enough that his arm is able to be fully submerged.
“Don’t take this the wrong way, but I really don’t want to carry that,” Jack says.
Simon snorts. “How do you think I felt cutting it loose?”
Jack shakes his head. “For your sake, I hope this is the last piece we need to get you out of there. Otherwise this is probably the most fucked up delivery job I’ve ever seen.”
And it’s that reminder of what this could mean that brings back the previous flutter of excitement Simon had experienced. He knows it’s not a guarantee, far from it, but if there’s even the smallest possibility…
“Keep me updated,” Simon says, watching Jack gingerly load the bucket onto a hastily attached shelf on the back of his chair.
“Of course,” Jack says. “Help me get this thing strapped in unless you want your arm spilled all over the mess hall.” It’s not easy to do with Simon missing an arm and Jack awkwardly twisting around in his chair, but eventually they do manage to get the bucket secured after a few minutes of fumbling and swearing. “You feel any different with it being out of the pool?”
Simon takes a moment to try and assess his condition. He think he can still feel the presence of his arm, but there’s none of the pain he’d experienced when he’d tried to leave the pool the first time around. “No.”
“I’ll try goin’ further away. Let me know if you’re about to have a seizure or whatever.” Jack starts to wheel himself down the loading bay, glancing over his shoulder occasionally to check on Simon’s condition.
There’s a bit of a pull now, like there’s still some invisible thread that’s connecting Simon to his severed limb. It’s strange, almost like a tingling sensation, but it’s not painful. It feels more like… his limb had fallen asleep. It doesn’t intensify the further Jack gets. Perhaps the blood it’s in is preventing it from any of the adverse side effects?
“You’re good!” Simon calls as Jack reaches the bay doors.
“A’right!” Jack waves back in confirmation. “I’ll get this down to the techs!” The doors slide open with a groan, and Jack is gone soon after.
He tries again to tell himself that this isn’t a guarantee, that this could all fizzle before anything even happens if the scientists discover that long-term removal from the blood isn’t possible, but he can’t quite stifle the foolish, stubborn hope completely. Simon sighs and runs his fingers through his hair. Once again he’s left with the realization that there’s nothing quite so beautiful and quite so dangerous as hope.