Chapter Text
The first thing Simon noticed as he woke up was how the air smelled. It was less artificial than what he was used to. It wasn’t recycled, chemically treated, or thinned for longevity. It easily filled his lungs with each breath he took and had a gentle scent he couldn’t place. He started breathing deeper, the sensation pleasurable for the first time. I must be dead, he thought. Life is not so kind.
He opened his eyes to natural light shrouded by clouds, another unfamiliar experience. It took a couple seconds for his eyes to refocus, but as he blinked them he realized he was propped up facing a large, wall-sized window that looked out to a sandy beach against a bright blue ocean. It was silent. It was…peaceful.
Simon sat himself up, having to catch himself when his left arm did not assist. He looked towards it, dread and fear bubbling up inside him when he realized it was entirely gone. He finished sitting himself fully upright before using his right hand to feel his rounded, bandaged shoulder. He tried to search his memory for where his arm had gone, but he could not recall.
The sound of a nearby latch clicking drew his attention behind him. He turned his body to the right and moved his legs over the edge of the bed to see where the sound was coming from. It was from a latch to a door that was now open and a bespectacled man dressed in a white short sleeve shirt and dark gray pants was walking in through its frame.
“I’m so glad you’re awake,” the man said, walking quickly over to the chair across from the right side of the bed and sitting down in it, grabbing a notebook from the table it was at as he continued to talk. “We were really worried for a while, especially at first.” He opened the book and slid a pen out of a loop on its spine before starting to write. “It was pretty touch and go until we were able to stabilize you, and then we had to figure out how to get your eyelids unstuck without blinding you, which was a whole ordeal.“
“Wait,” Simon mumbled, reeling from the speech battering him.
“Of course, once we got all the health stuff figured out, it was kind of up to you,” the man said, not hearing Simon as he took quick notes in his book. “You know, I’m consistently impressed with how resilient humans are. Not that I’ve seen another human in years, but I remember some stuff. And I guess I’m resilient too, given the context I come from, but I’ve never really considered myself that way.”
“Hold on,” Simon said, a little louder, but not loud enough.
“I really wish I had some more human-centric medical equipment. Not that the Eridians don’t do a good job, but their biology is incredibly different from ours, so I have to adapt a lot of it to human physiology. It was already hard enough for myself, a decently healthy guy, but with the severity of your injuries it was really difficult. The stuff from the Hail Mary has its limits, apparently.”
“Stop,” Simon said firmly, at a volume that interrupted the man’s train of thought and got him to meet Simon’s eyes. “Please. I don’t…” Simon gripped his empty shoulder tighter, his gaze collapsing into one of confusion and distress. “What happened to my arm?”
The man put his pen down in the centerfold of his notebook and turned to face Simon, pulling his glasses down to dangle them off of his ear.
“What’s your name?” he asked.
“Simon,” he replied hesitantly.
“Simon, got it,” the man said, nodding. “I’m Grace.”
“Grace,” Simon echoed quietly.
“Yep,” Grace said, giving him a quick smile before rubbing his face with one hand. “Okay. I’m just gonna be honest with you.” He sighed and met Simon’s eyes again. “When the Eridians found you, they weren’t even sure that you were alive. You were in some kind of stasis or induced coma. We aren’t sure for how long, but, uh, it seems like you’ve been asleep for…a while.”
“Found me?” Simon asked, frowning.
“Yeah,” Grace said. “You were just out in space, floating around in an abandoned craft.”
Simon let out a shaky breath, struggling to process what he was being told. He looked down, then out the window.
“What, um…what are you saying?” he asked.
“I’m saying that I don’t know what happened to your arm,” Grace said as gently as he could. “I don’t know anything about where you came from, what happened to you to bring you here, or who you are.”
Simon exhaled sharply and leaned forward on the bed with his one hand, staring blankly at the carpet floor.
“I’m sorry I can’t help you more, Simon,” Grace said, looking away to avoid revealing the tears in his eyes. He wiped them away quickly. “I’m really sorry.”
An unsettlingly calm voice echoed in Simon’s head, a memory as unstable as the sound coming out of the speaker within it. I’m really sorry, Simon. I can’t do anything for you. His own screams of fury interrupted any other dialogue from the speaker. NO! You promised!!! You PROMISED I would be released! Please, I don’t want to die!!! I JUST WANT TO LIVE!
Flashes of sight and sound and smell rapidly came back to Simon. The groaning of the metal hull, the click and flash of the camera, the whirring of the engines as the numbers on the dashboard changed almost too fast to see. Just as quickly as they appeared the memories were gone, and there was nothing once again.
“Simon, hey,” Grace was saying, now leaning forward in his chair. “Are you still with me?”
Simon took a gasping, shuddering breath in, blinking away tears that he hadn’t noticed before. He was gripped with an all too familiar feeling. Fear.
“They…they were going to leave me down there,” he said as tears rolled down his face. “They knew I wasn’t going to survive. They just wanted those fucking samples.”
“Hey, look at me,” Grace said, reaching over and setting a hand on Simon’s intact shoulder. Simon lifted his gaze to meet Grace’s, brow furrowed in anger. “It doesn’t matter what they wanted anymore. They are light-years away from you, with no way to contact you. What matters is that you survived despite what they wanted.”
Simon’s expression softened before he looked down again.
“That’s, um…” he mumbled, wiping his face. “That’s all I hoped for.”
Grace nodded and took his hand away, sitting back again.
“I’ll give you some space,” he said, grabbing his notebook and standing up. “Let me know if you need anything. I’ll be around. Oh, just warning you now, I’ve been keeping Laika out of your room as long as I can, but I don’t know how much longer I can hold her back. She really wants to meet you.”
Simon nodded, and Grace walked to the door.
“Wait,” Simon said, lifting his head to look at Grace as he paused to look back. “Thank you, Grace.”
“You’re welcome,” Grace said with a bit of a smile before walking out of the room and closing the door behind him.