Chapter Text
Simon stills.
It's not like he was doing much anymore since he'd finished his task, toying with his sphere for lack of anything else to do aside from staring or paying far too much focus to the radiating pain. There were divots in it, the feeling of something slightly smoother hidden behind a deceptively sturdy container. Occasionally, when he rolled it between his hand or threw it upwards, it would make a slight sound. Dry and lightly clicking. Easy enough to destroy if he had so much as an inkling in that direction, yielding to the touch. You could press your finger right into it and though it did take a second, it would bounce right back. Easy to throw, he's certain, but the thought of having it too far from him…
No.
He'd been doing a lot of that lately — the looking at the door and not seeing much. The bed was still firmly in front of it. The window was hardly open. Simon hadn't made it particularly easier to see farther, keeping the light off so long as that sliver of Outside existed.
He could shove the bed in a corner and hide under it, nab whoever was coming in Today. Tomorrow. Whichever it was…He'd had this thought before, hadn't he? Simon was forgetting himself which— Might be because he hadn't been sleeping much. Again and again, circling the same thoughts like liquid near a drain, a sigh leaving him before he stiffens again.
It's not close enough where he can make out the details, but compared to the low trills and chirps, this was something different. Mechanical. Like the Human voices from above, whenever they sounded. Robotic. The cadence of it entirely artificial and not something he can identify properly, but where the rest of them sounded…almost dense? This noise was hollow — in feeling and in depth, running over a lower sound he couldn't quite pick up on. A station's hum over the sound of his own breathing kind of overlap. Hard to make out.
Unless he got closer.
Not something he wanted to do. Not something he probably should do, if he was considering his own safety. Safety which was probably impacted by whatever they were discussing. It wasn't ego or some thinly veiled narcissism either — likelihood was, that if they were speaking near him, it was probably about him. These things had plenty space to talk about anything else anywhere else. And sure, they might be talking about Something Else, but this was a space that held or was adjacent to his cell. A space that he was being observed in. Hardly a stretch to assume that he was at least adjacent to the topic of discussion if not the centre of it.
So, he could choose to not get closer, and not know, or he could approach and figure out exactly what was Off by the noise, try and see if there were words he could identify in between all the warbling. Figure out what they wanted, what they'd do.
Hardly a choice.
A silent shuffle towards the door as he feels the bed dip under his weight. Noise beyond ceasing. As if they somehow could see him coming closer, heard the sound of the mattress giving way to his pressure, despite the walls in between them. Simon wouldn't put it past them — had assumed they were having him surveilled somehow, sound, vision whatever it was, they might not care about Him but they definitely would care about how he wasting their resources and—
There it is again.
That weird, scratchy whistle of a chirp, distinctly Other to the answering ones. Three people, he thinks? It's hard to differentiate them properly, one sounds a little brighter, chirpier, if that was even a thing. Hurried, like whatever was speaking would run out of breath, keel and never be able to get everything they wanted out into the world. He could understand that. Feeling wise. Not that he had much to say that would ever inspire that kind of pace. The other voice, the one that didn't sound hurried or artificial was…not…slow…Just…winding? It didn't rush itself as much, each note almost carefully extended as if the sounds were words and each word had been placed with intention.
This is what he got for all his trouble — trying to analyse sound and slap it with a personality.
Warm — it's a warmth that radiates from the door to lick at the skin of his ear. Not a heat, just…energy, lingering in the door, trapped or simply pushed into his room. This cell. Ear pressing closer, he waits as the conversation falls into a lull, counts and reaches fifty-eight before it resumes, noting with increasing discomfort — a condition that seemed to perpetually haunt him here — that the ebb and flow of it seemed to line up with each one of his movements.
Did they have some sort of mass camera display on the—
"—outside?"
A blink, uneasy, knots forming in his stomach as he hears the way those vowels turn.
"—English worked? No, Rock, we—" Human.
Simon would be able to recognise the sound of a human anywhere, he thinks.
Knows.
Assumes.
He swallows down the wave of nausea. In, out. Not oxygen deprivation. "—glad to hear it. The translator would've—" Sleep depriviation, then? Auditory hallucinations would make sense then. That alongside the memory loss, the jitteriness, the p— Symptoms kind of overlapped. Or maybe he was asleep and this was a nightmare. "—dark." Yeah, the thoughts were dark, but they were true. The chances of this being a last-minute, last-chance dream of being saved only for it to turn out he was dying was greater than none. Even if he was actually in the cell, they might've forgotten him or abandoned him. Simon could be passed out on the floor, recalling nothing and making shit up.
"I know some people are scared of—" Or—
Or the Creature had done this all along.
Managed to lull him into a false sense of security that he'd been freed from one maw, fallen into a kinder one. Playing with its food like— Like some animal he'd only ever really read about in the books when he still had access to them.
It didn't sound like anybody he'd known from Eden. Nothing like the people he'd known in his earliest years or even any of the people working on throwing him to his death. Entirely made up. Entirely feasible that the thing that was going to consume him made it up. "Trust me, I freaked out when I saw—" It sounded awfully human. Not tinny like the others, not modulated and regurgitating words that had been programmed in, the structure of the sentences just close enough to what a real person might sound like that the wave of nausea gets a little more intense, rocking him back slightly and—
Silence.
Breathe in, breathe out.
It was going to consume him.
"—moving." It's even quieter now, the words harder to pick out in between the echoes of the other voices. Simon wasn't stupid though — it would've been easier to fool him if the thing had attempted to at least make the other voices speak like that one. None of this made sense. A human. Outside of his cell. A cell he didn't dare look beyond and honestly, that would make perfect sense if this was an illusion. Never meant to go through the door, so he didn't feel sa…feel like opening it.
The only thing stopping him from going outside was the fact there was nothing there.
If the Creature had made something beyond it, Simon would've had been allowed to open the door — this? The closed, unlocked door? That was just a torment meant to keep him in his place.
The only way a human might've…
Only way that might work was if—
Did the C.O.I get him? Did someone from above retrieve him despite the fact it felt like they abandoned him to his death? Felt. They did — he was never meant to leave, he was welded in, heard the metal fuse around him, buried alive and thrown out to the sea. Was his recovery a fluke? He'd assumed that whatever stole him away from the Ocean had been another life-form entirely but it was actually far more probable that this was a human ship. A recovery to see if there was a black box gone wrong when they found him inside it and decided…
If this was a human ship…
If the people keeping him captive were human…somehow his chances of anything other than an inevitable dissection was abysmal, which was—
"—look fine?" There's a noise that follows, a thrum of — one of them is laughing, the other two…Might be? It was hard to say, in between the everything else, the running noise. He could read humans. Tried to, at least. So, the human was laughing and the other two…were doing the equivalent?
"I think—" You should go, Simon helpfully fills in, shoving the sphere in his pocket, knowing full well that he wasn't going to get what he wanted. He never did. As much as it would be nice for this to be the first time, he'd been running out of hope for a while now.
Another beat of silence and he holds his breath, listening as they shuffle closer. "They're not sleeping, right?" A full sentence, clear, slightly hoarse. Upward inflection. A positive emotion of some sort. Happiness, but he wasn't really sure. Laughter he could pinpoint easily, that was a sound faked far and wide. Happiness…
Didn't really matter — they were closer now, his heart pounding a mile a minute as whoever was behind the door gets an answer, the meaning of it entirely lost on Simon. Code? Maybe there was a pattern to it that he wasn't noticing, the truth of what they were saying hidden in between the melodies and the speech he could make out might simply be a distraction to keep him from figuring it out.
Something hidden, something he could plan for, work against, counteract, fight—
The door clicks.
Light floods the room.
He pushes himself forwards.
Bites.