Chapter Text
Ave Maria, gratia plena,
The blood is everywhere. Roaring in Simon’s ears, blinding his eyes, filling his mouth, stomach, lungs. The voices scream as one, echoing in his head because the monster knows his ears are useless by now. The blood pushes in, forcing its way inside Simon as quickly and painfully as possible to assimilate, consume, devour.
It's punishing Simon. Mutating him, contorting his body beyond comprehension and letting him catch glimpses of it as he’s flung around. Wants Simon to know this is personal, retribution for forsaking all those who came before him despite all he knows, all he has seen. Simon will be made part of it, whether he wants it or not.
Dominus tecum.
Simon tries to get his bearings and grab onto the walls but his remaining fingers slip and fail again and again as the blood overruns the cabin and slicks everything around him. The cabin jerks again and Simon is pulled under the rapidly rising tide.
Blood resistance makes it hard to move but Simon manages to find a surface under his feet to push off of and break back into the remaining air pocket. Hot blood drips down his face in thick clumps and when he tries to haphazardly wipe it from his eyes and clear his vision, Simon finds his eyes can’t see anymore.
Benedicta tu in mulieribus,
Simon should give up. If he was smart, he’d give up and try to make the inevitable as quick and painless as possible. Let the blood destroy him and pray he’s allowed death. Hope the black box survives but know there’s nothing more he can do to ensure that. Accept this is what he deserves.
There was never any salvation for Simon here, at the bottom of a blood ocean. His fate had been sealed from the moment he first took a life, conflicted but willing to do it again, and now he's in a rapidly filling submarine between the teeth of a monster.
et benedictus fructus ventris tui, Iesus.
But there is something in him that urges him to fight back, hold on for just a moment longer and not give up until he’s forced to. And like every single time before, Simon does. Whatever comes after will be what he’s always known he deserves but he’ll fight like hell before it.
He keeps gripping on to life with all he has left, strains the still-his parts of the body past their limit to gain half a second more. Ignores the pressure of something burrowing into his chest cavity as the blood rushes up to drown him. Endures the excruciating onslaught of a bitter ocean just to feel it for a moment longer. Pushes to stay above the surface to gasp mouthfuls of air that are mostly blood.
Sancta Maria, Mater Dei,
Simon meets the end like he does everything else: Violent and angry, so he doesn’t have to be scared.
His head hits the roof, the end of the line. The monster roars and Simon screams in response, putting everything he is and has been into it. It tears through the reminder of his face from mouth to ear, ripping through the muscle all the way into bone. One last act of defiance, allowing Simon to suffer from a horror of his own making in the end instead of the monster beyond human comprehension.
ora pro nobis peccatoribus,
The pressure in his chest grows. The last air pocket closes and for a moment, everything is quiet. Simon suspended in warmth, surrounded by blood that burrows through every pore of his skin. Burning the flesh off his bones on the way. He can feel it slither towards his heart and knows he’ll be gone, in whatever form that is, before the blood reaches it.
nunc et in hora mortis nostrae.
And then something buries, embeds, plants behind his ribs and sprouts.
It bursts out of his veins, roots cutting through the crushing pressure of blood as they look for a place to implant to. The monster screeches as the branches pierce it in place and the trunk shreds through its head reaching for the sky. It becomes one with Simon down to his cells, uses every last piece of his body for nourishment and stretches, develops, grows.
It takes a hold of his body so all-consuming and overwhelming and absolute, that there’s no space for Simon in it anymore.
Amen.
Simon falls, crashes, is engulfed. He flails desperately against the weight surrounding him, restricting, blindly trying to push against the mass and keep his mouth above the blood. Something hard and unyielding presses against his sternum, trying to keep him in place.
The feeling that takes him over is primal. Simon wretches himself out of the hold and frantically kicks his feet against the slippery surface. He twists, dodges, turns and suddenly, Simon is in a free-fall again.
He collides against a solid surface, landing on his left side. Directly on what remains of his arm.
The force of the pain that sweeps over him pushes the remainder of the air in his lungs out. It whites out his mind and overrides every other sense, agony radiating and shredding and cutting to his core. Simon thinks he vomits but can't be sure, his whole being reduced to one pulsating point of his body and forced to just feel.
It takes Simon a moment to realize he’s not choking anymore. Panting, yes, trying to replace the missing air but not gulping down blood as he does. Simon can breathe with relative ease, nothing blocking airflow or pressing against his lungs.
It takes him longer to realize that his body hurts less than it should. His arm still throbs like a motherfucker and there is a general pain to his body but it’s nowhere near what it should be. His chest, face, eyes. They all feel whole, despite being forcefully ripped open from the inside barely seconds ago. The pain in his stomach is not from blood forcibly filling it but much more familiar. Emptiness. Starvation.
The hit to his arm feels so overwhelming, because his body is not in consistent agony. Somehow, Simon knows it's not used to being in active pain anymore, despite fighting for his life mere moments earlier.
… What the fuck?
His next realization is that the roaring in his ears is his own heartbeat instead of the cacophony of voices. Wait, no, that’s not true. There’s a voice under the pounding of his heart but it’s calm and soft. Careful, even. So utterly out of place.
“– you’re safe now.”
Finally, Simon can see light. His eyelids are closed, something holding them together like glue, but his vision is bright red like when he’d pray while facing a light. Before he can think better of it, Simon rips his eyes open. The light stabs into his eyes, burning and blinding and agonizing but real.
And above him, surrounded by the light, is a man.
“Woah, woah, woah! Don’t do that, you’ll hurt yourself!” The singular voice exclaims, seemingly coming from the man. He makes a face. “Or, uh. More than you already have?”
He's kneeled next to Simon on the floor, his hair wild around his head and light-colored jacket spotless if not slightly worn.
The man's close, too close. Simon can't put distance between them. Instinct pushes Simon to reach up before he's made that decision, the next best option. His coordination is unsteady, body screeching in protest, but it's manageable. Simon only needs to sit up slightly to grab the man by his collar and then goes limp, using his bodyweight and gravity to yank the man down.
He's clearly caught off-guard, crashing on top of Simon without an attempt to soften his fall, and Simon uses the confusion to his advantage. He flips their positions, settling heavily on the man's stomach and making sure to use his legs to trap the man’s arms to his sides.
(This is such a bad idea.) (Simon's already in it.)
Before the man can react, Simon has him flat against the ground with a vice grip around his neck. Leaving his legs unrestrained is a gamble Simon is willing to make. The man is around his height at a quick glance but has much less muscle mass and the reaction time of a feverish old man. Simon is confident he can choke him out fast enough, if needed to. The man's eyes are wide behind his glasses as he stares up at Simon, frozen in place.
Huh, reading glasses. Thy don't see that everyday, must be a favored one.
Simon leans down, like he’s threatening the man, but is really just covering for how much energy that attack move took to execute. His spine aches from slamming it on the floor twice, his muscles are about to start shaking any moment and Simon is so, so exhausted. He must be able to keep it from showing, though, going by the way the man doesn't fight back.
“What betide?” Simon asks, careful to use standard Edenitian instead of colloquial language.
From what he heard, the man spoke unlike anyone else Simon has ever met. The language is a variant of English, definitely, but more similar to the First Colony speeches played on Settlement Day than anything from either Eden or the C.O.I.
Simon definitely did not pay enough attention to the recordings of old speeches. Any attempt to mimic them would definitely make him lose the authority he has right now, and the C.O.I. dialect is further from old English out of the two.
So, he’s left with the Edenite dialect. Despite the numerous differences between the Edenite and Consolidation dialects, both evolved from the same origin and the Consolidation guards understood standard Edenitian well enough from the beginning, as long as Simon focused on English-origin words and avoided using any Latinate. It's his strongest bet.
Blue eyes dart nervously between Simon and the rest of the room, that Simon only now notes is suspiciously void of guards. The man's lips move around words but only wheeze comes out. Simon’s knuckles are white.
Fuck, right. Can't answer if he can't speaketh.
He eases his grip, allowing air in but keeping it just on this side of uncomfortable. The man sucks in air, panting a little. He tries to wiggle his hands and Simon tightens his grip for a second in warning.
“I don't, uh, I don't know what ‘betide’ means.”
Fucking hell.
“How am I hither?” Simon tries again.
“‘Hither’..? Do you mean how are you here?” The man says in revelation and then, as if by accident, whispers, “Oh wow, your speech is fascinating. Shakespearean, almost.”
Simon gives him a withering look and the man realizes his mistake, ears reddening.
“That was insensitive, right? Sorry.”
The man clears his throat, his full focus back on Simon. Simon feels pinned down by it, like he's still being analyzed and evaluated by the man.
“We were actually hoping you'd tell us how you ended up here. 'Here' being the 40 Eridani A star system, specifically Erid or the 40 Eridani A b. Your spacecraft appeared in orbit four weeks ago and you’ve been recovering here since we recovered you. But we don’t know more than that.”
A pause.
This fucking bastard.
Rage colors Simon’s vision at the obvious lie. Went through the trouble of getting someone who could mimic the old dialects and then had him sprout this bullshit.
The man dares to not only speak of planets and stars like they still exist but of a spacecraft. As if Simon wasn't welded into a leaky submarine that would never make it past the fucking atmosphere.
It's not the first time his mind has been fucked with but it's the first time it’s so blatant. What was he supposed to think, that the fucking stars came back?
Do they regard me this idiotic?
“Thee're a shit strill. I wast in a fucking submarine, dumbass, didn't thy superiors tell thee?” The man seems a little older than him, based on the lines around his eyes and the gray in his stubble.
Simon doesn’t recognize the man as Eden but he’s been in the conviction realization program for years now. Could be a convert, as rare as they are. “Eden or C.O.I.?”
His fingers tighten just a little and the man goes frantic. Good, time for the truth.
“I don't know what those mean either but I’m not lying, I swear! Your ship appeared in the scanners out of nowhere.” Distress coats his words as he tries to kick his legs up and against Simon. He's either new to the job or an excellent actor. “Please let me go, you're hurting me.”
Simon’s stomach lurches.
“Please let me go,” the Consolidation fuck on Filament Station begs.
It's day eight of the battle and the man is badly injured, bleeding from a stomach wound there's no coming back from. He won't die immediately, might even last a couple of days, but wounds like that tend to fester and rot. His team must have known it too and he left him behind. He's already dead in everyone's eyes, except his own.
“I have a kisa your age!”
And Simon and his Brothers are angry and exhausted. This was supposed to be a three-day-long mission at most, they had been foretold so. They need an outlet for the rage they feel, something to attack instead of the Father who sent them here.
Simon sees the glint in their eyes, the target realized. Hears the laughs when they notice the man has pissed himself.
“Please don’t–”
But the man only sees the weapon in Simon's hand, blunt edge glinting in the hazard lights. His eyes are locked on Simon as the blade cuts his throat at a bad angle and leaves him choking on his own blood. Simon notices the Core Mechanic patch on his shoulder right before it's covered in red.
Simon tells himself it was an act of Mercy. That the man could have done nothing to save the core. That he would have died in any case, most likely by his Brothers’ hands. Knows Heaven will judge him and find him a liar.
The memory flashes to the front of his mind, like a warning, and Simon wants to vomit again. A feeling of absolute certainty settles into his skin, bones, atoms: Simon is about to make a mistake like that, again.
The man rips an arm free and swings, side of a fist hitting Simon's cheekbone. The force of it knocks Simon away and loosens his grip. A strange sort of lucidity breaks through Simon's mind. What the fuck is he doing?
He pushes away from the man like he’s been burned, scrambling off him to create space and only stopping when his back hits a wall. Simon pulls his knees in, eyes locked on them, and he just needs to- needs to think, make sense of things before acting for once in his fucking life, but his head is a mess. He can’t hold onto one fucking though for long enough to make heads or tails of it.
Fuckin- Focus, thy stupid fucking moron!
Okay, three options: either the C.O.I. or Eden found and rescued him, and are lying about it for some reason, or this is a vision from the monster.
Simon’s vision falters, goes dark around the edges. He’s breathing too fast, oxygen exhaled before it can do anything, and Simon can’t think, think, fucking think!
He brings his hand to his hair, pulling on the strands hard. It hurts, rips hair out of his scalp, but the tug-yank-pain clears his mind just enough.
The most glaring issue is that this place, wherever he is, didn't bother to have guards posted. The room contains just Simon and the man, which hasn’t happened since Simon became a Brother, almost like they don’t know how dangerous he is. Simon might not be as big of a threat as usual, one armed and disoriented, but he is still the Butcher and wouldn't be left unsupervised outside of a cell.
The C.O.I. would definitely have guards when interacting with Simon, a precaution ever since the finger incident early on in the conviction realization program. They usually don’t bother with mind tricks either, blatantly clear in their objectives with the convicts. With the exception of the SM-13 expedition, the C.O.I. won’t always tell the full truth but wouldn't lie to his face. (Even Ava had eventually told him everything she knew.)
Eden on the other hand would have both other Brothers guard him and play mind games. His Father was a master at those and as far as Simon knows, he hasn’t been replaced. But the situation doesn’t call for one. The Father always had a reason to play with their minds, as small as it could be. Simon would be the first to admit that he’s not that smart and maybe there’s an angle he doesn’t see, but it just wouldn’t make sense to lie.
If he survived the expedition, the C.O.I. would want to know what he found in his own words. Especially with Ava dead and the submarine destroyed. The black box only records sound but they’d want to know what he’d seen. To find him, Eden would have to know about the blood moons and that would give them the same incentive.
Both would be interrogating him right now.
(The man said he doesn’t know what Eden or Consolidation of fucking Iron is.)
That leaves an illusion from the monster. It could definitely affect Simon’s senses, giving him hope in the form of a voice while luring him deeper into the caves. It had felt real, right up until the moment Simon finally noticed the broken wires.
Except the monster had already won.
Simon died. He felt it, something ripping him open from the inside and tearing his body apart. Even if he hadn’t felt it, if he somehow managed to survive the monster attack, the SM-13 had been damaged and useless at the bottom of the blood ocean. Simon would have drowned, too far down to make it to the surface even if he hadn’t put the lifejacket around the black box.
The monster was going to assimilate him by force in a matter of moments. There was no need for a false vision like this, something unassuming and calm to keep him compliant.
There should have been no coming back from that end and yet, here he is.
Alive.
(Something quiet rings true when he thinks of it. There’s no logical reason for the feeling but he knows it’s true.)
All other options exhausted, he’s left with his first instinct: The Divine.
Simon was never much of a believer. Maybe when he was younger, long before the Quiet Rapture, he might have had some connection through his mother. But then she'd died and Simon was left alone in Eden, where you believed or nourished the Last Tree. It, or its appearance, allowed Simon to survive and he was nothing but a survivor, first and foremost.
Nevertheless, some of that old thinking had been awakened by all he witnessed in the Light. The monster spoke of a pinhole god, curious and wanting to understand their universe, and then pushed him into the Light. Simon had been too overwhelmed at the time, surrounded by a red void that should not exist and confronted with a being too large to comprehend, and then occupied with fighting for the black box’s survival but… That must have been it, right? The Eye was the monster's god.
And it had seen him. Something much bigger than him, to what Simon is little more than a speck of dust, had looked straight at Simon. Had seen him, known him, said his name. Showed him visions of his past and future, of death and despair, and then sent Simon back.
The god from the Father’s sermons punished mankind for their greed and corruption but allowed chosen men to lead those worthy to safety. He was not righteous, only willing to sacrifice himself at the end, but no virtuous man could have ended up in his position in the first place. Simon had truly been willing to die for the rest of humanity.
Maybe that had been its will and seeing Simon execute it, sacrificing the one for the good of the many, had earned him one last chance at life. Not enough to balance the scales of the afterlife but enough to be saved for now.
Or maybe this god is nothing like the one Simon knows of, could not give less of a shit what Simon is and what he’s done, and was just curious to see what a dead man would do if left alive.
Either way, Simon lives.
And immediately hurts the first person he meets, his possible savior.
Fuck.
Simon grasps at the strands tighter.
“I’m- I apologize, fuck, I didn’t mean to- I shouldn't be hither. Fuck,” Simon fumbles over his words, all of them inadequate and bordering on lies.
He did mean to hurt the man, as much as he regrets it now. Regrets don't do shit though, don’t undo the pain he’s inflicted.
Something drags against the floor, slow and tentative. Simon tenses.
“How about we start over?” The man says after a while, voice rough and hesitant and way too close. He can’t be further than an arm’s reach.
There’s a moment of silence, expectant. Simon looks up to see the man crouching in front of him, near but not close enough to corner. He’s holding a hand to his throat protectively but there’s quiet determination in his eyes.
“My name is Grace. Ryland Grace.”
Grace.
A little on the nose but message received, loud and clear. Fuck, Simon really did attack a blessing from God. What a fucking idiot he is.
Simon lowers his eyes, not looking directly at Grace but keeping him in his field of vision. He swallows, almost choking on it, and nods.
“What’s your name?”
Of all the things Simon expected, that question is not one of them. It’s an ordinary question, innocuous in nature, and Simon can’t remember the last time he was asked it. On Eden, Simon’s reputation had always preceded him and the C.O.I. wanted him to know his place. Even at the bottom of the blood ocean Simon had named himself to Ava unprompted, in a desperate bid to hold on to his humanity.
Grace is asking to know it.
His voice is rough, dissonant and harsh in the quiet, when he finally answers.
“Simon. Son of Hannah.”
It stings on this tongue.
“Nice to meet you, Simon,” Grace greets him and extends the hand from his throat. (Bares it, leaves it vulnerable.)
It takes Simon too long to react but Grace is patient, waiting for Simon to untangle his fingers from his hair and carefully place his hand in Grace’s. It’s warm and clean and soft, a stark contrast to Simon’s filthy one. His hand seems to have been scrubbed clean at some point but a fresh wound in the back of his hand stains it again, blood burrowing under his nails and in the lines of his knuckles. It’s grotesque. It's so very Simon.
Despite being more than in his right to do so, Grace doesn’t let go. He wraps his fingers around Simon’s hand and tugs on it gently, helping Simon stand up. There’s a soft smile on his face, in the corners of his eyes.
“Welcome to Erid.”