Chapter Text
Simon wakes up to pain and blinding brightness.
He doesn’t know where the fuck he is, or how he got here. His last memories are hazy and jumbled, colored by pain and terror. The blood inside the sub had started floating. Gravity had gotten…weird, like the sub had gotten launched into space somehow. The voices had gone quiet, leaving an eerie silence behind. It was as quiet as a grave in there.
He doesn’t really remember anything else.
His arm is missing. His arm is missing. He’s in some kind of facility that doesn’t look like it should exist, let alone belong to the COI, but who else could have gotten him out of the blood ocean?
“Eye movement detected. What’s two plus two?”
Yeah, fuck that. Simon wrenches himself upright and ignores the pain and the shakiness and the way his head spins. He rips out the stupid IV with his teeth for lack of having a second hand. Blood runs down the length of his arm as he stands up.
Fuck, it’s hard to balance with only one arm.
He stumbles through the first few steps and has to dodge a robot arm to the door. The door isn’t locked, and he continues down the hallway, trying his best not to make any noise. He’s wearing…clean socks and a pair of very soft, very new pants, shirtless no doubt so whoever patched up his shoulder could access it easier. He’d prefer to be fully dressed and have shoes, but the socks are quieter, so. Pros and cons.
He sees the guy at the end of the hallway. Blond, a little taller than Simon, dressed in a soft, clean cardigan. His eyes widen with shock.
“Uh, I don’t think you should be up -” he starts.
Simon lunges at him. The guy turns to run, and Simon grabs him from behind and slams him into the ground, pinning him face down on the ground as he yelps.
“You are going to tell me what the fuck is going on,” Simon snarls, pinning him down with his hand on his neck and elbow digging into his back. “Are you with the COI? You fucking tell them -”
“I’m not - I’m not with anyone?” the guy says, his voice going high with panic. “I don’t know who that is - please, stop, I don’t - I don’t know who that is -”
“You don’t know who the COI is,” Simon says. “Uh-huh. Think of a better lie.”
The guy underneath him is hyperventilating now. “I d-don’t - please -”
“Tell me the truth, I think you people owe me that after welding me into that fucking death trap.”
“I didn’t d-do that?” the guy says helplessly. “Please - please, I don’t want to die. I don’t want to die, don’t do this, d-don’t -”
Simon has a flash of memory then - of the moments after the blood started floating, of gripping the radio and sending out one last ditch distress call - Please I don’t want to die in here.
Simon lets go like he’s been burned.
The guy takes advantage to shove him back and scramble away until his back hits the wall, breathing hard. He doesn’t make a move to stand, only sits there shaking and near tears. Simon hadn’t even threatened to kill him, and he’s begging for his life.
Like any of the COI fucks gave a shit about Simon begging for his life. They can't take it but they can sure dish it out.
“Coward,” Simon says, bracing himself against the wall to stand.
The man flinches.
“Y-you are aboard the Hail Mary,” the man starts, halting and voice shaking. He is looking at Simon but not meeting his eyes. “We heard your distress signal and we - we radioed back and forth a few times, remember?”
“Not really,” Simon spits back.
“I can show you the logs, if you want. It’s - I swear, it’s the truth. You asked us for help so we helped you. Please, I don’t know what you want from me.”
Simon is about to spit back a nasty response, just as something catches his eye and he notices, on the far end of the hallway, a circular window looking at…
Stars.
It can’t be real.
Simon stumbles towards it without much thought. “This is a screen,” he says, at last, but even as he says it, he knows it’s not true. It’s not a screen. He touches the glass carefully. “This is a dream,” he amends.
“It’s - it’s a window?” the man says. “I told you, we’re on the Hail Mary. We’re about two months' travel away from the 40 Eridani star system.”
Simon can’t do anything but stare at the stars.
There are so many it is blinding. It’s the most beautiful thing he’s ever seen. It’s a miracle, a glimpse of a universe long dead, it’s…
Simon realizes he may have fucked up catastrophically about twenty minutes into staring at the stars. Which is, probably, about twenty-one minutes too late. Story of his life.
Because the stars…aren’t dead. They aren’t dead, and it could be a screen, but who the fuck would have the money and the resources to put together something like this? This entire ship is clean and new in a way nothing ever is. The guy’s clothes are new, the clothes that Simon is wearing are new. Not a single patch or bit of visible mending on them. The guy says he’s not COI and doesn’t look like he’d survive two minutes in the COI anyways.
Simon outlines his options:
1. This is a vivid hallucination or a dream. Simon will wake up shortly and he’ll still be in that fucking sub. This is the worst possible option. Please, God, let it be literally anything else.
2. This is heaven. That seems unlikely, both because Simon isn’t getting into heaven, and because this is too fucking weird and he’s in too much pain to be heaven. If it is heaven, he just tackled an angel to the ground. Fantastic.
3. There’s more humans out there and they have more resources than the COI or Eden and they’ve lied to him his entire life and the Quiet Rapture was all a lie. This seems like a hard thing to pull off.
4. Time travel. Interdimensional bullshit. Who knows. Look, he almost got eaten by a blood eel with psychic powers. He’s feeling open minded.
The guy who saved him is still sitting on the floor where he’d scrambled away from Simon and makes no move to stand or to fight back. And while Simon does have more muscle on him, he’s also still recovering from getting an arm ripped off and whatever adrenaline carried him here is quickly leaving. He is not a hard man to kill or subdue at the moment.
Simon is pretty sure gravity is going to subdue him, for fuck’s sakes, if he doesn’t sit down soon.
The guy is…not breathing well, not really looking at Simon at all. He’s acting like…
What, like a madman just tackled him to the ground and tried to kill him?
No matter who this guy is or what his motives are, he answered Simon’s distress signal and got him out. He didn’t let Simon bleed out from the amputation. He wasted medical supplies on him.
“D’you have a name?” Simon asks hoarsely. He glances back at the stars, because he can’t tear his eyes away from them for too long. Some part of him is still waiting for them to vanish.
“Huh?” The guy startles, and then his eyes land on Simon and he flinches back. “What?”
“A name. Your name.” Simon repeats.
The guy stares at him. “Grace. R-ryland Grace, but you can just call me. Call me Grace.” Grace shakes out his hands, blinks hard and takes a deep breath. “God. Okay. Okay. We’re on the Hail Mary. We’re on the Hail Mary, everything’s fine, everything is fine.”
Simon feels like he should be the one having a breakdown right now. Maybe once this all stops feeling like the world’s strangest fever dream.
Grace gets to his feet but doesn’t get closer. “You should probably get back into the med bay,” he says, not quite looking at him. “Sleep off the, y’know, blood loss and stuff.”
Simon has to brace himself on the window’s ledge because his knees are starting to feel wobbly. “I might, uh, fall.”
“Can I help you or are you gonna try to kill me again?”
“Uh, I’m - I’m sorry,” Simon says, feeling a little dizzy. “I don’t know what the fuck is going on.”
“Yeah, you and me both, buddy,” Grace says, and he approaches and ducks under Simon's remaining arm and takes on some of his weight. The touch shocks him - when’s the last time someone touched him to help instead of hurt? He’d enjoy it more if he couldn’t feel Grace trembling.
“Who’s in charge here?” Simon asks. Please let Grace not be someone important, please -
“Me, I guess? There’s just me and Rocky here. I mean, I’m technically the captain, but it’s not like I can really tell Rocky what to do.”
Yeah, he’s fucked up catastrophically, for sure. Get on the guy in charge’s shitlist while stranded who knows where and barely strong enough to walk. Good job, Simon.
“Fuck,” Simon says softly as Grace helps him back onto the bed. “You aren’t with the COI.”
“I don’t know what that is,” Grace says. “Not really with anyone at the moment. Earth sent me on a suicide mission, I didn’t die, we saved the sun, now we’re gonna go save Rocky’s sun.”
Simon blinks at him. “You…saved the sun.”
“Well, I hope we did,” says Grace quietly, expression sobering. “We sent the information back to Earth and the samples we needed, but it’ll take years to get there. No way to know for sure, but I have to believe this wasn’t all for nothing.”
“Earth is still there,” Simon says in disbelief.
“Uh, yeah, I sure hope so?” Grace says, looking alarmed all of a sudden. “Is…Earth…not there anymore, where you’re from?”
“Where I’m from? What the hell are you talking about?”
“Well, I mean, you kind of just…appeared on our radar, in what’s clearly a submarine, in the middle of deep space...Rocky and I’s best guess is a wormhole, maybe?”
Option 4, interdimensional travel bullshit, it is.
Oh God, this is real, isn’t it?
Simon wants to believe it’s real. He wants to believe it so badly. He wants to believe there’s a place where stars will exist and the planets never vanished, and humanity isn’t dying out.
Tears make his vision swim.
If this is real, Simon has wasted a miraculous second chance by immediately assaulting the person in charge. He’s going to get shoved into a cell or out an airlock, or maybe they’ll weld him back into the sub and drop him back where they found him.
He wonders if there’d be any point in begging for mercy. The tears spill over, running hot and shameful down his face.
Grace, for some reason, looks sympathetic instead of angry. “I know it’s a lot. We’ll figure it out. Do you want more pain meds? How’s that arm feeling?”
It hurts like hell, but Simon won’t admit to that. You don’t waste pain medication. “It’s fine.”
Grace seems dubious, but doesn’t push. “Okay. I’m bandaging that arm, though.”
Simon looks down at where he pulled out the IV, and the long line of blood trailing his forearm. “Oh.”
Grace pulls on gloves and rips open a little packet and pulls out a wipe to clean the blood, and then he’s pressing a gauze pad to where the IV used to be and taping it in place. More supplies wasted on him.
Grace throws the gloves into a yellow bucket and sighs. “Okay, Look, so…Rocky’s gonna…Rocky’s going to wake up in about an hour,” he says. “And there is no way I’m gonna be able to keep him from introducing himself as soon as he does. So you should know that he looks like a spider made out of rock, and he’s an alien.”
Simon stares at him for a moment. Grace just looks tired. “Is the alien…dangerous?” he asks slowly.
“No! No, no he’s my friend, he’s - uh, well, the engineer of the Hail Mary,” says Grace. “Look, I’m just saying that - he’s gonna wake up soon, and we don’t need to tell him about how our first meeting went. We can gloss over the whole ‘tackle me to the ground and scare the daylights out of me’ thing. I won’t tell you if you won’t.”
Simon is 90% sure this is going to come back to bite him in the form of blackmail but he nods anyway, because it sure as hell sounds like Grace is implying Simon will be allowed to stay a while longer.
“And I need to know that you aren’t going to try to hurt him,” Grace says, and it’s the first time that something hard has come into his voice.
“I won’t attack him if he doesn’t attack me,” Simon says.
Grace sighs. “All I can ask for, I guess. I’ll let you rest. Shout if you need anything.”
And Simon is left alone in the med bay, feeling like a man who’d been inexplicably granted a stay of execution. It doesn’t take long for him to fall back asleep.