Chapter Text
Love.
Simon never knew what that word truly meant. He knew his mother had loved him in a way, knew that he loved the trees for their green shapes, knew that he loved his brothers and their welcoming arms- but now, as he watches this tin can fill with blood, he knows he was wrong. That his definition of ‘Love’ wasn’t… right. It wasn’t enough. It wasn’t really what ‘Love’ really is. That he never felt something as all encompassing as ‘love’.
Somewhere beneath his cursed, warping ribs, he feels it. A tiny little thing. An empty feeling that sits there and gnaws on the heartstrings he has left, severing them solemnly one by one. Each snap a realisation, each realisation comes another wave of this almost indescribable feeling. He knew that his heart was still beating in there, he could feel it and yet, it felt as if he’d been completely hollowed out. Like the echoes of prayer wailed within an empty church, he feels it. The absence of love, the reverberations, the grief it leaves in its wake- the undeniable proof that he hadn’t quite loved the right way before. He’d lost everything and yet, its here, on his own in the middle of the blood ocean that he feels it. That he truly feels it.
He’s...incomplete.
It doesn’t hurt as much as he thought it would. It aches, like poorly healed bones before a rainstorm, like muscles after a long nap in the wrong position, like sweat dripping into a paper cut that’s trying to scab over. He wonders if the grief is supposed to distract him from the impending end that he knows is coming. With each passing second the tide of crimson rises in his tiny industrial box rises and Simon takes another step into an almost-watery grave yet, all he can think about is this stupid thing in his chest. This thing that he’s carried with him from before they finished the welds that almost held him here; from before this and what happened and everything in between. With his remaining arm wrapped around the black box Simon realises he can’t hold himself, then he wonders if it would’ve helped at all anyway. He clutches onto the box tighter. With his blunt nails digging into blood-rusted metal, Simon laments on it all. Maybe if he’d just done something differently, perhaps this wouldn’t have hurt so much. Maybe he could’ve died in abject peace.
Then a thought comes to him- just as that awful sea of viscera reaches his chin, he’s struck with what might be his last thought; that he’s going to die like this. He’s going to die incomplete. Simon ‘the butcher’, Simon from Eden, Simon who was his mothers only son- he was going to die without knowing what the opposite of this feeling is. That this feeling is all he’ll ever be once the light within him dims. Forever he’ll be the absence of love. Between grief, between melancholia, between nihility. A vacuum. A void.
It’s only now that he realises he’s scared. Weak like the last lamb in line for the slaughter he bleats out, calling to someone who he knows won’t be listening. They never listened.
“I want to LIVE… please…. Please….. pl,.. eas-”
Cruelly, his mind flashes with thoughts of things he’s yet to see. A beach. An evergreen pine. Ice cream. A snail’s shell. A rainbow. He wants so achingly, like a piece of him was carved out long ago and only now in the near embrace of oblivion did he recognise the edges of the void he’d carried his entire life. Stories the elders told in Eden, things they were told to keep to themselves. Wishes. Prayers wrapped in human hope, in a world where god had abandoned them, they could only dream of what a miracle meant. To hell with dreaming. Simon wants a miracle.
So, he claws at the blood filled air, reaching out to where he thinks the stars might’ve once been, carving his miracle out of nothing. Beneath his sternum sits the box, bobbing along in and out of the sickening sea- resurfacing every second or so like a man desperate to not drown. Eventually he tires of waving his arm in the air like a madman in need of saving. After all, Simon knew the C.O.I weren’t coming for him. No one was coming for Simon.
Foreign blood fills his mouth and he can feel something other than this feeling ripping him apart. How unfair. After all of this suffering, all of this anguish- he still had more to endure. It was selfish but in a way, he’d hoped that maybe he could’ve just drowned, that maybe if he was just someone else, that this would’ve been over by now. He could’ve floated along into the quiet unloving, nothingness like a leaf on a peaceful stream. Instead he fights with a constant ringing in his ears, a ghost living in his severed nerves and the red-hot chill of boiling upon his skin. What more could he give? What else can it take?
He’d lost it all. Mind, Soul, Flesh… He slumps over the black box, expelling air that he hadn’t realised he’d been saving. Giving up seconds of oxygen in a traitorous heartbeat, Simon found himself clinging onto the tiny metal box. Perhaps if he died, he could live on in it- a tiny clump of cells in the hinges of Eden’s most precious discovery. A gravestone. Perhaps it was fitting that he’d die to retrieve such a thing. Half-lidded eyes sorrowfully recounted the battered box, treasuring it as if it were the most beautiful thing in the world. Without knowing why, he rubs his thumb over the metal casing, caressing it as if it were a crying child or a wounded dog.
“….Sorry. You’ll… have to do the rest… alone…”
He tries to chuckle but all that leaves his rough throat now is the gurgle of blood-ocean water. Head held high, he spits out what he can before trying to fight off his fear. The red line approaches his eyelashes, then his brows and finally the crown of his head- submerged completely within what supposedly lived inside of himself. Drowning in the remnants of something once alive.
Simon wonders if he’d have time for one last wish.
Refracted through the crimson waves comes a warm light, golden tinged bronze through death’s hands. The shards of broken glass stick into his remaining hand as he relinquishes himself to this new light- in the absence of the monster’s whispers in his mind he chooses to believe that maybe, in his last moments a star had come back. That his miracle had occurred just out of reach. That maybe all this suffering wasn’t for naught and that he’d bought back a single star from oblivion with all his might. As his mind drifts on, swept away by the unending pain of death- he decides that maybe this was enough. At least one mind in the universe would know him as Simon the wish-granter instead of a Butcher- even if it was just himself. It doesn’t ease that ache, It doesn’t fill the hole within. Yet, it does bring him solace; gives him a reason to loosen his muscles.
To let go.
By the time a firm hand is grabbing his shoulder, Simon has already drifted off into a place of half-limbo; not expecting to come back.