Chapter Text
It’s cold when Simon wakes.
He hadn’t expected his death to be met with the same warmth and comfort The Father spoke of in his sermons, yet part of him prayed in those last moments. He did not go gently. He was not ready to die. Most of all, deep down, he knew his soul had not been worthy to be met with the kindness of that warmth The Father preached about. Hands so kind and soft to guide into the safety and security of Beyond. Sins forgiven, soul cleansed, heart deemed pure and untarnished. No more pain. All became well for those guided to the After.
There was no warmth. No hands lifting his soul. There was only a dull, throbbing pain. One he could not find the source of. His mind uncomfortably hazy, eyes too heavy to lift open, goosebumps littering his skin.
This was not Beyond. This was not the same After. It couldn’t be. Of course it wasn’t. Simon was irredeemably impure within the confines of his body. There was no separating his soul from what he’d done, what he had been driven to do, what he had stained himself with. One does not gain the favor of Gods by running from their salvation. Why should any take pity upon him when he had fought so hard to stay alive and in turn declaring his defiance against the After? He had all but spat on the offers. Gods would not take those that did not want them. These souls got left behind. Simon had heard it before, and now he knew it to be true.
Not that he ever committed to following any of it anyways. This was probably what happened to non-believers.
Something mechanical whirred at his right side. Barely audible through the dampening ringing distracting him in his ears as his consciousness stirred towards wakefulness. A distant part of him wondered after it, but no part of his body made any effort to move yet, and the curiosity left as quickly as it came in his half-present state. Everything is floaty and too-far. He drifts with it. Perhaps it’s better not to know what became of him.
Upon Simon’s next waking, the ringing is gone from his ears, but in turn he finds that it had been replaced with something quietly beeping. It comes from over his head, somewhere behind but not far. There is still a chill against his skin, but with some effort, his focus grants the discovery of cloth laid over his waist and down past his feet. It’s soft and light. His mind supplies the word sheet to him. He is not comforted by the concept. Instead, there is a deep and growing sense of wariness. Something is amiss with this picture. It is strange, and stranger the clearer his mind becomes. Simon struggles to control his body past the still-present pain inside of him. It seems to have settled into his very marrow and made home there. As if it were alive and became knowledgeable that nothing was coming to guide him away. He was unable to move. The mechanical whirring returned.
With great effort, Simon furrowed a brow, and opened his eyes.
There was nothing. His sight was greeted with a bright, all-encompassing white light, burning his eyes in welcome. No. He had not gone Beyond. He had been punished for eternity. The eel had come back for him.
The beeping above his head quickened its pace as he slammed his eyes shut, trying with all his might to get away. Anywhere. Any place out of the light. His body wouldn’t cooperate, and a new sound akin to an alarm had started alongside the rapid beeping, while the machinery nearby seemed to move in such a way Simon would only be able to describe as sounding frantic.
Wetness trailed down from the corners of his eyes into his hair, a dim awareness that he had begun crying. He was sentenced to die over and over again, left to the nonexistent mercy of his subnautic predator. Eternal purgatory within his welded ship, new alarms and unfamiliar noises. Punishment. This is what he gets for refusing the hands of Gods that had reached for him prior. His breath caught in his chest, seizing against his screaming ribs and halting in the hollow of his throat. Prayers would not save him now. There was no one left to beg to. The road to salvation had already been ripped from beneath him.
Across from where his body lay Simon hears a hiss past his feet. Something airtight being released. Hull breach, the memory of ferocious needle-sharp teeth puncturing metal, and something wails a pathetic sound as if it were a wounded animal. Maybe it’s him. He doesn’t know. Air is ripped from his lungs and he feels like he’s drowning again. Blood filling the submersible, his hands slippery with it, the taste of it making him retch. Simon is dying again. He’s dying again and he will die forever and he will never be allowed to rest. He’s never going to be free. The strain makes pain flare underneath his skin like his soul has been set on fire and this time he knows he’s the one sobbing as if it will ever matter. Distantly, he wonders if he’ll feel the fear this deeply every time. If it’s going to hurt this badly forever.
It isn’t until something touches him that his body begins to listen to him. A terrified shout comes forward, head turning away from the source of contact against his left shoulder with eyes still shut tight as if it’ll hide him, wishing for somewhere to run, for his limbs not to feel so heavy, his head to stop swimming. He wants, somewhere deep in the back of his mind, for his mother. But she isn’t coming to save him either. He’s being left to drown in the ocean.
The hand– hand?– doesn’t leave his shoulder but doesn’t try to harm him, and Simon is gasping for air that doesn’t seem to come with feeble attempts to shrug it off. His left arm won’t cooperate with him, stuck unfeeling for some reason as if the nerves had been pinched off. There’s a voice filtering in past the monitor that beeps just as rapidly as his heart feels. The voice doesn’t sound like the phantom researchers, or The Father, or Ava or David, or the eel itself. It’s a new voice, and he’s so afraid that he’s fairly certain he might actually throw up from it. Words take their time to hit his ears. Either that or his ears take their sweet time to hear them.
“It’s okay, you’re alright, please try not to move too much. Armando, back up, hang on, let me–” There’s shuffling, a couple beeps above his head, and the monitor quiets. The blood still hasn’t touched him, and the rapidly increasing worry that he’s about to vomit slows to a halt. The voice is trying to reason with him. Simon sucks in a breath, tries to move again, but the hand remains. He can’t handle this being a trick, a hallucination, a new part of his new hell. He can’t.
“Hey, easy, easy,” the voice says again, trying to settle Simon’s thundering heart as a thumb soothes across the skin above his collarbone. Simon winces against it, trying to pull in air that doesn’t burn against his throat. He realizes, humiliatingly, that he’s shaking. “I’m not going to hurt you, you aren’t in danger. You’re gonna be alright. Are the lights too bright? I’m sorry, here, let me fix ‘em.”
The bright white above Simon’s body turns a soft yellow. Lights. Lights? But the eel, it was– it was there, it was coming after him and–
“There we go. That better? It’s alright, just breathe. You’re waking up, that can be really scary, just take your time. No need to rush yourself. You’re safe.”
Adrenaline has started wearing off, but Simon’s nerve endings still felt like pinpricks across his body. He’s trying to listen, really try to get ahold of himself, stop crying, something. There’s no more alarms or beeping, the machines had quieted down, and whoever the voice belonged to remained patient and calm as he did his best to pull himself together. He was dry. Clean. There was no groaning metal, no blaring systems, no blood rushing in, no sounds like anything he’d recognize from the sub. Only a gentle hand against his shoulder, and an amber light over his body. He’s somewhere else. Laying on something soft, sheet still resting over his legs and a different loose cloth over his upper body and right shoulder. The air is clean. He isn’t drenched in sweat and blood. This can’t be the SM-13 at all. This is somewhere else.
The courage takes some finding, but Simon brings himself to open his eyes. Without the blinding light, he can blink his way past the lingering tears clinging to his waterline, and take in his surroundings. It looks… like a medical bay. Not quite the same as he’s used to, but close enough. Off-white walls, some equipment he couldn’t possibly begin to name, filtered clean air. It was nicer than any establishment he had ever entered before. But, then again, he couldn’t imagine Eden would bring the lower class members of the colony and prison convicts into nice places like this anyways.
Simon blinks, looking down at himself. The sheet he suspected is there, white and clean, and he finds himself to be wearing some sort of medical gown. It appears to have been altered to only cover his right shoulder. Eyes trail down past the sleeve, and freeze at the tubes and needles in his arm, a device loosely clamped to his middle finger. He frowns, confused, and tries to lift his arm up to himself for closer inspection.
It gets caught up on restraints. His heart rate picks up again. He tries to pull harder, gulping down a scared sound when the points attached at his wrist and above his elbow don’t offer any give.
“No, no, it’s okay.” Simon forgot about the voice next to him, the hand on his shoulder. He flinches and gasps, eyes wide, head whipping to his left towards the source. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to startle you. The uh– the ties are just to prevent you from bumping your I.V., is all. They’re not permanent. I didn’t want you to accidentally hurt yourself.”
The source of the voice is not anyone Simon was expecting. Next to him stood a man, tall, rumpled blond hair, dressed in a nondescript white shirt beneath a half-zipped blue hoodie with the sleeves pushed halfway up his arms. He’s drenched in the soft yellow light, illuminating above his head like some sort of divine signal. A pair of thin-framed glasses dangle off his face below his chin, hanging onto his ear for dear life. His eyes are blue. Gentle. Earnest. This man is the softest human Simon has seen in a long time. Simon stares, forces his jaw to shut so he doesn’t openly gape at this stranger.
“Hi,” says the man. His voice takes on a certain tenderness. Soothing, he thinks. “My name is Grace. Dr. Ryland Grace. Can you understand me? Do you know my language?” Simon nods minutely. It earns him a small close-lipped smile. “That’s great. I’m glad, that means we can communicate easier. Are you in any pain? You can nod or shake your head if you’d prefer.”
Pain. Simon thinks, attempting to tune back into the needling below his skin. Like everything had fallen asleep and was just coming back online. It didn’t hurt, but it was uncomfortable. He didn’t think anything below agony really counted. Simon shook his head. He was rewarded again with the same smile. He was doing good. This meant he was answering the right way.
“Okay. Great. I’m glad. Means we got the medication dosage right and it’s doing its job correctly. You can let me know if that changes, okay? I don’t want you to be hurting. I can have Armando adjust the dosage if you need it.” Then the man gestured with his free hand and Simon followed it to discover a… robot. Not a person. A robot across the room from them that seemed to… wave? Its head? Hand? Claw? Simon looked back up at the human person next to him. “Armando is a medical robot. Sorry, I probably should've mentioned that. He was the one that took the most care of you while you’ve been asleep. I’m not that kind of doctor exactly. I actually work on the molecular level, most recently based around the structure of some single-cell organisms, so I could really only be more of an aid to his expertise.”
Simon didn’t have much to say in response to the excess of information he was being given. Medication, molecular-level doctor, medical robot. He blinked, a confused crease between his eyebrows. The man– What was his name again?– seemed to catch on with this. “Right. You probably don’t really want to hear about all of that right now. Um.” He seemed fidgety. Searching for words. Awkward. “I don’t have a lot of information beyond Armando’s treatment and my notes. I don’t want to be insensitive, but do you… remember anything about what exactly might have happened to you?”
What happened to him? Oh, he remembers. Simon remembers. The false promises, the hotter-than-hell submersible, the exact number of times he was thrown around and smashed his skull into the walls and pipes. The mission. The blood. The black box. The eel and all of its mind games. The too-late realization that he had fatal radiation poisoning and it compromising his body so badly that his arm–
His arm. Simon’s arm.
Simon’s breath faltered in his chest. He watched the way the man’s eyes glanced worryingly at what had to be a heart monitor back above his head as the real thing squeezed behind his ribcage. He dared, so very carefully, to trail his own eyes down to the point of contact on his shoulder. Then further. Skin became bandaging, and then bandaging became nothing but a stump. Where his arm should be. Gone. Ripped off, right off of his body in searing, agonizing, gut-wrenching pain that tore a scream out of him so tormented he was sure it should’ve shred his vocal chords into dust and choked him.
Behind his eyes burned as they welled up with tears, sucking in a breath like the oxygen would make him whole again. He went to reach up to the bandages. His arm was trapped by the restraints.
A wounded, fearful sound left him. He forced his body to cooperate. Simon reeled back, drawing away from the person next to him so forcefully the bed beneath him shook under the effort. The man’s hand snapped away at the same moment, both flying up in surrender as Simon tugged at his restraints again. Harder. His vision was becoming blurry as new tears flowed too-warm down his cheeks. The strain jostled the needle closest to his elbow ditch. It hurt. He couldn’t stop. He needed out. He needed out, to run, to get away from here, he wasn’t safe–
“Wait, hey, you gotta be careful–”
“Please!” Oh, no, was that what he sounded like? Unrecognizably hoarse and desperate, sobbing himself back into a panic attack, begging for what exactly? What did his new captor owe to him? “Please, I can’t–” Simon heaved in a lungful of air. He was pretty sure he was going to cry himself sick. “Please! Please, I-I’ll behave, I’ll do whatever you ask! Please, I need– I-I can’t–!”
“Woah! Hey, it’s okay! Look, I’m gonna take them off right now! Watch me, alright? I’m taking them off.” The man moved to get around to the other side of the bed, trying to be fast with his hands still raised up by his head. Simon pulled and yanked and tugged, dislodging the finger monitor onto the floor and nearly ripping I.V. lines out of his arm in the process. He needed to be free. He needed help. He needed nobody to touch him. “Hey, you gotta let me do it, okay? I don’t want to snag anything. Come on, help me help you.”
It was a nightmare situation to find himself in. Gasping and coughing for air, begging, sobbing, weak. Simon had never felt so helpless in his entire life. So small and defenseless. Even when facing off the monster in the ocean he still had his dignity. Now he folded against a man that didn’t even look remotely intimidating to begin with. Let alone like he wanted to bring Simon any more harm. He had sworn himself to obedience. He had to listen now. He had to submit in exchange for mobility. The thought of it made him nauseous.
He could only be so still. The restraints left angry red marks across his skin that would surely bruise. Breathing was painful. The man’s hands almost trembled as he made quick work of undoing the straps, hands flying back up and away from Simon’s skin the second he had freed him. Simon recoiled like he had been burned. He clambered up and away on the bed, crumpling defensively into himself at the head of it as far away as he could get against the wall. Knees drawn up to his chest, left side angled away from the stranger at his bedside as if he stood a chance to stop him in this state anyways.
“I’m not going to hurt you.” Bright blue eyes were wide and concerned, trying to search wild and distrusting brown. He spoke as if Simon were a fearful child. He sounded like he had practice with settling people down. “I just want to help. We don’t know what happened, or where you came from, but you’re still hurt. You are not in any danger. I swear to you. Nothing bad is going to happen to you. You’re just afraid, and that’s okay, and I’m sorry. I want to help you.”
God, Simon’s head hurt. He felt dizzy. Yet despite being unsure if he was even capable of standing, his eyes shot over at the door across the room. It was both so close and so far away. Everything ached. He should’ve nodded when he was asked about pain. Maybe it would’ve dulled enough by now that the thought of making a break for it didn’t send anticipatory aches into his legs. The touchscreen next to it didn’t look very promising towards any escape attempts either. Where would he even go if he succeeded? How fast was the man next to him? How much trouble would Simon be in for causing so much of a disturbance? He kept being told that he wasn’t going to be harmed, but he wasn’t stupid. Nobody would state their intentions like that. There’s no possible way Simon could know what this man was capable of or who was waiting to hunt him down on the other side of that door. But he tried to imagine it being easy.
He knew he was trapped in here, deep down. He was too injured, needles lodged into his arm that attached him to I.V. drips, his left arm missing. Leaving wasn’t an option. That door was the only way out and he didn’t know where it would lead. Simon had caused a fuss already, disrespecting the medical treatment he was being given and the resources being used to help him heal, yelling and crying and making this man’s job harder when he should have just stayed still. Causing more problems would only make his punishment worse.
Simon’s eyes snapped back over when the man moved, freezing mid-step when Simon met his gaze. He kept his hands raised. “I know you’re scared. I get it, I do. You have every right to be. This is a new place, I’m a new person, and you probably have no idea what’s going on. We can start over. Does that sound alright? We can try this again. Is that okay with you?”
Nothing really seemed okay, actually. But that wasn’t something he could just say. He was being asked something. This was a courtesy rarely given and nearly never to people like him. He didn’t want it to be taken away, even if it was just to placate him into behaving. Simon nodded, bottom lip wobbling with the effort.
The man smiled at him again. Relieved. Shoulders dropped away from his ears.
“Okay. We’ll start over.” The man placed his hands over his own heart as he spoke. Gentle. “My name is Dr. Ryland Grace. Most everyone just calls me Grace. You can too, if you’d like. Can I ask you what your name is?”
Grace. Maybe his soul hadn’t been abandoned.
“...Simon.”