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Guilt is a familiar emotion to Simon. He feels it often, has for a long time.
He didn't feel it when his mother handed him the knife to keep himself safe, but he did the first time he used it.
He did every time he used it.
(Every time he ignored someone pleading for their life, begging him to show them mercy that he never did. So many bodies he climbed over to save himself.)
He’s less familiar with guilt over lying, has rarely had reason to lie. He asks questions, may demand answers, may apologize, might curse and yell. But he doesn’t lie.
And these are lies of omission, at most.
Because Ava has asked in her own way, where he goes, when he’s quiet and his eyes are empty.
May has asked by waking up choking on screams like he does.
Elle has asked by having the same empty eyes.
And he never tells them the truth.
He hears it still. The Light, the Ignorant God.
They try to keep him from wandering at night, May curls into his side when they share the bed, Elle uses her reputation as one of the few scientists left to demand his pendant back, Ava tries to pull him away from the railing when she sees him staring down -
Down.
Down.
It’s so loud in his head sometimes. It quiets when he’s out here.
(When he’s closer to it.)
Are you happy now, Simon?
Do they trust you?
How many of them hate you?
How many of them fear you?
You saved Ava, was she worth it? Did she deserve it after what she did to you? Did any of them deserve your sacrifice?
(Some of the COI higher ups had taken him to be interrogated, a few days after he was pulled up. Ava had been furious when she found out. Had stormed in and bodily pulled him from the room, ignoring the shouts and threats that followed them.)
He tries not to answer it, but sometimes, the nights when he wakes up screaming, it’s difficult.
Then Jack tells him about the ship. It’s one of the only times he’s spoken to him at all, which is just fucking fine with Simon.
(He knows now that Jack and David were sending him to his death intentionally, of course. Any denial he had washed away by the blood. He doesn’t want them dead in turn, not really, doesn’t wish he’d used the camera when he had the chance. He doesn’t want them near him either. Ava… was different.)
Something is wrong with the SM-7, and he recognizes it too well when he sees it.
(Some part of him thinks he’s seen this many times before. In other… lives, sometimes with a missing arm, or a deep red left eye, some with fangs in his mouth and gills on his neck but all his limbs intact, some where Ava is dead and some where she is not. Some where it’s the SM-13, 12, 7, 3. The numbers overlap in his vision until he can’t tell them apart.)
It’s not as obvious, not as gory and bloodied as the SM-13 that first (first?) time, but it’s there.
The ship seems to move slightly even as it’s docked and should be still. Its sharp edges look too much like teeth, its sides like gills.
It wants you. It was meant for you, if it was needed.
(Simon can feel himself choking on his own blood, his body breaking down from radiation, blood flooding the submarine, his arm tearing off his body -)
The way the thoughts came, it was like a foregone conclusion. Here. Have this. It’s for if you need it, because there’s the chance you’ll manage to dive in on your own.
Foregone, that he’d go down. Leave them.
The ones that feared, didn’t trust, hated, the ones he could never be happy with.
(Foregone, but patient, and he doesn’t know-...he wonders if…)
Part of him wanted to be obstinate, maybe for the sake of it. (It was hard to tell for whose sake he did anything anymore.) That livelier piece that still wanted to scream fuck off to the inevitable. Or maybe the part that died for- a black box, a bunch of voices, a person with a name who died not long after sharing it.
Memory hardly made the SM-7 look appetizing, turning the churning darkness into something he wanted to willingly dive into. Reality wasn’t giving it any appeal even without all the creeping things he felt on a body that was-and-was-not. In what world, what world, was that the better option?
(Like there was an option.)
(Like he could stay without trust, without happiness, with fear and hate, like he belonged more with them than with-)
Obstinate or not, he repelled from that.
It wasn't ... right. There was... plenty, here. May. Elle. Human warmth. Against clothes that pressed into skin only, not blood and bone and mismatched flesh (dolls patterned together with technical human parts, gods that played with what little they saw through a pinhole). Bile could lodge in his throat at the sight of the sub and at least (for now) that's all that was in there. It didn't line with teeth or flap open wrongly.
It always could. It had. It didn't feel like him that May hugged, that she lay against at night, clung to when she had a nightmare. He didn't trust bodies ever could.
What got fished up now…
As much him as anything. As unreal as everything. Dragging feet over the same steps until he died, and even then, being made to crawl.
There were reminders of life here missed for so long (for so many times, because- )
Ava was defensive. Ready to bite on his behalf. She was as protective as ever over the futile future for the human race, the thing that got her killed. Over and over again. In other memories, she'd use subs as knives and execute plenty for the sake of finding salvation for humanity.
(Salvation always came with a sacrifice; where Simon was from, sacrifices always had looked like executions. Or maybe they’d just be called murder. Butcher. Butchers.)
It wasn't that she was a different person when she turned that threat to posture on his behalf. She was doing what she always did, he just counted as part of that human race to her this time. It made her guard him, feed him, yell at dangers for him.
It could lead her into a coffin, steering down into the depths. Fleeting hope. Pragmatism demanding stipulations get set and a time frame be put on rescues, but still she went. And still she died.
(And still she'd be here, again. What can eternal lie is not dead, can never die. His mother told him that once, whispered it in defiance of The Father.)
She clung to hope like he'd grip his pendant.
It would be so, so nice to do that here.
Where (ever familiar, never fully alive) voices talked.
Where bodies used that function.
Someone holding him inside a room. Someone ready to lash proverbial knives outside it.
No one tried to hold him. Help him. In so long.
(Was the last time he was truly touched kindly by human hands one of his brothers before their betrayal?)
A better gift than the sight in front of him, right?
He wants to close his eyes, sink, accept it for what it looked like- trust it, trust it was real, they really were talking - flesh and blood and alive and he'd helped (trust It didn't know why to bother lying, didn't think to try, and that made every blink that opened to a past time worse in a way long past despair. Trust It wasn't lying, because It wouldn't ever need to.)
Both could be real. One could stop being real the moment It planted him somewhere else in time and life again.
He could -
Trust them when they said to breathe, trust even more in what they said with actions, that this was a reality where he was, they were all, people, and no one needed to sacrifice.
May had playing cards made out of scrap material. She was still trying to get him invested, stable enough and present enough to hear the rules to games she'd mostly made herself (childhood memories were distant things for all of them. It wasn't a side effect of the ocean, the light, for her).
Elle getting his pendant back mattered more than he could ever express.
(He could hear the noise made when mouth crushed metal and all the defiant, screaming, meat within. Nothing of that here. Empty eyes here. Everything, here, all times, always. Nothing got washed away. The pendant remained a pendant.)
Ava did a lot. Ava did enough.
She listened, and acted on groundless words, because she would offer him that trust. Her voice didn't come through the distortion of speakers. And it only sounded like scratchy screams to him a fraction of the time. That was better than...before, however before was counted.
He could-
Trust they tried. Trust they tried. (Trust their trying could be undone not by their choice, but because it was just removed from existence, memories reset when time did.)
Do they trust you?
He leaves without speaking to Jack. He thinks he hears the faint creaking of metal under pressure, moving in a way it shouldn’t.
He doesn’t turn around.
He wonders if it’s in pain. He wishes he didn’t know what the voice in his head wanted.
If it was needed.
Because he does know. He’s known for… so long. Maybe deep down he knew the first time he woke up alive and intact after the sub imploded. Maybe it was the tenth time. The twentieth. The hundredth. Maybe he knew when it saw who he is..
Maybe in some ways he’s always known.
(Time is hard to grasp. It’s so loud in his head.)
He barely registers that he’s walked back to his room and locked the door behind him, his chest heaving.
(He wonders if it’s in pain. If It's in pain, waiting for him. It seems so patient. So fucking patient waiting for him to… to...)
He can’t breathe and it’s not because he’s drowning in blood. Not this time.
(His hands are soaked in it.)
He’s so tired. Everything has blurred together. Why does he keep hoping for a life he will never get back?
There’s a sort of pressure in his head, right behind his eyes (are they glowing now?) there’s a hunger to it.
An excitement. An acknowledgement.
My butcher, come to me.
(He doesn’t know what he believes in anymore. If there’s a heaven his mother must be there… but he was never going to join her anyway. He’s known that for a long time.)
It could all stop. He doesn’t know what will happen after. But he could stop. No more nightmares, no more suspicious glares that Ava has to protect him from, no more fighting no matter how little he wants to, for things he will never have, that he never really did.
He could just… stop.
(It almost feels like there’s tendrils wrapping around him again, curling around his arms, his chest, resting under his eyes.)
Be as one with me.
Would it be quiet in his head? Would he finally get to rest?
(Mom… where are you?)
He doesn’t realize he’s opened his mouth when he speaks.
“Yes.”
Welcome home, Simon.
He burns, he changes, he vanishes, he lives and dies, he rises.
All that Ava will find later is a small tree, growing senselessly out of the metal floor, the shattered glass of Simon’s pendant scattered around.
If you look at it long enough it almost seems to glow.