Chapter Text
It was another night on the Hail Mary, about a year and a half into their journey to Erid, and Simon woke up to the sound of shuffling above him. Grace had let him take the bottom bunk after he'd gotten acclimated, saying it would be hard to climb a ladder after waking up from a coma and having your arm ripped off of your body. Blinking the last remains of sleep from his eyes, Simon looked up at the top bunk to see his companion thrashing against the sheets, kicking them away as he muttered sleep addled pleas for his life.
Simon pondered grabbing the sleeping man's shoulder and shaking him from the nightmare, but he didn't have to worry about that decision because Grace made it for him, tumbling off the bed and waking himself up in the process.
“Shit! You okay, Grace?” He asks, reaching out towards him. Grace stares at him, disoriented with sleep and the fall before suddenly looking dead-on at Simon's hand towards him before getting up and sprinting off somewhere else in the ship. “Where are you going?” Simon asks again, taking off after Grace, getting no response in return. They ran through the halls of the ship before Grace's foot caught on a ledge and he fell to the ground for the second time that night.
“You really gotta stop doing that,” Simon muttered to no one in particular, coming up and kneeling beside Grace to check if he was hurt. Which turned out to be a fatal mistake as an agonizing scream ripped out of the other's throat.
Simon froze because he knew that look and scream. This was fear. Pure, animalistic, instinctual fear. Grace didn't talk much about how he'd gotten on the ship, but Simon had gotten the broad strokes of the story from Rocky. To be ripped away from your home and everything you ever knew and cared about? Simon didn't truly understand, but he didn't need to.
Simon tried to approach Grace, holding out his hand in a non-threatening way, trying to calm him down enough to know what's going on. But Grace didn't look at him, but looked through him. As if he wasn't there. ‘Crap,’ Simon thought. ‘What does he do when I'm like this?’ He thought about it for a minute before coming to the solution: Physical contact.
He tentatively wrapped his arm around Grace's waist, trying to convey a sense of safety and security, but all it did was make Grace scream louder and fight harder. Soon, everything derailed as Simon became frozen, unsure of what to do, barely registering the pain of his skin breaking at the shoulder from Grace’s teeth, or the feeling of liquid running down his chest from long scratches.
But it was the sounds that made Simon the most scared. Loud, primal screams of terror mixed with screeches like discordant notes from a piano. Gasps of “I can't do it, I'm not brave enough, please let me go,” intertwined with the fear, Grace taking in so much air so fast half of Simon thought he would pass out. But still he kept fighting, begging to be let go, biting Simon's arm in an effort to make him let go. His words and screams gave way to exhausted sobs, wave after wave of tears rushing down his face.
Hours had passed since that initial dream, and Grace had finally passed out from exhaustion and energy loss from fighting Simon and crying as hard as he did. Simon had let go during that time, letting Grace run from him and back to the dormitory. Once Simon confirmed for himself that he was asleep, he tucked a thick blanket around Grace before heading to the medbay to be patched up.
“Patient exudes signs of minor external damage accompanied by bleeding. Starting bandaging process,” Mary said, her voice ringing in Simon's ears as he was cleaned up by the robot. God, he felt like such an idiot. He should've known by how Grace looked at him. The eyes which he could usually stare at for hours were only pinpricks, pupils dilated so much that they nearly took up the whole eye. The robot finished its work, saying to apply ointment to the worst bite wounds every 24 hours. As if he's gonna do that.