Chapter Text
Simon’s first thought upon waking is that it is bright and that he is trapped in the Light somewhere.
His second thought, as the lights are dimmed, and a stranger leans over him, talking to him in words that Simon can’t really make heads or tails of, is that he would do anything, give anything, if only it meant he could stay here.
He thinks he manages to garble out the word please before oblivion takes him again.
He is a little more lucid, the next time around, but only barely. His left side is in agony and it takes enormous effort to crack his eyes open. He knows something is horribly wrong, though he can’t turn his head to see. Tears run down the side of his face into the bandages plastered there, and into his ear on his right side.
“You with me this time, big guy?”
The man leaning over him is blonde, glasses perched on top of his head. He looks like he hasn’t slept much, but looks oddly hopeful as he peers down at him.
Simon doesn’t know where he is, or who this stranger is - he only knows that he is in pain, and he is at this person’s complete mercy because Simon can’t move.
Well, Simon’s begged before, he’ll beg again, for all the good it’ll do: “Please d-don’t let me - die.”
“Whoa, okay, you’re okay,” the man’s voice softens. “You’re gonna be okay. I know you’re probably in a lot of pain right now, but I swear you aren’t dying.”
Simon lets out a broken sob, as dread curls in his stomach - because if he isn’t dying, if they’re patching him up, it’s because they’re going to send him back down there. “Please. Please, I can’t - I can’t do it again. Please don’t send me back. I can - I can work. I can d-do…”
And Simon tries to move his left arm to grab at the stranger, but…nothing happens. It takes everything he has to wrench his head to the side and look at what is left of his arm.
Oh God.
No. No, no, no. He can’t work like that. If Simon can’t work, he’s as good as dead.
There’s alarms ringing loudly in the background and the man over him takes Simon’s remaining hand in his and squeezes it tight. “Hey. Hey, look at me - I promise you aren’t going anywhere. We got you out of the sub, you’re okay, no one’s going to send you back in that thing.”
Simon doesn’t know if it’s true. Doesn’t know if he can trust this stranger. What do promises matter? Ava had promised to let him go, and see how that turned out.
He should fight. Try to make a run for it. Push the man off him. Do something, anything. He barely manages to twitch his hand.
“You’re safe, here. My name’s Grace, do you want to tell me your name?”
Saved by a man named Grace. Fuck, that’s a little on the nose, isn’t it? Maybe this is just a fever dream before he dies. In case it isn’t, though, he repeats: “Don’t send me back down.”
He doesn’t remember the rest.
*
Grace is there again when he wakes up, this time to throw up what little he had in his stomach into a waste bin, as the man helps him. He is shaking from the cold and the strain. This time he’s awake enough to realize that he is in some kind of medical gown, in what looks like a med bay of some sort.
“Are you cold?” Grace asks. “I think the temperature’s a little low in here, the Eridians struggle with keeping it steady.”
Simon tries to make sense of that statement and decides he doesn’t care. “Yeah, ‘m cold.” He collapses back against the bed. The top is raised enough so he’s almost sitting up, propped up by pillows. He drags the one blanket, white and not particularly warm, higher up on himself.
“I’ll be right back, hold onto this in case you need to throw up again before I get back,” Grace puts a clean pan in his lap and takes the other one with him as he runs out of the med bay.
Where the hell am I? Simon thinks, as shivers wrack him hard enough to hurt. Definitely not Eden. They would’ve slit his throat and called it mercy, and fed him to the Tree. Which leaves the COI but…Even if Simon managed to recover the black box, and it somehow miraculously saved all of humanity, he’s pretty sure they still wouldn’t have thought him worth saving.
Grace reappears with his arms full of colorful cloth, which he dumps at the foot of Simon’s bed. Simon watches silently as Grace throws a brown, soft blanket over him. Then he unfurls the colorful fabric, and Simon realizes it’s a quilt. It’s heavy as Grace spreads it out, a patchwork of loud colors and patterns that Simon can’t make sense of right now.
“I called it the Good Luck quilt,” Grace says. “It’s all symbols of luck from across the world, it was a parting gift before the mission - but let’s not get into all that. It’s silly but it’s comforted me through some pretty hard times. I thought…I don’t know. I’m probably just being sentimental.”
Simon grasps the edge of the quilt that he can reach, if only to make sure it’s real. It’s beautiful. There’s not a lot of color left in the world, and colorful, soft fabric of this quality is worth a fortune. The patterns are joyful, almost childish. For some reason that Simon can’t quite articulate through the sickness and exhaustion, it makes him suddenly very certain that this isn’t the COI.
“Where the hell are we?” he asks, voice hoarse.
“We’re on Erid, in the 40-Eridani system. The Eridians - that’s the aliens that live here - found you on a moon that kind of…uh…appeared out of nowhere? We think it went through a wormhole,” says Grace.
“There’s aliens here?” Simon says. God, he is so tired. What the fuck was he going to do against an alien? Vomit on them and then faint?
“Yeah, we’re, uh, kind of the only humans here. But they’re good people,” says Grace. “Better than humans, in some ways, I think. Kinder as a whole, though very blunt and very pushy. I - I know I’ve said a million times already, but you are safe here. I promise.”
It’s still cold beneath the blanket and quilt. He shivers. He decides to believe Grace for now - not like he can do anything about it if Grace is lying, in his current state.
“You still haven’t given me your name,” Grace says. “Doesn’t have to be your real one.”
“Simon.” He swallows hard and debates asking for water, and decides he’s not desperate enough yet. “…What’s wrong with me?”
“Mild radiation poisoning, blood loss from the amputation, and what looks like second and third degree burns all along your left side. We’ve got you on prophylactic antibiotics, so we’ve managed to avoid infection so far. We’ve got you on a combo of acetaminophen, naproxen, and morphine for the pain. It didn’t seem to be working great before, but we’re a little short on what medications the Eridians have managed to synthesize, so. Sorry about that.”
Sorry we used up a bunch of valuable medications on you and saved your life. Is this guy for real? “You’re weird,” is what comes out of his mouth. He probably shouldn’t have said that.
It just makes Grace laugh. “Jeez, tell me how you really feel, huh?”
His stomach starts lurching again. He’s so tired and everything hurts, can’t he just sleep? “‘Gonna throw up again.”
Grace looks exhausted as he sighs and pushes his glasses up the bridge of his nose.“Alright, come here, I’ll hold your hair back.”
It occurs to him that Grace probably hasn’t slept much in however long since this started.
He takes a guilty sort of comfort in the feeling of Grace’s hand in his hair, the other bracing his shoulder as he is sick for the thousandth time.
*
He drifts in and out of sleep, his fever peaking and then mercifully declining. Grace is almost always there, sometimes arguing with what looks like a lump of rocks in harsh whispers, sometimes asleep in the chair by Simon’s side, other times leaning over Simon as he talks him through changing his bandages and washing his hair.
There is a terrifying robot arm that tries to help but after Simon panics so badly that it makes every alarm go off, Grace takes over most of his care. It’s embarrassing, and Grace is clearly very uncomfortable doing this, but at least it’s not the robot.
He owes Grace beyond anything he’s ever going to be able to repay.
The few times that Simon wakes without Grace present, he is still wrapped in that damn quilt, and it’s probably a little pathetic how hard he latches onto that fact - that spot of comfort in a strange, sterile room.
*
Recovery is slow - slower than Simon would like. It’s hard to relearn how to walk, how to do things one handed. His energy takes forever to return. It feels like he’s advancing at a crawl.
He meets Rocky and Adrian and a few other members of what Grace calls “the Dome Team”. Once he’s recovered enough that he doesn’t need to be confined to a med bay, Grace helps him through the mortifying ordeal of not being able to dress himself.
When they leave the med bay, Simon is almost able to walk unassisted - Grace walks within grabable distance and is ready to intervene as needed. But he lets Simon walk out under his own power, something Simon appreciates after weeks of having very little dignity or pride to speak of. They take a long, dark passageway that opens into a wide open space.
Simon freezes.
It looks…like Earth. Like Earth from the old recordings, anyways, god knows Simon never stepped foot there. It’s a little cold and the air is damp, and there is dirt and stones underneath his borrowed shoes. There’s a path leading up to a house on a hill, and stretching out into a haze of white is a real sea. Not a cursed ocean of blood, but something clear and beautiful as it crashes over the shore.
“This is…” Simon doesn’t know what to say, what to do. He looks at Grace.
Grace is grinning. “It’s pretty amazing, isn’t it? Do you want to go up to the house?”
“Y-yeah.”
“Come on, you’ll love it. Eridians are fast builders, so you’re in luck, you’ve got your own bed. They cleared out what used to be my office and set you up in there,” Grace says. Then, sounding uncomfortable, he adds: “If you ever want a house of your own, we can get it done for you, probably. But in the meantime…”
Simon had fully expected to be relegated to a cot in a corner somewhere. He might have expected to sleep on the floor, but he figures the kind of man who brings good luck quilts to sick strangers probably wouldn’t do that.
(Simon’s fatal flaw has always been that he is too trusting. He trusted the Father, trusted his Brothers, he trusted the COI when they promised him freedom. He never learns. He wonders how badly he’s going to get burned this time around.)
When they finally make their way up the hill and into the house, he is shown a small room with a large round window, and a single bed, covered in blankets and that quilt again. “I will be borrowing the quilt from you the next time I’m sad, just warning you,” Grace says. “But we can share custody of it, and I think you need it more than I do right now. What’s mine is yours, and all that.”
“This is too much.”
“It’s mostly the Eridian’s doing,” Grace says as he helps Simon sit down. An insane thing to say after Grace has spent three weeks taking care of Simon.
“What do I owe you?” Simon asks.
“Don’t worry about it.”
“Grace.”
“Simon.”
It sets him on edge, the not knowing. Because there has to be a cost hidden in there somewhere, something Grace wants out of him either now or later. And Simon’s…Simon’s not sure how much good he’ll be for much of anything, and he can only pray that Grace isn’t looking for an easy fuck, because like hell is Simon repaying him that way.
(He ignores the pit that forms in his stomach at the thought of how easy it would be for Grace to pin him down in his current state).
For now, he lets the issue lie, knowing he wasn’t going to get a straight answer out of Grace anyways.
*
The Good Luck Quilt has lived through quite a lot. Like Ryland himself, the quilt has far outlived her life expectancy. It’s fraying in a couple of spots, fabric worn, and the stitching has come out in a few places. It’s still one of his most prized possessions.
“Why don’t you fix it?” Simon asks, as they sit on their couch and watch a truly terrible action movie. “The quilt.”
It’s been a couple of months since Simon’s left the med bay, and he’s recovering more day by day. Grace has been able to weasel out a few key things about the place Simon came from - the fact that the stars were dead, and humanity on the brink of dying out, and that Simon had been sent on a suicide mission more horrifying than Grace’s - but he still knows very little about the man he now shares a house with. Simon responds to most things with wariness and suspicion, so everything moves at a glacial pace.
But still, there’s moments like this, when they just exist in the same space, that make Grace start to think they’re friends, of a sort.
The quilt in question is currently spread across both of their laps. Simon is running a thumb over one of the holes in the fabric.
“We don’t have a lot of fabric to go around,” Grace says. “I considered re-doing the stitching at least and just not patching the holes, but I don’t really know how to sew and I don’t want to ruin it.”
“...You don’t need fabric to mend a hole this small,” Simon says tentatively, like he’s unsure whether or not Grace knows this fact. “Do you have thread?”
“Yes, after a crazy amount of trial and error, I do at least have thread,” says Grace. “One day we might even have fabric that doesn’t make me itch like crazy or leave me with rashes. They tried weaving the thread, but it’s like wearing sandpaper. They're working on it.”
“I could fix the quilt for you, if you want,” Simon offers. He’s looking at one of the popped seams near the edge now with a frown.
“Would you?” Grace says, straightening up and shooting him a hopeful look.
And there’s that wariness in Simon’s expression that Grace has come to expect. “It’s not a big deal.”
“It’s a big deal to me. I love this thing. If you can keep it from falling apart, I’d be super grateful.”
Simon is still looking at him like he’s a weirdo, but he nods. “Show me where you keep the thread and stuff.”
*
They settle on the couch, the blanket spread over Simon’s knee, Grace dutifully handing over the needle he threaded for him.
“The mending’s gonna be visible since I can’t match the thread color,” Simon warns.
“That’s okay.”
Simon leans over and starts to work, holding the fabric in place with his residual limb and his knee. It’s fascinating, watching him handle that small needle with such finesse, his movements quick and precise. He's creating a grid of thread crisscrossing across the hole, almost like he is weaving new fabric out of thread. Grace doesn’t realize he’s staring until Simon shoots him an annoyed look.
“You don’t have to watch me the whole time, I promise I know what I’m doing.”
“Oh! No, I just - it’s cool to watch you work,” Grace says. “You’re very skilful.” You have very nice hands, he thankfully refrains from saying.
“It’s just mending,” Simon says, turning back to his work. “What did you do when your clothes wore out back home?”
“Uh, threw them out,” Grace says, embarrassment making his face burn. “Most people did.”
Simon stares at him blankly for a moment before he returns to sewing. “That’s so wasteful I can’t even wrap my mind around it. Well, where I’m from, most people know how to do this type of shit ‘cause it’s the only way to keep having clothes to wear.”
Grace watches Simon’s hand weave the needle expertly. It was rhythmic, repetitive, almost soothing to watch the patch take form.
Then, out of nowhere, Simon blurts out: “Like, not even kept for rags or bandages? You didn’t even reuse the fabric? You didn’t mend anything, at all? Just one little hole, and you threw the whole thing out?”
“Some people do mend their clothes! Just, uh, not most people, not if it’s more complicated than like, sewing a button,” says Grace. “I get how terrible it sounds.”
Simon huffs. “I feel like a fucking alien, talking to you sometimes.”
“Sorry.”
“It’s fine,” Simon says, and he doesn’t sound mad, so Grace will take it as a win.
Grace reads a book while pretending he isn’t getting distracted watching Simon work. There is something very attractive about the kind of expertise where something becomes thoughtless. Where movement is smooth and practiced and economical, no fumbling or inefficiency.
Grace is such a goner.
*
Grace wakes up in the middle of the night, heart racing, his mind filled with images of Simon bleeding to death in his arms.
He ends up by the water’s edge, sitting in the rocks, knees drawn up and elbows braced on them, hands in his hair. The water usually helps, after nightmares, a reminder that he is not on the Hail Mary, he’s not being chased and pinned down by people who want to sacrifice him for the greater good. Tonight, the sound of the waves don’t soothe nearly as much as they should.
He’d kept it together for the entirety of Simon’s recovery, but looking back, he supposes that was probably low key a little traumatic for him. He’d been entrusted with the care of a man who was delirious, convinced he was either dying or that Grace was going to kill him or send him back into that horror show of a submarine, who begged for his life over and over. Grace isn’t sure how much of it Simon remembers, but it had been harrowing to watch. Grace didn’t really sleep for three weeks, much to Rocky’s consternation, but Grace refused to let the already terrified man alone with a robot or strange aliens. The poor guy had been through enough, Grace could handle a few rough weeks.
But now it was catching up to him, and the reality of how close he’d come to witnessing the only other human he’s ever likely to see again die in front of him is hitting him hard.
He startles as a weight drops around his shoulders.
It’s the quilt.
Simon sits next to him at the water’s edge, bleary eyed, wearing one of Grace’s stretched out old t-shirts. “You alright?”
“I’m fine,” Grace says, hoping Simon wouldn’t notice the tremor in his voice. He wraps the quilt around himself tightly. “Thanks.”
“It’s nothing.”
“For fixing it too,” Grace says, feeling himself tearing up. He blinks it away with no small amount of annoyance - he doesn’t need to get weepy on Simon now. He’s just so tired, and his heart is still beating a little too fast. “Means a lot.”
“Grace, I owe you - and this isn’t a complete list - my life, several weeks worth of room and board, the literal clothes on my back, a shit ton of medical supplies…The mending’s nothing.”
“You don’t owe me anything,” Grace says, irritation creeping in despite himself.
“No one does anything for free.”
“Look, I…” Grace trails off, staring across the water. He needs to find a way to make Simon understand. “Everything I have here was a gift, you know. The Eridians owed me for helping them save their star, yes, but they didn’t really need to do all of this. They could have given me the bare minimum to keep me alive and called it good enough. I would have called it good enough.”
“At least you’re useful to them. You teach the kids. You work with the scientists.”
“I spent two years being sick and not at all useful first,” Grace says wryly. “I ran out of food like a month after landing on Erid. I was living off taumeoba but it wasn’t really giving me any vitamins. Got scurvy and beri beri, lost a crazy amount of weight…And I was insufferable. I lashed out at Rocky and the other Eridians. I was mean. I would cry uncontrollably for no reason. I’d have panic attacks at random. I wasn’t…I wasn’t easy to care for. It was hard on Rocky.”
“Didn’t realize it had gotten so bad.”
“Not something any of us like to talk about,” Grace says. He turns to look at Simon very seriously. “My point is…do you get what I’m trying to say? I’m here, I’m alive, because Rocky risked his life to save mine, because he gave me the fuel I needed, because Erid came together and sunk years of effort into making me food and a place to live. Because Rocky sat with me through all the breakdowns and the fever dreams. Erid built me an ocean for no reason other than I was homesick. They -” Grace stops, lost for words, the magnitude of Erid’s generosity hitting him all over again.
At least, Simon looks like he understands, like something has gotten through to him at last.
“So all of this is a gift. I didn’t earn it. Or I didn’t earn all of it, at least. It costs me nothing to share it with you. There’s plenty to go around. I’m not going to demand repayment for something I was given freely. That’s crazy. And besides that, I mean, we’re the only two human beings for sixteen light years. It’s nice to share meals again. It’s nice to have a whole conversation in English. It’s nice just knowing I’m not alone - not the only one of my kind that I’ll ever see again. This isn’t…I don’t know, Simon, I guess I’m trying to say this isn’t really as selfless as you’re making it out to be.”
Simon looks away, and then starts running his hand through the sand pensively. There is a long stretch of silence before he says, quietly: “I’m still grateful.”
“Yeah, so am I,” Grace says, burrowing deeper into the quilt. “So am I.”