Chapter Text
“Eye movement detected.”
Simon jerks awake, his eyes flying open only to be immediately blinded by the violently bright lights above him. Was he dead? He had to be dead. There was no way he wasn’t dead, right?
“What is two plus two?”
What? He tries to say, but all that comes out is a strangled gurgling noise as a tube is pulled from his throat. His chest spasms, sending a sharp, stinging pain radiating through his chest.
“What is two plus two?” the voice repeats.
“Where am I?” he slurs, his tongue like lead in his mouth. The room finally comes into focus as he blinks. Why is it so fucking bright in here? Everything is so stark and white it makes his head pound. It feels uncanny, the way every surface is so reflective.
The second thing he notices is the robotic claw hanging above his head.
He jolts, trying to push away from the strange appendage, but his arms give out immediately and he falls back onto the bed. The sudden movement sends the room spinning around him, making him groan.
“You may feel some dizziness,” the claw explains.
No shit.
He pinches the bridge of his nose to force his eyes to focus. At least, he tries to, but his arm refuses to cooperate. He tries again. Nothing. Panic shoots up his throat as he suddenly remembers…well, everything. The submarine, the blood, the fleshy, pulsing vines that burrowed into his skin and seeped into his blood. His arm…
He hopes beyond hope that it was all a hallucination. Maybe the combination of radiation, CO2 poisoning, and the multiple concussions had finally gotten to him. Maybe he was still insane. Maybe he was still in the SM-13, slowly suffocating at the bottom of an ocean of blood.
That didn’t make him feel better.
Slowly, ever so slowly, he looks down. His right arm is largely intact. There are clean bandages around his forearm and an IV port on the back of his hand. His left arm…well, he doesn’t know what else he expected. His shoulder is wrapped in equally clean bandages, but that was all that was left. His arm was, in fact, gone. Which only meant one thing.
It was all real.
He leans over the side of the bed and throws up. Bile splatters onto the nice, clean floor and for a moment he feels guilty for having ruined it. Taking a deep breath, he forces himself to focus. If he’s back with the C.O.I., then that means he needs to move fast. Sure, Ava had promised him his freedom if he retrieved the Black Box, but—
Wait. The Black Box. Did they get it? Did it have what they needed? He shakes his head. He can’t worry about that now. As far as he’s concerned, he’s held up his end of the deal. The problem now would be getting the C.O.I. to honor it. Simon didn’t trust that they wouldn’t make up some other excuse to make him stay. Or, even worse, force him to go back onto that godforsaken moon. No, if he wanted to guarantee his freedom, then he needed to leave as soon as possible.
He forces himself to sit up, ignoring how his vision swam and his stomach clenched. Instinctively, he goes to use his hand to pull out his IV, but, of course, there’s nothing to pull with. He sighs. That’s gonna take some getting used to. Using his teeth instead, he yanks the needle out. The robot says something—actually it’s been talking this whole time—but Simon continues to ignore it as he staggers to his feet.
Something bright and colorful catches in the corner of his eye. As he turns, his heart leaps into his throat.
Flowers.
A whole vase of them, sitting primly on a rolling table next to his bed. Bursts of yellow and orange and pink all staring at him as if their mere existence didn’t just call everything he knew about the world into question. Simon had only ever seen pictures of flowers in the few faded textbooks they still had on Eden. The closest he ever got to seeing the real thing were the paper flowers he and his mother spent hours folding as a child. Hers were always so crisp and perfect. Simon was never very good at it, but his mother always ooh-ed and ahh-ed at his attempts anyways.
Was this another trick? It had to be. There was no way there were flowers here. Simon tentatively reached towards them, afraid that any sudden movements would cause them to blip out of existence. The tip of his finger brushes oh-so-gently against the petal of a bright yellow flower with a dark center. His breath catches. It felt…strange. Softer than a leaf, and infinitely more delicate.
It looked just like the ones his mother made him.
“Please return to your bed.”
Simon is ripped from his thoughts as the robot arm beckons to him. Right. Escape.
He gives the flowers one last, longing look, determined to burn the image of them in his mind forever. It takes him a second to orient himself, pulling his remaining arm into his chest to try and stay balanced. Various medical devices beep and whir frantically behind him, no doubt an alarm was being sounded right about now. Swallowing down his remaining nausea, he stumbles out the door.
Everything was equally clean and white in the hallways as they were in the med bay. He didn’t think he’d ever seen a station so clean before. Cleanliness becomes a luxury when water is a limited resource. Why waste perfectly good drinking water on something as trivial as mopping? Wherever he was, they obviously had resources to spare.
As he walks, he keeps expecting someone to intercept him. Any moment now, a group of officers would round the corner and he’d be thrown back into prison. But no one showed up. Where was everyone? He knew the human population was dwindling, but he didn’t think it was this bad.
Thoroughly weirded out, he ducks into the first open room he sees. It’s some kind of lab, he thinks, or at least used to be. There are white boards and various science equipment, but none of it looked like it’d been used in a while. He hobbles forward, his bare feet quiet on the cold floor. The only thing out of place was a bunch of clothes heaped haphazardly on a table. He approaches it curiously, if only because all he has on is a thin hospital gown. Surely nobody would miss a random jacket on an empty ship.
He freezes as the heap moves. Getting closer, he can see now that it wasn’t a heap at all, but a person. A man slept at the table, a blanket draped over his shoulders. His head rested on what looked to be a journal of some kind, his glasses bending at an awkward angle and pressing into the side of his face. He definitely wasn’t an officer—he wasn’t wearing a uniform. But then again, his clothes looked way too nice to belong to a regular civilian. Maybe he was a doctor? Someone had to have been changing his bandages regularly while he was out.
Speaking of, how long had he been out exactly? Long enough to have recovered from…whatever it was that had happened to him. Maybe that’s why there were no people. Maybe he’d slept so long that everyone else was already dead.
He reels himself in. Be practical. Panicking only wastes time. He debates whether or not to wake the sleeping man. To find out what the hell was going on or potentially lose the freedom he’d sacrificed everything for.
The choice is obvious. Whatever happened while he was out is none of his business. All that mattered now was getting home.
He’s only just started to turn around when the man stirs.
_____
Grace sighs to himself as he realizes he fell asleep in the lab. Again. It’d been a while since that happened to him—proabably not since he moved into the biodome. For a moment, he thinks that he’s gone back in time, that he and Rocky are still on their way to Erid. He blinks the sleep out of his eyes as he reorients himself. Groaning, he sits up, his glasses slipping off his face and clattering onto the table. A familiar ache pulses through his neck and back. He grimaces, that was gonna hurt for at least a week.
He turns around in the chair to check the time, his gaze briefly sweeping over the man standing in the corner.
Wait.
“HOLY CRAP,” he exclaims, shooting out of his seat and stumbling backwards. The man was hunched in on himself, his arm tucked firmly against his chest. Dark, messy curls fell over wide and intense eyes, like a deer in headlights. Well, except that there was nothing deer-like about the man in front of him. He was more like a feral dog chained to a post.
“You’re awake!” Grace observes intelligently.
“Where am I?” the man asks, his voice deep and hoarse.
“You shouldn’t be up. Did Armando say you could get up?”
“Who—? Where is everybody? Are you with the C.O.I.?”
“What’s the C.O.I.?”
The man stares at him like he’s grown a second head. It’s a look he got a lot back when he was living on Earth. It makes him feel oddly nostalgic.
“The Consolidation of Iron?” the man says as if it were obvious.
“Uh,” Grace says, taking a tentative step forward, “Listen, you really shouldn’t be moving around right now, so why don’t we get you back to the med bay and have Armando take a look at you?”
Apparently, that was the wrong thing to say. The man recoils as Grace approaches, looking seconds away from bolting. Grace retreats, holding his hands up placatingly.
“Or we can stay here!” Grace glances down at the man’s quivering legs before adding, “but I would still like it if you sat down.”
The man blinks, looking down as if he’d just noticed how unsteady he was. He nods slowly, backing up until his back hits the far wall, bracing himself against it.
Good enough, Grace thinks as he sits in his chair, grabbing his discarded glasses and putting them back on.
“Let’s start simple,” Grace begins, “My name is Dr. Ryland Grace. You can call me Ryland or Grace, but most people call me Grace.” He leans forward encouragingly. “And you are?”
A pause. And then:
“Simon.”
Grace smiles. “It’s nice to meet you, Simon.”