Chapter Text
When you’re living with another person, there’s only so much space you can get between you. You share a little bit of everything between you. Food in the fridge that you’re not sure who purchased what. The slides sitting by the door that everyone slipped on when going out to check the mailbox. In really desperate times, it didn’t matter whose towel it was hanging on the shelf if it was the only one in the bathroom to grab. Grace had grown familiar with the ups and downs of having roommates in his college years and beyond into grad school.
This, however, was decidedly not a college dorm room or graduate housing.
Grad school Grace would never have guessed in a million years that he’d have a roommate post grad school. Grad school Grace had a very different idea of how his life would go. Grad school Grace thought that he was going to go on to get his doctorate (which, to be fair, he did), be the first person to make alien contact (which, to be fair, he was, twice, no, thrice-over now), and also succeed in every millennial’s pipedream of homeownership.
Grace looked around the small house lovingly built by a very concerned Rocky and Adrian. Huh. Maybe grad school Grace did know a thing or two.
A couple clumsy thumps sounded from upstairs. Ah. There was the second component that threw everything Grace had tried to plan out of orbit and hurtling into the next star system over, now lumbering down the stairs in a series of sleepy grunts.
Simon let out a sigh as he reached the bottom step, running the only hand he had left through his sleep-frizzled black hair down to the nape of his neck. He did a slight double-take when he saw Grace on the couch with his laptop and a cup of coffee.
“Don’t you have school?” Simon murmured, glancing around for a watch.
“Nope,” Grace responded, popping the P. “It’s a weekend.”
Simon’s nose wrinkled, and he went to the fridge. He made a few noises that reminded Grace of a nature documentary he showed Rocky recently, which included a scene of a bear wuffling around a stump digging for bugs to eat. Maybe he’d wait to draw that comparison to Simon’s face though. For being human, the guy knew next to nothing about Earth or its inhabitants. The now Simon-proven fact of human life out in another galaxy somewhere that Earth didn’t even know about was something Grace had gingerly packaged up in a box and crammed into the back of his mind with all the other things that felt too big to think about.
“Don’t be so bummed out, big guy,” Grace said as Simon returned with a tub of peanut butter tucked into the crook of his arm and a spoon in his hand. “I know you’re only four weeks in and you’re still getting used to the idea of weekdays and weekends, but you’re not stuck with me all day today. I’ll be headed over to the classroom to talk to some Eridian scientists about the sun’s monitoring.”
Simon’s eyes snapped over to him, the spoon now dangling from his mouth. Usually, Simon was pretty hard to read. He was as stoic as a soldier most of the time. And half of his face being a mutated mess didn’t help with Grace’s shaky ability to read micro-expressions anyway. Still, his eyes had an almost animalistic look of panic to them.
Grace raised his hand. “Relax. The sun’s fine. We’ve been monitoring it for, what, six years now? Its energy levels haven't dropped outside of its usual fluctuations from solar flares and the like.”
“So…the stars are okay?”
Grace swallowed. The quiet desperation in Simon’s usually anger-laced tone forced Grace’s usual blabbermouth shut. He didn’t tell Simon that the only known and documented Taumoeba were in Tauceti’s––and now Earth and Erid’s––system protecting the star that sustained life. He didn’t tell Simon that if other systems didn’t have some form of protection from Astrophage, those stars would likely die long before their time, consumed by something too small for Simon to see with the naked eye. Telling him all that just felt…cruel.
“Yeah, the stars are all good.”
Simon nodded, pulling the spoon out of his mouth with a slow pop and going back in for another spoonful of peanut butter. Grace sighed. Some things from college didn’t change, he supposed.
As Grace dressed to go, putting on an actual button up instead of just a graphic tee, he glanced up at Simon, who was sitting cross legged on their bed, trying and failing to pull his hair back into a ponytail with one hand.
Yes, it was their bed, a fact Grace hadn’t come to terms with yet but wasn’t so disturbed by that he had to box it up and make it join the ranks of things he preferred not to think about.
It just sort of happened.
Adrian had already been so stressed about having to accommodate another life in a biosphere that they’d been so sure would only need to support one. They had been the lead scientist in the project that ended up with the Eridians extracting Simon from whatever weird tin can they'd pulled him out of. They felt responsible for him.
Seeing their distress, Grace had offered to take him in. He was another human. Why not? He’d not spoken to or touched another human being in, what, six years? So what? What could go wrong?
They’d argued a lot, those first days. It had been a strange dance of Simon’s anxiety about resource preservation and Grace's built-in desire to give to the people around him until there was nothing left. It all culminated in them fighting each other over who was going to sleep on the couch. They hadn’t literally fought with fists and teeth. Not really. Simon may or may not have thrown a startled elbow when Grace got too close, which Grace howled about until he got his way. Or mostly his way. Mostly his way being Simon taking the left side of the bed closest to the wall while Grace took the right, closest to the window, with a fortress of pillows between them like a raised white flag.
Still, it was better than the couch. Grace really had not wanted to sleep on the couch despite arguing with Simon that he needed it more as he recovered from his arrival. Grace was too old to be couch-crashing, and his joints complained enough from the first few years on Erid before the biosphere managers realized that Erid’s natural gravity was twice that of earth’s, a little fact that Rocky gave Grace grief about not mentioning every day since then for the past six years.
“Hey,” Grace said, and Simon looked up from where he’d been trying to pull the hair tie from his wrist with his teeth in hopes of getting it around his fistful of black hair.
Grace glanced over his face, his eyes briefly flicking over the row of sharp fangs jutting out of Simon’s cheek on the right hand side. The same side where the stump of Simon’s arm was raised out of instinct, as if it could help tie his hair back.
“You, uh, you need help with that?” he asked, gesturing to the hair tie.
Simon’s eyes narrowed. His thankfully still human set teeth were still gripping the elastic band. A slight scoff came through his nose, and he reluctantly held out his wrist. Grace reached out and slipped the black hair tie off over skin stained dark red with a set of claws on the end to match the inhuman look.
Slowly, he pulled Simon’s hair back into a ponytail and tied it with a gentle snap of the elastic. Despite forgetting major parts of his life for a while, Grace remembered the motions of tying a ponytail. One of his students had long blonde hair that she could never tie back right. It always fell out during recess, and she’d come running with her Rainbow Dash themed hair tie for him to put it back up for her.
Grace could remember the name of her favorite character but not her name.
His stomach felt queasy.
Box. Box. Right. It’s in a box in the back, in the stack we don’t touch or think about. Earth is in a box.
“I’ll be gone for a while,” Grace said as Simon shifted forward to slide off the bed. “Expect me back maybe around dinner time?”
Simon paused. “That’s…a lot longer than you’re usually gone.”
“Yeah, I know…”
“...okay.”
Simon reached down and put on his sandals, the ones he wore out to the garden he’d started working on a few weeks ago in the backyard.
“Bye…” Grace murmured once the door was already closed.
Grace came back near sunset with a crick in his neck. Talking with the Eridian scientists was never bad. In fact, he had a great time sharing data with each other about the star’s health. One of the scientists had even predicted a solar eclipse would occur that year.
Plus he got to see Rocky and Adrian. That made sitting for six hours through a quiet dread humming in the back of his mind of “oh god what if one day we check and the star is actually dimmer?” all worth it in Grace’s opinion.
“I’m back,” Grace called, and the house responded with a quiet emptiness that it hadn’t done since Simon’s arrival.
Weird, he told himself, pushing the little curl of anxiety that rose in his belly down with his professional pusher-downer.
He saw movement in the window, and he sighed immediately in relief. Simon was in the garden. Of course. Where else would he be?
Grace leaned out the back door, one hand holding the doorframe while the other dangled at his side. “Hey,” he said. “I’m home.”
Simon didn’t look up. He was pacing along his planter beds like a big cat would pace the fence of an enclosure at a roadside zoo. His hair, now puffy from humidity, had long since fallen out of his ponytail, but the black band wasn’t on Simon’s wrist.
“Simon?”
Simon turned sharply, eyes wide. When he saw Grace, he cleared his throat a little. “Hey,” he muttered. “Uh…hey.”
Grace stared at him for a moment, tilting his head. He could feel his glasses slowly slipping down his nose, but he just peered at Simon’s tense shoulders over the gold frames. “You look…intense,” he said. “Everything okay? Did caterpillars get into the tomatoes again?”
Simon didn’t respond. His dark brown eyes that usually had a predator’s calm were now as wide as they could go. Grace’s grip on the doorframe tightened a little. “I can, uh, give you some space if you want?”
“No!” Simon barked, and Grace froze. “No… Uh… no…no.”
Grace tilted his head the other way. “No. Got it. You just need some quiet right now?”
“No,” Simon said again, shaking his head. “No. Uh… Quiet….bad. Bad.”
Grace hadn’t seen Simon like this in a while. When he was first here, there were times he was so on edge that he could barely speak, like when Grace had tried to introduce him to the shower. That day, Grace had quickly learned that wipes would have to do, even if Simon couldn’t tell him that after the sound of running water had knocked all words out of him.
“You’ve been out here all day?” Grace asked, noting the dark patch of sweat staining the front and sides of Simon’s gray shirt.
Simon looked down and nodded.
“Alright. Well, how about we take a quick stroll on the beach, huh? That always clears my mind.”
That earned him another nod, and Simon followed Grace through the house to the front door. His sandals are missing, Grace noticed as they walked. He’d check the garden after they got back.
They walked alongside each other down the beach. Grace was careful to keep his steps shorter. While Simon was only an inch or two shorter than him, proportions-wise, his legs were significantly shorter than Grace’s. And currently Simon’s gate was less of a stride and more of a shuffle through the sand.
Grace wanted to ask what happened while he was gone. Why was Simon so off right now? Was he okay? Was he sick? But the way Simon was glancing around with his hand absentmindedly flopping around at the wrist like he was trying to shake off water told him that he was in no mood to answer questions or maybe even talk at all.
So it surprised him when Simon spoke.
“Uh…um… What’s earth like?”
“You want to know about Earth?” Grace replied. “You’ve never asked me before.” He didn’t mention that he’d been grateful Simon hadn’t asked.
“I wanna know now.” Simon wasn’t looking at him, instead scanning the beach.
Grace sighed through his nose. Simon only looked to be half-paying attention, and Grace knew what that meant. He didn’t really want to know. He just needed noise. That Grace understood, needing noise when you were having a bad day. And that need was something he was able to fulfill.
“Well, it’s hard to sum up what Earth is like in just a few minutes,” he began. “It’s so big, for being one of the small-ish planets humanity knows about. I lived in a city. I don’t think you would have liked it. Too loud. Too many people, you know? I didn’t like it much there, either.”
Simon nodded absentmindedly.
“But there’s not just cities. There’s cities and towns and forests and jungles and deserts and ice caps and whole lotta ocean. And beaches! Like this one.” Grace gestured around them. “Rocky was kind enough to have the biosphere engineers make a little foggy beach here, after I told him a story about one while we were on the Hail Mary. I barely even remember what I told him, honestly… But it’s home now, so…”
He trailed off for a moment, becoming lost in thought, but as he did, he realized Simon had fallen a few steps behind. His feet were planted in the sand, and he was staring out at the gray water where the ever-present mist was concealing the edge of the biosphere.
“Uh, Simon?”
The slits along the sides of Simon’s neck opened, rhythmically pulsing like gills––were those gills? Grace had always assumed that they were just strange looking scars over mutated skin. Simon had enough scars for it to be a reasonable assumption.
Slowly, Simon took a step forward, shivering as a particularly bold wave slid over his bare foot before receding.
If it had been anyone else, Grace wouldn’t have thought anything of it.
If it had been anyone else, Grace may have chuckled and joined.
But this was Simon.
Stiff, distrustful, hydrophobic Simon.
“Hey, hey, hey, what’re you doing?” Grace said. He was over to Simon in just a few long strides, putting a hand on his shoulder.
“Swim…” Simon said, a word Grace would have bet his life he never would have heard Simon say, maybe even at gunpoint.
“Swim? What do you mean?”
“...we…want to swim… We want to go home…”
Grace’s sweaty palms slipped from Simon’s arm, and Simon staggered forward a few steps, now up to his knees in the water.
“Shoot, Simon, wait!” Grace exclaimed, hurrying after him. Immediately, the saltwater made his trousers cling like cold hands to his legs, making him shiver, but it was nothing compared to the cold line that ran down his back when he heard Simon say “we” in that distant tone.
Who was “we”?
Legs plunking in awkward steps through the water, Grace positioned himself in Simon’s line of sight and held out his hands. “Simon! Look at me! What is going on?”
“We want to go home,” Simon repeated. His deep brown eyes looked hazy as they scanned the gray surface of the water. “We have to get back…”
He didn’t stop walking forward into the water, not even when it brought him bumping into Grace’s chest. Grace took the opportunity to wrap his arms around Simon’s broad shoulders. He didn’t know what was going on, but there was one thing he did know: if all of Simon’s lights were on upstairs, he’d be terrified of what he was doing. And Grace was not about to let his friend just walk right into the ocean. Not like this.
“C’mon, big guy,” Grace said, unable to stop the slight tremble in it. “You gotta talk to me. What do you need?”
The pressure of Simon pushing forward against his chest stopped, and a relieved lump formed in Grace’s throat. C’mon, c’mon, c’mon, Simon…
“We…want to go home…” he repeated again, and Grace squeezed his eyes shut.
“I know you do, bud.”
“We want to go home…”
“I know. But…that’s a really, really long way away from here. We don’t even know how to begin looking for where you’re from, and…”
Grace paused.
And I really don’t think you should go back to that horrible place.
And I really, really, really don’t want you to leave.
Simon’s arm came around Grace’s back, and he felt claws dig slightly into his shoulderblade. A breath sucked on instinct, and Grace stiffened as another wave came up and pushed against them both, like the biosphere itself wanted them both back on land.
“Take us home…”
Grace shook his head. “I can’t. I told you.”
“Grace.”
The slight growl, the familiar hostility, made Grace pull back enough to look at Simon in the face. But instead of finding a glare or a snarl, it was just wide-eyed desperation.
“Simon?”
“I want to go home. Our home. Not—” he let out a frustrated grunt. His arm uncurled around Grace to hold his head in his hand. Then he waved it behind them, towards the shore. “Our home. Your home. My home. Take me home.”
“Oh…” Grace said, breathing out all the air from his lungs all at once. “Oh, our home. Yeah, yeah, let’s.”
He grabbed Simon's arm and began pulling him back to shore. Sand caked their now soaked feet and pants, but Grace didn’t care. He tried to keep pace with Simon, mindful of his more sluggish gate, but everything in him was screaming to get Simon indoors and away from the shoreline as soon as humanly possible.
Simon tripped a bit, scuffing his knees along the sand and getting even more covered in it. In an instant, Grace was there, murmuring apologies as he slung Simon’s arm around his waist for better balance.
Simon was still being terrifyingly quiet.
Grace let go once they were inside and Simon wasn’t so unsteady.
“I’ll go get us some towels,” he said, hurrying to the closet.
That actually got a response. Progress. But it was just an animalistic whine as Simon shifted impatiently in his now sandy, wet pants. In an instant, the need for comfort over dignity won out, and the pants hit the floor. When Grace turned back from the closet with a pair of towels, his eyes landed on Simon and then immediately shot to the ceiling.
“Okay,” he said, maneuvering around furniture slowly with his eyes on the ceiling. “Okay, here. Towel.”
Simon took the towel, and Grace glanced down and sighed in relief when he saw Simon had wrapped it around his waist as he’d hoped.
It’s not that he minded.
He’d just much rather deal with whatever was going on while Simon had some form of pants on, not just the briefs Grace had bequeathed onto him when he’d learned the only clothes Simon owned at the time was a hospital gown.
Simon kicked off the wet, sandy sweat pants from around his feet and moved towards the couch, wiping his feet on the carpet as he did so. Grace followed, like a useless hovering mother hen over a clutch of snake eggs.
“Are you okay?” he asked as Simon sat down curled up against the arm. “Uh…can I get you anything? Water? Food?”
Simon looked up at the mention of food. That was a good sign!
“We are hungry.”
And that was a bad one.
“Okay…okay, food it is,” Grace nodded quickly, and he hurried to the kitchen, glancing over his shoulder at Simon every other step.
He returned with a plate of some plain salamis, which Simon wolfed down like it was nothing. Grace swallowed as he watched Simon eat. Even those movements felt wrong. Instead of using his jaw to tear at the artificial meats, he’d turn his head to rip and tear, as if the sandwich meat had muscle sinew to be rending.
Grace quickly decided that he’d package up the thought of the meat technically being synthesized from his own muscle proteins for the “never touch again” section of his brain. But later, when Simon needed less attention.
“Feeling better?” he asked. “Still hungry?”
Simon shook his head slowly. “Full…” came the sonorous response.
His head rested on the arm of the couch, and his dark brown eyes slowly turned to look up at Grace. Grace tried to meet them, he really did, but he caught himself glancing back and forth between them and the gently pulsing gills on the side of Simon’s neck.
“You brought us home…”
“Yeah, I did,” Grace said, smiling weakly. “You asked me to, so…”
Simon let out a rumble so deep that Grace could swear he felt it in his chest.
“You are our angel…”
Grace blinked. Angel? What the heck was Simon talking about? Simon was weird, yes, but calling Grace pet names was a new level for him. And the strange sounds paired with the flaring gills didn’t make a good image either.
But instead of pointing that out in a logical response, all Grace could manage to get out was a simple, “Huh?”
Simon’s eyes had already closed. Grace sighed and hunted for a blanket, draping it over Simon’s shoulders. “Okay… Okay, bud…” he murmured. Slowly, he sat down on the opposite end of the couch. “I’ll watch you while you sleep…”