Chapter Text
When Simon wakes, it’s a gentle thing. Unrecognizable.
He’s drifting with every muscle relaxed. He’s so loose he can barely even feel them, but he knows they’re there. It’s peaceful. Yet again, completely alien.
Simon’s eyes open, squinting against the blinding white of his surroundings. The lights are thankfully fairly dim, but the room is just so clean and so white. He feels soft, like his body is cushioned as he’s still coming into focus, wherever this is.
Slowly, he sits up. Brings his hand up to his chest, to his shoulder, but… nothing’s there. The soothing leather he kept with him is simply gone. With its absence finally brings the first ripple of recognizable, familiar, comfortable panic and fear.
A fuzzy memory reminds him of his last moments. Pulling his harness off, hooking the lifeline of his own security up to what he hoped could be humanity’s second chance. He had whispered a prayer to his mother, to please, please watch over this gift as she’d watched over him. In his final moments, he had finally given into the knowledge that if anything in the universe cared, it wasn’t Father, his brothers, or even God, but his mother.
The loss of his protection should be far more concerning, but those fears drift away from him gently into a plush numbness.
He focuses instead on the plush softness surrounding him, under his palm. He’s wearing a shirt that is not his own and it’s the softest material he’s ever felt. Everything is soft. There’s a blanket covering his lap, made of a similar material and just as gentle to run his hand over. It’s hard to feel where his body ends and the blanket begins, it makes him feel fuzzy.
He’s in a bed.
Should probably get up.
No idea where to, though.
Simon slides his legs away from the warm divot in the mattress and swings them over the side of the bed.
Presses his feet to the floor – and immediately stumbles. He almost catches himself with his left hand, but actually, he doesn’t have a left hand. It feels like his arm stays on the bed as he falls away from it, and the memory of much more violently ripping himself away from it floats up from the same place the last one did, but there’s no pain with it. Like he’s watching it happen through static to someone else while instead he gently staggers.
Simon doesn’t fall far, though, as he clips himself into another bed beside his with a little oof. His legs manage to get underneath him before they slide any further out and he wobbles upright with his right arm.
Takes a look and yep. Left arm is gone. Look at that.
Pristine white bandages wrap around a shortened stump.
The surroundings come into focus a little more clearly. It’s an odd place to be in, and his brain is really struggling to make any sense of it at all. In fact, it’s so nonsensical that he just gives up and lets that thought ooze away.
There are three beds in the room, all pristine components of whites and yellows and oranges without a speck out of place. It’s uncanny. He’s never seen anything like it.
What’s even more uncanny are the glass panels that sweep through the room seemingly at random. They entirely engulf one of the beds, stretch across most of the wall at the head of each bed, and bridge upwards across the room.
A cursory poke to the glass yields little information. It holds steady and unmoving. It’s warm but not hot. Simon sends a brief thanks that the room itself is blissfully cool. It’s also dry, not the leaking, dripping, steaming mess of metal walls closing in on some poor soul.
Confident the glass won’t swallow him whole; Simon passes by it and underneath it to the doorway.
Some type of instinct is trying to tell him something, screaming across his reflexes, but it doesn’t break through the trance that this opening to outside has on him. Probably doesn’t matter anyways. It floats up and out of him and to the surface of some other ocean he’s no longer in.
As Simon steps out of the room, it yields more of the same architecture.
White padding and walls with glass intersecting the space in fractal shapes, with various screens and junk scattered about.
At least it’s consistent. It would probably be more great if that consistency lined up with anything Simon had ever seen before.
His attention shifts as he picks up on something more familiar, more dreadful. Even through this fog keeping his mind pleasantly dull, if he focuses he can feel vibrations from all around him, a quiet but pounding rhythm.
It’s almost like the swells of his ship. The thump thump, thump thump that suffocated him as the very metal surrounding him screamed as it came alive and mutated into a fleshy mass…
“Fuck me…” Simon finally utters, rubbing his eyes so he can at least focus on whatever this is instead of that nightmare. This one at least smells better.
He starts to move and the thumping is getting louder, pounding stronger and stronger as more noises come into focus as he hears… voices? They’re so loud and he can barely make them out.
It would send him in a panic, if the voices were cloyingly wrapping around him. Inescapably seizing him, suffocating him, tethering him down while he struggles desperately. Instead, this voice bounces right by him without a second thought.
He stops at a doorway that’s nearly drowning him in noise now, braces his arm against the wall, and looks inside.
…
To be able to process something, you have to have some frame of reference to compare it to. At least the white walls and the bed were something.
…
One of his instincts finally kicks online as he tries to at least survey the dream in front of him point by point.
Colors. There’s a lot of colors. The… room? is bathed in colors on all sides, flashing brightly and quickly across a whole spectrum of neons Simon doesn’t think he’s ever laid eyes on before. It’s almost nauseating, how strong these colors are.
There’s also… a floor. And a railing. Made of metal. Smart observation.
There’s a ball of glass and… uhhh… y’know, he’ll look back at that later.
There’s a person. Another person, standing right there, jumping and moving his body. Dancing. It’s music pulsing around them. Loud and boisterous and it vibrates within Simon, so loud and filling that he can’t even find space for fear.
As he looks down the body of the person in front of him, taking stock, his gaze once again lands on this moving, shifting ball of glass on the ground next to him that he still can’t bring himself to make heads or tails of.
A buncha rocks?
The waypoints on his map that he labelled with the same phrase look nothing like this, but it’s all he’s got.
Simon continues to gape but only barely manages to notice when the ball halts and presses into the other man. What he does see is a complete freeze in the other man and then a dead lock on his eyes.
Confusion.
Is it some fucked up mirror? He barely feels his body, maybe he has been dancing. The man’s own left arm is there but looks fucked, maybe he’s been imagining it’s gone. How the hell would he have blonde hair, though?
The ball rolls a little more and finally the pounding music and shrill voices abruptly halt, bathing the room in a pink brighter than anything Simon could have imagined and a silence he’s never known.
Simon gapes at the man.
The man gapes back.
The mirror theory holds some water.
The eternity passing between them is at least better than the hell he was in before. Nicer to look at than the gaping maw of horror and screaming pleas.
After a few minutes of staring, the ball comes rolling over to Simon, all awkward angles slowly trundling down the metal walkway towards him. It stops a couple feet away and then reaches up a limb and taps gently at the glass.
Simon manages to tear his full gaze down to the ball in front of him. Staring at it, really focusing, he can start to pick out and process the details of the thing. It really is just a bunch of rocks in an odd formation. But the rocks are moving and gesturing and he’s fascinated by this, but his poor head is just still too fuzzy to really panic about it.
The rocks… the creature? It taps on the inside of its ball a couple more times. Slow, gentle, so quiet. And then it moves the limb up and splays the end out into 3 pieces outstretched, and waves. A gentle purr accentuates it.
The other man seems to boot up still faster than Simon and finally breaks out of his trance, and it’s full of so much energy that honestly he’d prefer the rock.
Either way, the weird mirror dimension theory is out the proverbial hatch, then.
“Uhhh… you’re awake? Hi!” The man says brightly. His voice is a little rough, but it’s also sticky sweet in tone.
The guy turns himself towards the glass… rock… creature thing. “Rock you were on watch duty,” he whispers.
The rocks, or, I guess, Rock, turns in the ball and stomps a bit and it sounds like it’s whistling some type of tune.
“What the fuck?” Simon bites out.
“Well, uhhh… good question! I… I don’t know.”
Rock plays a fast little tune, stomping a couple more times.
“Did you think of anything? Cause you know just as much as I do!” The man points accusingly at Rock. The gesture is at least a little more familiar and Simon finds a bit more solid ground.
“I think… I’m in the wrong place.” Seemed like the only thing he knew for a fact. He’s dead at the bottom of a blood ocean, not… wherever this is. Nice that his panic and fear are bubbling to the surface with his oxygen at least.
“Yeah, we pulled you out of your ship. Seemed like you needed some help… but we had to let it go just about as soon as we got you out of it, sorry about that.”
“And uh… where are… we?”
“Where do you think you are?”
“I asked you first,” Simon scoffs. What is there to hide?
“And I asked you second.” At that, Rock gesticulated and sang a few more notes from… however it spoke. The man ran with it and continued, “Look, I don’t know what to tell you or where to start from. Gimme a hint, cause it’s probably gonna be confusing no matter what I say.”
Simon nods. The back of his neck wants to prickle at the negotiation, but everything is already off the rails enough. Giving info to get info was familiar territory. “Can I sit though? I’m feeling a little…” He staggers slightly now that his body isn’t coursing with as much shock.
“Of course! Here, you can come back here to the lab.” The man thankfully turns and walks in the opposite direction. Simon’s instincts are starting to kick back on a bit and heading to “the lab” is letting him get further into the ship rather than retreating to his starting point.
In only a handful of strides they come to a room that Simon can at least vaguely place. It’s still far too white, but between the computer servers blinking away in the back, the lab benches scattered with equipment way above his pay grade, and the screens all displaying varying information, it feels a little bit more normal.
The familiarity is a bit of its own stab, though, isn’t it? He kind of wants to go back to the pink dream and pretend he’s floating in a mirror again. Here, the sub doesn’t feel that far away anymore.
But he’s still here, not there. The cascading tunnels of glass looping around the lab are still alien. He gently taps on one panel of it, taking in the somewhat hollow note that rings off of it, then places his palm flat against it. Runs his fingers along a welded ridge, but the metal doesn’t feel like anything he’s ever handled before. Scratches a nail into it. It feels too real and too foreign to be something made manifest from his guilty conscience.
Simon’s broken from his reverie when he hears the other man clear their throat behind him.
When he turns around, the man is holding out a rolling chair towards him.
“I know you only just woke up, but you've gotta be fatigued. Mary knows that I’ve been in that position before. Take a seat,” The man says as he sits down in his own chair a few feet away. It’s only open space between them.
Mary… there’s no way Simon made it back to Eden. And this man looks far too relaxed to be a brother. He was too clean, too comfortable, too gentle to be one of his current brothers. Simon glances down at the man’s wrists.
Empty.
He instinctively grabs for the pendant at his own wrists and is reminded that his arm is back in the sub and both of his pendants are gone. The leather on his right wrist is still there, though.
“Is this the Grove?”