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Grace goes to sleep the same as he does every night – Simon spooning him firmly from behind, arm wrapped securely under and around his waist, the shorter man’s nose buried in the crook of Grace’s neck. The soft push and pull of Simon’s breathing against his back and neck lulls him into a haze, and he drifts off before even realizing he was falling asleep in the first place.
Grace never sees or hears his nightmares coming; he feels it in his body first. He finds himself unable to move freely, struggling and failing to move against the invisible, omnipresent pressure holding him down. His increasingly panicked mind fills in the details for him: the smell and feeling of wet grass and dirt against his face, the hands pinning his arms and legs down, the knee pressing against his back. A rainbow in the sky above a barbed wire fence. Adrenaline forcing his breathing to hasten and heart to pound in his ears.
He begs for his life against the men holding him down. “Please – no – I can’t – you’re murdering me!” he tries to scream, but the sound of his pleading gets stuck in his throat and dies. A hand grabs his jaw and forces his head sideways, exposing his neck, and a sharp pain stabs him.
Grace blinks and he is now in the Hail Mary’s open airlock, peeking over the lip into the vastness of space below. In the far distance, he can hear the shrill beeps and alarms from the cockpit. Excessive centrifugal force, he thinks, despite feeling nothing but still empty space around him. There are no stars, only ever-continuing inky expanse. I failed my mission, he realizes, looking around for any sign of starlight. His heart hammers in his chest like a jackrabbit kicking a hole through his sternum. He isn’t wearing his EVA suit, he notices; he’s still in his favorite yellow rain jacket.
A hand from behind shoves him; he loses his balance, flailing wildly, tumbling over the edge of the airlock headfirst into open space. There is nothing to tether him to the ship. He falls and falls and falls, faster and faster, gravity increasing. He sees Adrian’s bright green atmosphere fast approaching.
Grace slams the ground with enough force to shatter every bone in his body. A scream rips out of him, shredding his vocal cords.
A hand grabs his arm and Grace wrenches himself away, disoriented and confused and ready to fight for his life. He can’t see anything. He throws his hands up in a defensive pose, fists curled, kicking his feet desperately away from the direction the hand came from. Grace’s heel makes direct contact with a body to his left.
“Hey – Ryland – hey!” A familiar baritone voice yells.
A light clicks on, and Grace can see his surroundings. Four earth-toned walls surround him, illuminated by the soft, warm glow of the bedside lamp. Grace takes in heaving, wheezing breaths, fighting past the familiar feeling of suffocation, of not being able to expand his lungs.
Simon is sitting upright in bed next to him, eyes wide in bewilderment. His arm is raised, hovering over Grace’s, not touching him for fear of taking a punch.
Grace stares at Simon, not computing. Reality feeds into his consciousness at the speed of dripping molasses. For a moment, they stare at each other, both men’s chests rising and falling quickly, appraising each other.
“You’re okay,” Simon says eventually. He moves to put his hand on Grace’s thigh, telegraphing his movements slowly so as to not startle the man next to him. “Do you know where you are?”
Grace looks down at his trembling hands, still brandished, and lowers them to his lap. One of the first body sensations he regains is the feeling of being drenched in cold sweat. His night shirt sticks uncomfortably to his back.
Simon’s hand feels warm and dry against the chilled, goose fleshed skin of Grace's leg. “Do you know where you are?” he asks again, softer.
Grace takes a long minute to appraise his surroundings, eyes wide and scanning. He is on Erid, in his biodome, in his home, in his bed. Simon is next to him, shirtless, his dark wavy hair messily tied back with a headband. Grace can’t bring himself to make eye contact with him, lest he blink the man disappear.
Grace minutely nods his head, finally acknowledging Simon’s questions. He stares at the wall opposite the bed, mind still churning. The memories of his nightmare were seeping out of him, nearly all but forgotten, but the experience of them still lived and ached in Grace’s body. It is disorienting and reminds him of the early weeks of the mission, when his memories were gone but the feelings of them lingered. The familiar sensation of memories just out of reach captures his attention, bringing him out of the bedroom and back on the Hail Mary. He can almost smell the clinical, stale air of the ship.
“You’re okay,” Simon says, brushing his thumb up and down where his hand lays on Grace’s lap. “You're here. It’s okay.”
Everything hits Grace at once. His shuddering breaths increase in pace until he’s hyperventilating, then hitch into silent, wracking sobs that shake in his chest. He clutches a hand against his mouth, stifling his erratic breath, unable to think a clear thought through the terror seeping out of his nerves and bones.
“You need to breathe. Ryland. Breathe,” Simon commanded. Grace feels an arm wrap around his shoulders and gently tug him into leaning against the warm body to his left. Grace follows the pull without resistance, feeling the sensation of Simon’s bare chest against his cheek.
Grace sucks in a gasping breath and exhales a keening, wailing sob. Then he does it again, and again. He grabs the man embracing him like a lifeline. They stay like that for a long while, Simon rubbing gentle circles into the other man’s trembling shoulders, placing gentle kisses on his forehead. Eventually, his shaking calms and his sobs become nothing more than hiccuping gasps for breath.
“S-Simon,” Grace whispers after a long while. The simulated pale grey light of dawn had begun to bleed in through the window.
“There you are,” Simon murmured in a low rumble, squeezing the lankier man closer against him. It was jarring to Simon for Grace, who normally can't stop talking, to go nonverbal after waking up from an episode. It sometimes took hours for him to find his voice again, to return from wherever he had gone.
Grace reciprocates the squeeze weakly. He was exhausted down to his core, but the thought of going back to sleep sounded impossible. “I’m sorry,” he whispered. He knew how scary his night terrors were for Simon to experience secondhand, and guilt sank into his stomach at the thought of trying to physically fight his partner.
Simon wasn’t used to Grace’s night terrors – you could never truly get used to your partner screaming himself awake – but they had happened often enough that Simon knew what to do. When he was lucky, like today, he was able to wake up before Grace did because of his erratic, jerky movements. He had time to prepare for the aftermath. He had made the mistake of trying to restrain Grace once while he woke up and earned a black eye for his efforts. He knew better now, and let Grace come back from wherever he had gone at his own pace. Grounding touches, gentle reassurances, deep squeezing to coregulate; things that Grace could not ask for in the moment but desperately needed to become reacquainted with his surroundings.
“You’re fine. You’re here. Go back to sleep.” Simon’s control of the situation gave Grace comfort, and he felt the tension in his muscles slowly give way. He could feel the exhaustion taking him away, but the thought of slipping back into another nightmare kept his eyes frozen open, staring at nothing.
Simon gently rocked the other man cradled in his arm, pressed firmly against his chest. The sound of Simon’s strong heartbeat was the last thing Grace heard as he slid into restful darkness.
-
Simon let Grace sleep in that morning. He slipped out of bed, clipped on his prosthesis, walked to the kitchen where the radio for contacting Rocky was kept, and phoned in.
“Grace, question?”
“Hey, Rocky,” Simon started, stifling a yawn. “Can you let the pebbles know that class has to be cancelled?”
“Grace have night terror event, question?” Rocky asked in low chords, already knowing Simon’s answer before he gave it. Grace never called out from teaching, except after nights like these.
“Yeah. It was a rough night.” Simon rubbed his eyes with his flesh arm, leaning against the kitchen counter.
“Rocky will come to biodome. Be there soon.”
Rocky, Simon, and Grace knew the routine that followed night terrors. Rocky always joined them on recovery days. Grace couldn’t function properly after a night terror – all of the synthesized Eridian caffeine on the planet couldn’t keep him up and running. His brain kept revisiting the nightmare, even though the specifics were foggy; he could still feel it in his body. Everything was kept as low energy as possible for Grace and Simon, which meant curling up under the quilt on the couch in the living room, marathoning familiar high fantasy movies or nineties sitcoms. Rocky would sit on the other side of Grace, stretching two legs onto his lap to keep him warm through the xenonite shell suit. The weight, heat, and pressure comforted and grounded him. Simon would peer at Grace occasionally to see him staring off into nothing, or otherwise drifting into a nap.
Rocky became acutely aware of Grace’s night terrors when they started during their return trip to Erid. The alien understood dreams from a hypothetical lens, given the differences in Eridian and human brains and sleep, but was horrified to learn that prolonged, severe stress could lead to Grace getting stuck in his memories like that. Seeing Grace writhing in his sleep, then waking up screaming and disoriented, was what pushed Rocky to invent the first prototype of the shell suit during their journey home. He couldn’t stand to witness Grace curl up on himself to self-soothe from the other side of a xenonite wall. He had to learn through his gifted laptop that humans were extremely touch-dependent for comfort. Grace hated talking about it, given he was never going to touch another human again.
That was, until Simon appeared – quite literally out of nowhere, to the confusion of every planetary scientist and astrophysicist on Erid. His arrival into Eridian orbit in a beaten up, half-defunct submarine filled with blood was impossible; Simon surviving his mutations and injuries seemed even less likely, but the team of astrobiologists assembled to keep Grace healthy were able to stabilize him and fix the worst of the damage.
Simon rarely talked about his life before being warped into Erid’s orbit, but enough details were shared for both of them to conclude that they did not come from the same universe. In Simon’s universe, the stars had gone out; Grace hypothesized that astrophage had likely colonized the Solean system early enough that Project Hail Mary was never possible to begin with. There was no saving humanity in Simon’s timeline. Simon had dealt with his own baggage from his past, openly sharing with Grace where he came from what he’d done to survive. Grace had his own share of midnight wake-ups with the dark-haired man, but they grew fewer and farther between over time. Whatever chokehold Grace’s memories had on him did not have the same effect on Simon. Grace wonders what could have been in the French amnesistic to cause his trauma to root so deeply in his psyche.
The mid-afternoon sun is shining into the windows of the living room when Grace eventually stretches and rises from the couch. Simon follows suit, closing the laptop and heading into the kitchen to grab vitamin shakes from the fridge.
“Grace feels better, question?” Rocky asks.
The taller man nods, adjusting his glasses and running a hand through his blonde hair. “Thanks for coming by, Rock. I’ll still see you and Adrian tomorrow for chess, right?” He clears his throat, voice still aching and rough from the night before.
Rocky chirps an affirmative, climbing off of the couch and doing a stretch similar to a cat waking up from a nap, vents rattling. “See you tomorrow after class. Sleep well, Grace.”
Grace offers a weak smile. Rocky always said that after days like these. “You too, bud.”