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Here’s what he’s figured out: the teeth and the missing arm are new. The first one is pretty obvious – he might not recognise his own reflection, but he knows that teeth growing out the side of his face isn’t normal, and he’s not an idiot. He thinks he’d remember that, despite the fact his head is just a starless void behind his eyes. Because he keeps thinking he has two hands. More than once, he’s tried to use the limb that isn’t there, and when he first woke up, he kept flinching when he looked down and found just a stump. It feels like muscle memory.
The only thing that doesn’t add up is the fact that the stump is fully healed over. No bandages, no stitches, nothing. Just numb scar tissue and itches that he can’t scratch in a limb that doesn’t exist anymore. Which means it should be an old wound, despite evidence to the contrary. But it doesn’t sit right. He had two arms before, he’s sure.
He’s not sure what to make of it, other than it makes him doubt the story that’s being told to him even more.
The fact that there’s a restraint fastening his single wrist to the bed also isn’t helping.
“What kind of expedition?” he demands. His voice is gruff and low. There’s a strange dissonance in noticing something as basic as that about himself. But when he knows nothing, he finds himself picking up every single detail. Like if he can piece it all together, he’ll be able to figure out exactly how everyone is lying to him.
The man who’d introduced himself as ‘Acting Captain David’ shifts, pointedly not looking at the horror show that is his face. “A scientific one. To explore the ocean on AT-5.”
His left eye aches and aches and aches. He twists his hand against the restraint. “So…what? I’m a scientist or some shit?”
“You volunteered to go,” is all David says, tapping his finger restlessly against the pad he’s gripping.
“Right.”
Doubt sits heavy in his gut like a hunger that’s gone too far. And it’s interesting, he thinks, because he remembers almost nothing, but he knows what that feels like. When the gnawing in your gut gets so voracious that it becomes everything you are.
“Yeah. You’re a real hero. But, like I said. It…went wrong. And whatever happened down there…your mind must have blanked it all out. At least, that’s what the shrink says. Some kind of post-traumatic response.”
He’s lying through his teeth. The person who came in to “assess” him earlier could barely stand to be in the room with him. And her questions – she’d been scoping out the edges of his memory for sure, figuring out what was gone and what wasn’t. Like she’d known he wouldn’t remember. His memory is patchy and doesn’t really make sense. He knows he’s on a space station. He knows that there are no planets, no stars, about the Quiet Rapture. But he doesn’t remember experiencing the Quiet Rapture. And he knows what the COI is, on a basic, factual level – and that, in a way that feels like pure gut instinct, he doesn’t trust them at all.
I’m not one of them, he thinks, but he has no idea where that leaves him, or why he’s here, or why –
“Then why don’t I know my name?” he hisses, dragging the words out of his throat like thorns. The inside of his mind stares back at him like a starless void. “Why don’t I remember anything?”
Acting Captain David just shakes his head.
“I don’t know. Maybe it’ll come back. Maybe it won’t. But for now, considering…what’s happened.” He gestures to the teeth growing out of the side of his face. “You’re staying in here. It’s not exactly quarantine, but –”
He pulls against the restraint. “Right.”
“Yeah. Until we figure out – well. Until we figure it out.”
He shakes his head, anxiety and mistrust blistering inside him – and what does it mean, that he feels like this? That it runs so deep that it just bursts up like this, roots breaking through soil, even when he doesn’t know a fucking thing about himself?
The only thing he knows is that he’s afraid.
His body is running on autopilot, hands off the wheel with engines at full throttle. His fear twists sharply into anger like the two are tangled together, and he feels his lips bare, the teeth on the side of his face shifting uncomfortably.
“What’s the point of lying to me?” he hisses, words turning strange through the opening maw in his cheek. He leans forwards, straining, and David takes a step back. “D’you really think I’m that stupid?”
“I know what it looks like,” David insists, recovering himself. “But you don’t – you don’t remember what it was like when you first came up, okay? Trust me. The restraint will come off. It’s just – for everyone’s sake –”
He wants to snarl at him – to make him flinch back and suddenly doubt the strength of the restraint. But before either of them can say anything more, there’s a knock. David twists around, moving to the side to reveal a blonde man stood in the doorway, fist resting against the wall.
“Uh,” he says, completely ignoring David and staring right at him instead, before giving him an awkward little wave. “Hi.”
“…Grace, you’re not supposed to be down here,” David says. The other man’s attention snaps to him.
“Oh. Right! Sorry, no, I am, they, uhhhhhhhhhhhh…they sent me down from –” He gestures upwards with him thumb. “Y’know.”
David stares at him. “What?”
“It’s, uh.” Grace swallows, before looking…conspiratorial? What? “It’s Ava.”
David goes still and stares. “She’s awake?”
The other man makes a strange expression like a wince. “You should…probably go up there.” He nods into the room. “It’s alright. I’ll keep an eye on him.”
David seems to hesitate – and it’s almost stupid. What do they think he’s going to do? He can’t even get off the bed. But it’s another piece of the puzzle that fits right into place. They’re scared of him. They’re all terrified out of their fucking minds.
Except this Grace guy, who’s looking right at him again, eyes wide and soft like he can’t quite believe he’s real.
What?
“You’d better still be here when I get back,” David says, stern – but there’s an edge of desperate hope in his voice, and he’s already moving towards the door, brushing shoulders with the other man as he goes. “If I come back here and you’ve wandered off –”
“Oh, believe me,” Grace says, like something about that is funny. “I’m not going anywhere.”
David gives him an odd look at that, but seems to care less about that and more about whatever’s going upstairs with Ava, because he elects to not say anything further and simply moves past him down the corridor. He’s not even at the corner before he breaks into a run and disappears. Grace turns to watch him go, giving a low whistle, before he turns back and immediately crosses over. He gets a better look of him now – he’s dressed in ragtag clothes like the rest of them, face smeared with engine oil and grease. The bags under his eyes seem settled there like a permanent fixture, and yet somehow don’t distract from how strikingly blue his irises are, like the sky of a planet that doesn’t exist anymore. But there’s something about him that feels…off. It must be the way he carries himself – he can’t put his finger on it, but to him, it seems that Grace doesn’t quite belong here just as much as he doesn’t.
He gets no time to figure it out – Grace sits down on the bed without even a fraction of hesitation, ending up closer than anyone else in this place has been to him since he woke up.
“Okay, that should keep him busy,” Grace says without any preamble, before he reaches across and starts unbuckling the restraint.
Bewilderment and hope rush through him, his pulse picking up. The moment the strap comes loose, he lurches across and grabs Grace by the wrist, tight enough that the other man stops in his tracks.
“You know me.”
It’s the only thing that can explain it.
Grace stares back at him. “Yeah. Yeah, I do.” He shifts forward, eyes alight like a showering of sparks. “Do you…know me?”
Irritation flashes through him. “I don’t even know my own fucking name right now.”
And for some reason, Grace grins.
“You know your favourite word, though.”
“What?”
“Ah – I can’t actually say it, sorry –”
He grips his wrist tighter, giving it pointed shake. His emotions churn within him, shifting from confusion to annoyance to fear to desperate in a blink. “What’s my name?”
Grace stares at him. “Wait – they didn’t tell you yet? No, of course they didn’t – frick, sorry, I’m doing this all wrong. My name’s Grace –”
His lips curl into a snarl. “Yeah, I got that –”
“– and you’re Simon.” Grace looks at him expectantly. “Yeah?”
Simon. He looks away and mutters it to himself, tasting the sound of the name on his tongue. It feels familiar. Well-worn stone in the palm of his hand.
“I’m Simon,” he says, and reality shifts slightly on its axis, because it fits. Dislocated joint going back into socket.
It’s an unnerving feeling, to know without knowing.
“Sure are,” Grace says, with another grin that is way too bright for a dark universe with no stars. He shifts, trying to catch his eye. “Hi! Nice to meet you properly.”
Simon frowns, confusion deepening, and snaps his head around to look at the other man. “You mean you don’t know me?”
“Uhhh, questions later! We should get going,” Grace says, already trying to pull away. Simon just digs his heels in harder, and pulls Grace’s arm back down, keeping the other man from getting up.
“Tell me what’s going on,” Simon growls.
“I’m breaking you out,” Grace says, looking genuinely confused. “I mean, unless you want to stay here…?”
“No,” Simon says. “I just don’t run off with the first pretty boy who shows up who knows my name until I get some answers.”
Grace blinks at him, flushing slightly, a smile tugging at his lips. “You think I’m pretty? No – ignore that.” He shakes his head, waving his free hand awkwardly. “That is so not the point. Sorry, okay. Answers! Yep. The problem with answers is that you’re gonna think I’m crazy. And, I mean, maybe I am crazy but the fact that you’re actually real is kinda empirical evidence that I’m not losing it, so –”
Simon tightens his grip. “Grace.”
And that name sounds right too. Not in the same way as his own name had, like he’d been saying it all his life. No, this felt new, but old in the same breath. Like it’s been etched into his bones his whole life, and he only knows it now that he’s been cut open, muscles sheared back and revealing the carved femur underneath.
“I’m rambling, yep, I know.” Grace stops himself, taking in an exaggerated deep breath that, somehow, seems to be completely genuine. “Okay. So, just to be clear, you definitely don’t recognise me at all, right? Because not gonna lie, if you do, that would make this a lot easier…”
Simon’s mouth is dry. But he shakes his head. “Why the fuck would I know you?”
“Sometimes you do, sometimes you don’t,” Grace replies, like that makes any sense. “I still haven’t really figured out what makes a difference, but –”
Unease rushes through Simon’s veins like blood. “You mean we’ve done this before?”
He already suspects that his lack of memory is more manufactured that he’s been led to believe. But the idea that this isn’t the first time – that they’ve wiped his mind over and over, and he has no way of even knowing –
“No no no – not here, anyway,” Grace replies.
“What?”
“Aghhh, sorry. This is all in the wrong order. I get mixed up a lot.” He pulls his hand out of Simon’s grip, and Simon lets him go. The other man just presses both his hands to his face, dislodging his glasses completely as he rubs his eyes. “I should start from the beginning. You remember the Quiet Rapture, right?”
His unease shifts into dread. “What’s that got to do with anything?”
Grace shifts, leaning forward. When he talks, he gestures frantically with his hands, like he can’t keep all the energy inside of himself. Simon feels dead in comparison, too still and wary. “When the Quiet Rapture happened, something happened to me too. And believe me, I know it sounds…impossible and insane, and it’s been driving me crazy because it makes no scientific sense, but –”
He breaks off, looking directly at Simon.
“I saw everything,” he says. “Every d-brane of the multiverse – well, at least the ones that I actually exist in. I could see all of them.” He chokes on a strange laugh. “Nearly fried my brain, y’know? And everyone else was freaking out about the planets and the stars, so I just kinda locked myself in a cupboard and pretended nothing existed for a few days until I could actually process it all, and I was only, what, fifteen? And Mom had been planetside so there wasn’t even anyone left to come looking for me, but that’s not the point, the point is that I kept seeing you.”
“What the fuck are you on about?” Simon breathes.
“We find each other in more universes than we don’t,” Grace says, the words coming out in a rush, but he stops after that sentence, and it sits heavy in the air between them. “But it’s always different. Sometimes I find you. Sometimes you find me. A couple of times we grow up together. Usually, we don’t even start in the same reality and you manage to find your way to a universe where I exist but you don’t, which is crazy, by the way. Most of the time, we don’t even know each other – I’m actually a science teacher in most universes? It happens so often that I keep forgetting that I’m not one here, do you know how weird that is? Because it’s weird. I get mixed up all the time. And as for you, you’re – well, it doesn’t matter, but the thing is that apparently different universes run at different speeds? Probably I’m the only guy that knows that, actually. So I can only see what’s going on at the same time relatively speaking, but relativity between different dimensional branes is! Kinda varied! Which means some universes are further ahead than us, others we’re still kids. We’re in a pretty slow one here, I think, because most of the other versions of this particular timeline I’ve already seen how your mission goes, and I was really hoping I’d get to you before it was too late because –”
He breaks off then, voice cracking. Like he’s actually upset.
“Because I’ve seen the ones where I don’t find you in time. Where you don’t make it back.”
Nothing that the other man has said makes any sense – in fact, he’d been completely correct when he’d said earlier that he’d sound crazy. Simon shouldn’t even be entertaining this. His head is screaming at him to just get up and make a break for it. Run down as many corridors as he can until he can find some way out of this place. But where would he even go? He has no idea where home is. He doesn’t even know if he has one.
And here is a man who looks at him like he could put the stars back in the skies, who actually seems to know him. And Simon wouldn’t know any different, would he? Grace can tell him whatever he wants and he won’t know if it’s true or complete bullshit.
But he knew his name. And now –
“What was the mission?” he asks, urgent. “David said they sent me down into an ocean or something. And somehow that ended up with me losing a fucking arm and getting teeth growing out of my face.”
“Yeah,” Grace replies, meeting his gaze without even flinching. “It wasn’t a normal ocean, Simon. It’s an ocean of blood.”
What the fuck, he wants to say – but suddenly, he can’t. His throat is choked with unremembered horror, and he can feel the shape of the memory in his mind like a leviathan under the surface. Blood ocean. He knows how it sounds to be down there. How it smelt. How it tasted. His skin crawls like it’s burning, blisters and teeth bursting out of his skin. He’s changing. The back of his mind tears open like a wound, and through the tear, a light shimmers. An Eye opens. He is seen –
Grace grabs his hand.
“Simon. Hey,” he says, low and urgent. “Don’t go anywhere I can’t go, okay?”
Simon swallows, bile biting at the lining of his throat. He tries to reckon with knowing without remembering.
Something very wrong has happened to him, he realises.
“Blood ocean,” he manages.
“Yep,” Grace says. “Not a great time for anyone. You good?”
Simon manages to nod, and elects to say nothing – but his thoughts are racing. Because if nothing else, this confirms something for sure: Grace is telling the truth.
At least, about what’s happened to him. The whole…multiverse part, he’s less sure about, even though there’s something about the other man’s presence that feels undeniably right.
Grace clears his throat. “It would really make me feel better if you said like, a sentence.”
Simon closes his eyes and sighs.
“Fuck off,” he says, but it comes out soft and completely lacking in bite.
Grace laughs, apparently completely unoffended. “Not sure if that counts as a sentence, but I’ll take it.”
“It counts.”
“Uh huh.” Grace’s fingers fidget restlessly against Simon’s wrist. “Okay. I won’t say too much about what happened down there, given –” he gestures to Simon, clearly referring to his reaction – “but also because I still don’t really know much – but you can ask me any questions you want later, okay? The point is that often you don’t come back out. Sometimes because you end up in another universe. Sometimes because you die. As it happens, the worlds where you do resurface…they tend to be the ones where you know me. Even though you didn’t know me before. Which really makes me wonder about what’s down there, if sometimes you come back with multiversal knowledge and sometimes you freaking leave this d-brane, y’know? And, I just –”
He breaks off for a moment, strangely emotional, and looks away.
“I haven’t actually, uh, told anyone? About any of this, before?” Grace says, eyes glistening, gesturing vaguely to his head. He chokes on a quiet laugh. “It’s just a lot! I’ve been pretending to be normal for years, people really would think that I’m crazy. I wondered – for so long I thought I probably was crazy. But now you’re here, and you’re real and I found you, and you don’t – I just –”
His voice cracks, breaking, and he shakes his head, looking away. Swallows. Steals himself.
“Sorry,” he says, and then laughs, clearly trying to sound normal and missing it by a mile. “This is probably…so weird for you. You don’t even know me. And I mean, you don’t even have to come with me if you don’t want. I just…”
Grace presses his head into his hands again, knocking his glasses way up into his hair. Simon just sits there, staring at him, completely out of his depth, and wondering how this man survived this long in the brutal reality of their starless void.
But then, he’s apparently had one foot in this world and another in every other softer world this entire time. Whether it’s real or not doesn’t change the fact that it’s clearly been very real for Grace.
He almost wants to remember. The only person in this entire place who can look at him without flinching – and Simon includes himself in that number – is sat in front of him, fractured, and the solution might be hidden in the darkness behind his eyes. He just can’t reach it.
“I’m sorry,” he murmurs, itching to do something – he’s not a man of words, he’s realised. He’s someone who does something. And he can’t. “I don’t…I wish I knew you, but –”
“No, it’s okay –”
“It’s not,” Simon hisses. He closes his eyes, reaching out into the gaping maw of his head. But there’s nothing there but teeth and eyes, staring, and he swallows down the fear that rises up in his throat. His pulse thrums in his throat, reedy and fast.
“There’s nothing,” he says, opening his eyes again. “I’m no-one. Just – some corpse walking around. I’m not whoever you think you know, not anymore. I wish I was –”
Then at least he’d be someone, he thinks, as he grips the sheet with his single hand. At least he’d have something to cling onto.
Grace reaches forward suddenly, grabbing hold of his arm. Simon can’t help it – he flinches back slightly, but Grace lets him go immediately.
“Not your fault,” he says. “Not at all. Don’t worry about it, I mean it. And you’re not a corpse. You’re alive, and you’re here, which is really kinda incredible on a lot of levels. Do you know how many things have to align for that to happen? Because it’s a lot.”
He flashes him a sad smile.
“For what it’s worth,” he says, “it would be nice to get to know who you are now?”
Simon just stares at him, before an ugly, awful grief twisted through him, torquing his face into something deeply pained. Is it possible to ache for someone he doesn’t even know? Even if that person is himself?
He has to look away.
“Don’t think there’s anything left to get to know.”
“There’s always –”
“There isn’t.” He twists back around, staring at him. “I’ve got nothing, alright? And it’s not coming back. Just like the stars, just like everyone fucking else. It’s just – gone. That’s it.”
“They did a real number on you, huh…” Grace murmurs, reaching up and tucking a hair behind Simon’s ear in a move that seems more instinctual than conscious. The touch is so soft, so brazenly unafraid, that Simon freezes, his breath hitching in his throat. “This is usually what happens to me, by the way, so –”
“They did this,” Simon cuts in. “The COI?”
“Pretty sure this is induced, yeah,” Grace replies, pulling his hand back. “Which, in my vast experience from the me’s who are not me, means it’s gonna wear off at some point. Unless whatever they gave you has given you brain damage, everything you are is still in there.”
“I knew I couldn’t trust a fucking word that was coming out of his mouth,” Simon hisses to himself, injustice building in his gut, before he turns back to Grace. “But you’re not with them. Right?”
“Nope,” Grace says, giving him a smile. “I’m with you.”
It’s an enormous thing, for someone who didn’t even know his name until five minutes ago. For someone who has nothing. He doesn’t know how old he is, where he comes from, what his mother’s face looked like other than some non-mutated facsimile of his own.
But he’s not alone in this.
Not anymore.
He gets the strange feeling that he’s not had that for a very, very long time.
“Are you gonna come, then?” Grace asks, glancing back over his shoulder before turning back to look at Simon. “I mean, something did start happening upstairs with Ava but I don’t know how long that’ll actually keep him busy for, so if you wanna get out of here before David comes back then –”
“Let’s go,” Simon says, already swinging his legs off the bed. This looks like his best option, by a long way. Besides, if Grace does turn out to be really crazy, he can always –
He grabs that train of thought by the throat.
He knows, suddenly, with an unnatural certainty, that he could absolutely overpower the other man without even thinking about it. That he could break his neck if he wanted to.
The knowledge sits sour in his gut, itching like a scar.
He swallows, and files that information away to examine later.
Grace, completely oblivious to his train of thought, just beams at him with so much delight that Simon wonders if that’s where all the stars went. The other man practically jumps off the bed, and then grabs Simon by the wrist to pull him along before –
“Ah, sorry!” Grace immediately lets go as Simon flinches back once again. “Sorry, I forget that you –”
“It’s fine,” Simon replies, embarrassment rushing through him at his instinctive fear. He scrambles to come up with an explanation that makes sense. “I’ve only got one hand.”
“Yep, sorry,” Grace says, immediately accepting it, turning to head out of the room. “I think if we go this way…”
“Are you telling me you don’t even have a plan?” Simon says to his back as he follows along, feeling a flicker of adrenaline as he crosses the threshold of the door and out into the corridor.
“Um, please don’t critique the rescue,” Grace shoots back, and Simon can hear him smiling. “This rescue is great. And also the only one you’re getting, so y’know, beggars can’t be choosers –”
“Where are we even going?”
“You’re not this demanding in other universes, by the way,” Grace says instead of answering as he seems to do something like eeny meeny miny moe to decide which turn they take when they get to the junction. And it should infuriate Simon – in fact, it does. But his chest does something strange – a warmth growing through him like a tree, branches unfurling, weaving through his ribs. And he suddenly finds himself reaching out whip-fast and grabbing Grace by the wrist, pulling him back before he can go around the corner.
“Who are we?” he asks, finding himself desperate to know. “To each other? Across your different worlds? What is this?”
Grace meets his eyes without flinching.
“We’re everything,” he says. “Different things every time. Friends, brothers, strangers –” He breaks off then, glancing away. “Other things, too.” He laughs. “One time we’re enemies, now that’s a fun one.”
He looks back at him.
“I guess we gotta find out what we are in this one, huh?” Grace says.
And Simon can’t help but meet his smile with one of his own.
“Yeah,” he says. “Guess we do.”