Chapter Text
Simon was dead and this time he had proof. Lots of it, actually.
For one, his arm was back on his body, and all his clothes were as they had been when he first entered the submarine. Ratty; but not yet soaked in blood and sweat. More than that, he had his knives back. Both the one at his back and the one on his chest were there– he'd pulled them out to look at them time and time again, but every now and then he'd reach for them and they'd be gone.
Much like his knives, the whole of the submarine he was in was impermanent. He first came to in the sub as 'new' as the first time he was locked in there. No blood and flesh and teeth, just a claustrophobic place that smelled like rust.
He got up and walked around in a panic that first time, before he realized he was dead. He had first looked for a way out that he knew didn't exist, then started going through everything he knew did. The binders in the bag they supplied him were all there, and as intact as they had been. The first aid kit and life vest were hidden in the wall, and Simon ignored the water bottle and alcohol this time.
That was the first point he realized he wasn't hungry or thirsty. He'd grown used to the hunger pains through out his life; he'd started seeing it as an extension of himself, like a third limb. An obtrusive growth that sat heavy in his stomach and would until he di–
Well. At least he was right about that.
With the lack of hunger Simon also noticed the temperature for the first time. The submarine was cool. Not cold, but cool like the spaceships always were. There was no condensation, no heat bearing down on him from all sides. Nothing. It was almost… comfortable. Horribly, horribly comfortable.
It was at that time that Simon realized he was dead and started crying. He raged and screamed and sobbed, banging his head off of the floor and the walls, trying to shock himself back awake to no success. Even the pain felt dull, like it was far away and hidden behind a wall of nothing.
He had reached for his knives to make sure pain was real and found them missing again for the first time. Just empty sheaths that offered him no comfort.
He sobbed and sobbed and sobbed in that submarine, crying for his mother like a child. If he had to die, why couldn't he have gone to where she was? Why wasn't she here to hold him, to welcome him to death with soft words and loving lullabies? Why was he trapped in here alone?
But he already knew the answer to that.
Eventually he sobbed himself back into sanity, and forced himself back up to start looking around some more. The radio never once blinked, never made a sound even when he hit it, but the wire was still connected to the wall.
He'd gone back to the computer terminal, unscrewed the panel and pulled out the seed pendent. There was no note this time telling him to cross the wires– the first inconsistency from the way things had began.
For some reason the missing note had given him a glimmer of hope. If this was a hallucination, then it made sense that there would be inconsistencies– and if this was a hallucination then it meant he could still be alive. Maybe dreaming, maybe this whole thing had been a dream, maybe he would wake up back on Mars with his mother and his friends and he could walk into the garden and put his hands in the soil and–
He found the note the second time he looked.
The terminal was inconsistent too. When he crossed the wires and started it up he had access to everything. All the files and the pictures and the information. Nothing from the SM-8 the first time he scrolled through, but like the note it came back to him eventually.
He found things that had never been there too. Voice recordings of the Father's sermons. Pictures from his past, Mars and the tree and prison. Voice recordings of his Brothers. Of himself, too.
He kept coming back to the terminal, hoping to find one with his mom's voice eventually.
He went down into the crawl space a few times. It smelled like smoke and iron, but not blood. Sometimes the black box was there, sometimes it wasn't. He tried to restart the subs power, but it stayed on even when he turned it off.
The engine was running. He could hear it somewhere in the metal beast, but it too seemed inconsistent. The lights were on and bright, but the camera didn't work. He hit the button over and over but there was no sound and the screen didn't light– the button itself was no longer glowing green either, just like the O2 and depth meter.
He tried the controls. He could hear them whirr when he moved the levers and twisted the direction, but there was no movement in the sub itself. It didn't sound like they were moving through anything. It didn't sound like there was anything outside at all.
No bumps and groans, no sensors lighting up, no sounds of blood swirling outside. Just the sound of the lights and the engine running in tune and his own breath.
It had all lead him to where he was now. Sitting in the –unbroken– chair at the control panel, staring blankly at the porthole window.
He had hesitated to turn it when he first thought about it. If there was blood outside and the hull cracked, then he'd be eaten by the blood again. If there was nothing outside and the hull cracked, he'd be eaten by the nothing too.
But what was the point of delaying it? He was already dead, he had proof, so with one final and verbose "FUCK" he turned the control.
The metal moved slowly, creaking, and revealed itself.
Stars.
Outside the window were stars, like the ones he'd seen as a kid, like the ones in the pictures. Bright and shining and numerous, the space around it painted with hues of blue and purple, red and yellow, every color there could have been stretched across the scene like one final hurrah.
Simon had started laughing. Then crying, then laughing again. He screamed at some point, picked up and threw something, punched the walls then laughed again.
It was a joke, so he laughed. The only time he'd ever get to see the stars again was after the died and was trapped in his own personal hell. It was a good fucking joke.
So Simon watched the stars.
He watched and watched and watched and eventually he wasn't in the submarine anymore. He wasn't certain when it changed but suddenly he was on Eden again, looking up at the dome over the Last Tree, watching the stars go out one by one.
He'd panicked, of course. He ran around screaming, looking for someone, only to find the place empty and as inconsistent as the submarine had been. Some things were the same as he had last seen; the room he shared with his brothers, the training hall, the door the rations were locked behind. But other things were different, like they had been when he was younger. The medicine room was fully stocked and smelled clean, the lights in halls he knew had long gone dark were bright.
He walked. He walked around until he walked himself into prison. He tried to walk out but the doors were locked. People who hadn't been there before started to pour in and attack. He fought back and his knife was there until it wasn't– just like his arm. At some point he started losing the fight– he couldn't recall if it was before or after his arm disappeared, but eventually he hit the floor hard. He screamed and scrambled to his feet, forcing his broken body back up, and when he stood he was in the submarine.
He started seeing more people after that.
He'd walk out of the submarine and into the C.O.I. ship orbiting AT-5. The camera would work there but it would only ever be one picture. The C.O.I. workers would be there, but they wouldn't talk to him or look at him and when he went to grab them he would be back in the sub again with the stars.
Ava spoke to him on the submarine speakers a few times. Never about the mission, or where they were or why. She'd asked him about the stars he saw through the porthole and he'd told her. He'd asked her if she was real and she cried.
He'd found himself on Filament Station once or twice. He'd tried to leave by grabbing one of the people he saw, thinking it would take him back to the sub but it didn't. The body turned to blood and exposed muscle, flesh and bone and tendons and blisters under his hands, on himself, festering and festering. Filament started filling with blood and he ran and ran until he tripped into the blood and came up the other side in the red space, with the God's eye and the blood and the shadow and the tree made of blood–
He'd ended up back on Eden after that. He sat down next to his mom by the roots of the tree and listened to her sing. He didn't touch her because he knew if he did she'd go away. So he laid his head on the floor next to her feet and tried to sleep.
He didn't sleep, but he somehow woke up on the submarine again. He cried. He stayed on the floor and cried even when the sub turned into the prison, and then to the workshop, and even when it changed to Mars he stayed down.
He only got up when the Eel came back, crashing into the sub, biting and throwing him around. She spoke to him a bit, nothing comprehensible. The light and what it saw in Simon, why he got to go and she had to stay, why he didn't want to stay with her. How she was scared, so scared that she'd be stuck down there forever, alone in the hot dark blood.
It was Mars again after that. He actually got up and looked around that time, finding areas he'd long since forgotten. At first he had wondered, confused how his purgatory was showing him places he had never seen before, but the memories came back to him slowly.
The first bed he had slept in as a child, the park where his mother taught him what a butterfly was. Places from when he was so young the memories had faded to feelings; feelings of comfort and home he had learned to bury.
Seeing those places made him… happy. The moment he realized he was happy of course, he was back in the sub.
So he was back to watching the stars. The weren't always there, especially on Filament and the AT-5 ship, so he took the time to enjoy them when he could.
So he sat with his arms crossed, leaning back in the leather chair watching the stars pass him by. He'd found that even though it made no noise, the sub could still move through the stars. So he'd set it to spin using the binder under the lever trick. He had at some point kicked his feet up onto the control panel and was all things considered, surprisingly comfortable.
He would have fallen asleep if he could've. He'd tried to sleep after crying himself to exhaustion the second or third time, but he never seemed to get there. He would just close his eyes and eventually open them feeling fine again. A neat trick if he'd had anything to spend energy on.
He felt the weight over his shoulder appear as he stared out the window. Someone was behind him in the ship, and more then likely it was his own corpse again. He decided to ignore it as long as he could. The clouds that lived with the stars were yellow and green right now– he liked them like that.
He only turned when he heard other noises. The shadow of his corpse rarely ever made noise. When it did it was the creaking and twisting of flesh, spurts of blood, the gargles of a drowning man.
What Simon heard this time was shoes.
He shifted to look over his shoulder and was startled to see a whole-ass man under the lights of the sub, looking around confused.
Someone new.
He was tallish and a little thin, with bright blonde hair and glasses barely hanging onto his face. His clothes were… strange. Brightly colored and simple, a t-shirt and soft looking gray pants– that were both full intact. Who the hell still had access to patchless clothing? And who was this guy to have glasses that didn't even look like they had been broken before?
Why was he looking at him with those big blue eyes?
"Uh– Hey. Hi? Can uh– can you m-maybe tell me where we are, or?" The man stuttered through the sentence like he was afraid of it. His hands fluttered, looking for a place to go, first his hips then crossing his arms, then one to the back of his head and the other in his pocket.
The absurdity of his shyness in conjunction to the question made Simon laugh. It was more of a scoff, but it was the first sincere laugh he'd had since he died and it felt good in his chest.
"Where do you think we are?" He asked back, not unkindly. He spun around in the chair to properly face the stranger but stayed sitting with his arms crossed, leaned back so he could watch the man properly.
"Uhm, well–" The man stuttered, looking around. "Well I mean it looks like a submarine from the 1800's if I had to guess. But– it" He gestured behind himself, "it has a computer so that doesn't make any sense, really. Honestly kinda looks like if a scrapyard and a space wreck had a baby, so…" he shrugged with an awkward huff and Simon laughed again, smaller this time.
"Yeah, it's something like that." Simon said quietly. He added nothing else, just letting his eyes roam over the man and wonder why he was seeing this.
The hallucinations usually never acknowledge that none of this was real, and if they did it was to taunt him; force him to once again wage war with his afterlife. But this guy just seemed… confused. Not antagonistic or cruel, just weary of where he'd found himself.
None of the other hallucinations ever acknowledged if where they were was different from usual. What made this guy special?
They started to lapse into silence but the man quickly scrambled to fill it.
"So are we like– this is a dream, right? I don't think I've ever been conscious for a dream before, that's– that's pretty neat." The guy flitted about, his shoes constantly scuffing as he spun around the area to take in more of the space. His eyes bounced off of Simon to the control panel and the porthole behind him and his eyes lit up.
"Oh! We're in space! In a submarine? That's– well, I was gonna say that's not possible, but I guess this is a dream so anything's possible, ya know." He shrugged with a crooked smile and moved forward, closer to Simon and the window. But his eyes bounced back down to Simon, and he stopped with a flinch.
Simon wasn't making a very friendly face anymore.
His face had started falling with that word. Dream. Something about it pissed Simon off immediately, a furious bug of– what? Indignation? Contempt? Whatever it was, something in his chest and on his face scowled at the idea that this guy thought Simon's hell was his own dream.
Absurdly, it felt belittling. This guy had just popped into Simon's afterlife and started acting like he was the real one here. How fucking dare he?
"You're not in a dream." Simon snarled, his posture stiffening. He didn't like when the guy moved forward. Sure, most of the hallucinations disappeared when he tried to grab them, but some of them had touched him before. Dead bodies under his hands, struggling bodies that dissolved into blood and flesh and soil.
Was it a memory or a hallucination of him curling up on the floor as boots stomped him? Had that happened here or elsewhere? The lines had started to blur a while ago. But real or not, any approach gave him reason enough to be weary.
"This– isn't a dream?" The man repeated, disbelief and a small amount of fear coating his voice. He took a step back.
"This is the afterlife." Simon stated blankly, still scowling. He pointed aggressively to himself, "I'm dead." Then to the man, "You're a hallucination."
The man blinked a few times, his hands twitched and flitted again, and then he fucking laughed. It was more of a scoff of disbelief but Simon's stomach still twisted, a short flicker of humiliation at being laughed at, followed quickly by that all-to-familiar anger of being laughed at.
"That– I don't think so," The guy laughed again, "I was literally awake a couple minutes ago, there's no way I'm dead–"
Simon stood up, and the guy flinched back. Just like everyone else used to when Simon walked into a room. It didn't feel good, but it was familiar. Consistent. Simon tried to shove it down. Being angry wasn't going to help him– help him do what exactly?
"You're not dead," Simon tried to explain, his voice coming out angrier then he meant it, "I'm dead, you're my hallucination."
He wasn't sure why he was so desperate to clarify this. Why did it matter if a hallucination thought it was still real? It didn't. It didn't matter and yet it still made his skin crawl that this guy thought Simon wasn't the real one here.
"I'm not dead, this is a dream!" The guy reiterated back. He sounded equal parts frustrated and desperate, throwing his hands in the air. "I can prove this is a dream when I wake up! Right now!"
The man crossed his arms, stomping one foot like a child throwing a tantrum. He closed his eyes and strained like he was constipated.
Simon watched on in… he didn't even know anymore.
The guy cracked one eye open after a moment, looking around like he was surprised his genius plan hadn't worked.
"Huh. Thought that would work."
Simon was laughing before he even knew it. A deep bubbling guffaw that sprung up from somewhere so deep inside him it had his eyes tearing up. The guy had the wherewithal to look embarrassed but pressed on.
"That doesn't mean this isn't a dream!" He shouted indigently, his face flushing red. He reached his hands up started pinching himself, smacking himself lightly on the face. Simon was laughing himself breathless, forced to sit himself back down in the chair so he could hold his aching sides.
"Hahahaheheheheh…. HAHAHAHAAAA" Simon's laughter continued. It would fade as he struggled to breathe before bubbling up again at the image of the man slapping himself in an attempt to 'wake up'. Something about the guy was just… silly.
Simon didn't care if this was a hallucination anymore, this was awesome. The way his laughter filled up his whole body, making his head and stomach tingle. He could feel it in his fingers and toes, like a neurotoxin that kept making him giggle. He loved it. He didn't know if he had ever felt like this while alive.
This guy could stick around forever as long as he kept making him laugh.
He rubbed the tears out of his eyes, struggling to get his breathe back. The guy had been talking the whole time still, but Simon couldn't hear it over his own giggling.
The blonde was moving, walking around parts of the ship and touching things as if he'd eventually find the 'wake up' button.
"Stupid dream boat… stupid submarine… laughing at me…" The guy mumbled irritably walking around in the back of the sub. He hit some buttons on the terminal, then turned and smacked the camera button dismissively.
The camera whirred and flashed. Simon's laughing stopped like a faucet.
When had the green light returned?
He stood abruptly and rushed over to the wall, ignoring the way the man full-body flinched as he came closer. The picture was already fading by the time he reached the back, and he couldn't make it out.
Simon smacked the button, frantic.
No sound.
He spun around back to the man who had folded himself into the corner by the terminal, ducking as far away as he possibly could. Simons face must have looked as accusatory as he felt, because he folded in on himself even more-so.
"What did you see?" Simon snapped. The man shook his head, shrugging with his whole body.
"I– I don't know? I wasn't– didn't actually loo–"
"Hit it again."
"What?"
"Hit. It. Again." Simon commanded in a hiss, pointing towards the screen. He stepped aside, giving the man room to unfold. He had shrunk himself into the corner so much he was practically squatting. He straightened minutely and reached over slowly, just barely tapping the button like it was hot metal.
No sound.
"You have to hit it harder," Simon snarled. Was this guy stupid?
The man smacked it properly, in a mild panic.
The camera whirred and flashed.
The image was… different. The X-ray images had been black and white, dark and so grainy the images often felt useless. This one was in color. It looked less like a picture and more like Simon was looking through a window. He could almost feel the breeze.
Outside the window, a house sat atop a rocky outcropping, oddly shaped but certainly a house– a door and windows, like he knew they were supposed to have. In the foreground the trail leading from the house sloped down to a sandy beach, meeting the water that lapped at it's shore– amongst the rocks and sand, patches of tall brown grass stood out swaying in an unseen wind. The picture was moving, the waves and water alike swishing and crashing and glowing with every unfathomable sign of life.
Simon's jaw was slack, so in awe of the sight that he didn't even flinch when the man shouted behind him.
"Ha! See! I told you this was a dream! That's where I'm sleeping right now!" He shouted, his voice triumphant and far far away.
Simon stared blankly. When the image began to fade he pulled in a shuddering breath he wasn't aware he was holding, blinking hard to push the sting of tears from his eyes.
"Hit it again," He said, his voice much rawer than he had wanted it to be. He didn't turn around, couldn't take his eyes off the screen because if he did there was no guarantee the screen would stay put.
"Huh?" The voice was soft with confusion.
"Hit it again," Simon whispered, "Please,"
After a moment of pause the button was pressed and the camera whirred back to life. A flash, but the image was still the same; like it had come straight from a history book back when Eden taught their children more than slaughter. A home, on a planet that might as well have been alien to him.
Simon tried to crawl back into his memories, searching for where he had ever seen this but there was nothing. The images of the oceans were never so clear; always shitty quality on shitty paper with faded shitty ink.
Simon raised a hand and pressed it to the glass of the screen, the grass and the waves waving back at him.
The image faded as Simon sank into a squat, one hand still pressed against the glass as he dragged it down with him, steadying himself.
"Please," He requested again, and the man didn't take as long this time. The camera flashed again and Simon bit his lip with the effort to keep himself from crying.
He didn't even have the energy to care what it meant, to care about the possibility that he was just a part of someone else's dream. All he knew was that there was something beautiful in front of him and he wanted it.
Why couldn't that have been his? Why couldn't he had lived someplace with life, with water and wind and grass instead of in a decaying spaceship, with decaying people and an already dead tree.
His own words came back to him– that maybe it wasn't earth and the stars that disappeared but them, the ships and the stations. Was it possible that a place like this still existed, outside of his hell?
Was that place heaven? Was his mom there? He prayed she was. She would have been so happy, she would have loved the sand–
He took in another deep and shuddering breath, his hand curling into a fist on the glass with the effort. He was holding back his tears more on instinct than anything else at this point. Crying to himself in a submarine in hell was one thing. His body wouldn't let him cry in front of someone else.
Someone else.
The image had faded from the screen once more and in the reflection of the black glass Simon could see the man standing behind him, looking down at him with blatant concern.
"Uhm– are you okay?" He spoke softly, reaching down for Simon's shoulder.
Simon moved fast, ducking out of his reach and leaving the sanctuary of what the camera showed him behind. He took big steps back and away from the man, into the main section of the submarine. The man flinched again at the sudden movement, his face still equal parts concern and confusion.
Simon couldn't let them touch. If they did, the new man would disappear, just like everyone else eventually did. Just like the stars.
"Who are you?" Simon demanded, the barrage of questions making their way to his mind now that the screen had gone dark. "You said you lived there, where is that place? Where are you from?"
The man flexed and unflexed his hands, clearly caught off guard. His eyes and hands flitted about again, either reluctant or hesitant to reply. For a moment Simon wondered if he was trying to come up with a lie.
"My um– my name's Grace. That–" He jerked one thumb back towards the camera, "that was Erid. It's a planet in the 40 Eridani section. And… you?"
So he is going to lie. Simon thought, he gut reaction of disbelief deciding for him.
…But he might not be. He thought it like a whisper, remembering the stars outside the window. If this was the afterlife where the stars ended up, maybe this man was from a dead planet too. Maybe when the planets disappeared it happened so suddenly the people who lived on them never knew what had happened. Maybe they still thought they were alive.
But that still didn't explain what he was doing in Simon's afterlife.
"Why are you here?" Simon asked in lieu of an answer. The man– Grace– shrugged immediately.
"I don't know!" He said, throwing his hands up slightly. "Why does anyone dream of anything?"
Right. Even if he was dead, he still thought this was a dream. Simon battled the feeling in his chest fighting between telling Grace the truth or letting him believe things were fine still. What would be the point of either option? It cost Simon nothing to let this man keep dreaming, and if he tried to convince him otherwise, he might end up having a breakdown like Simon had. But was that the right thing to do? To let someone keep pretending to be alive when the truth was otherwise? Simon wasn't sure.
His mind spiraled, and he didn't even remember looking away before Grace was waving a hand to grab his attention again.
"Uh- you alright over there? You didn't tell me your name. Did you want me to name you? I kind of have a history of doing that–"
"Simon." The Butcher, the Convict, the last son of Eden snapped. He already had too many names when he was alive. If he was going to meet new people in the afterlife, he'd rather they know him by the one his mom gave him. "My name is Simon."
Grace smiled, nervous but sincere. "Nice to meet you, Simon!"
Simon made no response, his head still swimming. He needed to think, he needed some silence, but the blonde seemed incapable of allowing that.
"So!" Grace started again, rocking back and forth on his heels, continuing to look around now that introductions had calmed the situation, "Space submarines! That's pretty cool honestly– do you live here? Seems kinda small, unless there's like a door or something that I'm not seeing. Then again I guess you don't really need a proper living space like on the Hail Mary– man this place makes no sense. Ya know, I don't think I've ever had to introduce myself in a dream before. How is that the part that seems weirdest about all this–?"
Wow, this guy talks a lot. Simon thought, rubbing his face. He took steps backwards before eventually settling back in the chair with a plop, his whole body feeling drained. He needed to back track, to learn more before he started making any assumptions– as far as he was concerned this could still all be a hallucination.
But the hallucinations hadn't ever showed him anything he didn't already know, at least not after he had died. He'd seen plenty of new and terrible things in–
In the blood ocean. The Eye. The Light. Was this it's doing? Giving him someone to talk to like it had in the sub, guiding him into a false hope of being saved. But Simon already knew he was dead this time; there was no being saved from this. So why?
Simon peered through his fingers back towards the man, and jumped like a shot. He had gotten much closer, moving forward and crouching down so he could look up at Simon's face from where he sat. He stared at Simon with big, curious blue eyes and a genuinely interested look on his face that made Simon feel… weird. Not cornered like peoples gazes usually made him feel, more like the way Simon looked at the mold that grew on the space stations. Just fascinated.
"Hey," Grace said with a soft smile, seeming pleased to have Simon's attention back on him. "Mind if I ask you some more questions? Even if this is a dream, it's been a while since I talked to anyone– well, any human. I'd kinda like to enjoy it, even if this place looks like tetanus personified."
Simon paused. He thought about what was right, if he was real, and if anything would ever matter any more.
Fuck it.
"It doesn't always look like this." He answered eventually. He leaned farther back in his chair, trying to force himself to relax. The words 'I'd kinda like to enjoy it' swam in his mind. This was all fake one way or another. Might as well try to enjoy having someone to talk to.
"The scenery changes," He continued when Grace's eyes lit up slightly. "Sometimes its the ship, sometimes it's Eden, or Mars. No rhyme or reason to it, though. Just changes."
"Mars? Like, the planet Mars?" Grace enthused. "That's so cool! What's Eden? Is that where you're from?"
With hesitance, Simon nodded. "Yeah, it's the space station I grew up on. But I was born on Mars, with my mom."
"Born on Mars?" Grace repeated, astonished. He rolled back from his crouch on to his ass, sitting with his legs splayed slightly like a child. "How do you get born on Mars? And you said space station too– are you like, from the future where we colonize mars or something?"
Simon frowned slightly. "I mean, it's not the future for me. That was done back in… uh…" Simon scratched his scruff, trying to recall the few and far between history lessons. "EIC was… 1989, I think? Somewhere around then…"
Grace scoffed again, and Simon bristled, the sound just as offensive as it had been the first time. "Wow. 1989? That's insane. I wonder how I came up with that…" He mused, leaning back on his hands and staring past Simon towards the porthole. "If your world is supposed to be so advanced, why does this place look like… this?" he waved one hand.
Simon's shoulders dropped slightly, memories coming back again. "It was a lot nicer before the Quiet Rapture. We had food and trees– there were whole ecosystems they managed to build in the Mars biodomes–"
"Woah, wait, pause, back up– Rapture? Like, the Rapture from the Bible?" Grace stressed leaning back towards Simon, a look of pure astonishment on his face. "Wha–when? Why? Did you meet Jesus?"
"If I had meet Jesus I wouldn't still be here." Simon snipped back. "We were the ones left behind. Something took all the stars and planets and left the space stations behind. That's why everything looks like this." He did the same gesture Grace had.
"We had no resources. Started starving and running out of food, had to start dismantling and rebuilding with space scraps just to survive." Simon shook his head. "It's not like any of it was in that good of a condition before though, Mars and Earth had been arguing over resources for years even before then."
"…all the planets and stars?" Grace repeated quietly, his head lowering to stare at Simon's feet. "Did… Was it the astrophage…?"
Simon's face twisted. "The what?"
"The astrophage was eating our sun too," Grace spoke, the softest his voice had been thus far. "It was bringing the temperature down so quickly, we would have lost half the population in 30 years."
Simon paused, chewing on the information. He barely made it past thirty himself, and he'd known he was a walking dead man since he was a teenager. Would he have rather taken 30 guaranteed years of slowly dying, or the constant fear of everyday he'd lived through? If it had been slow, could he have spent more of that time with his mom?
"Thirty years is a long time. Better than it all going away at once." Simon decided with a shrug. He could feel the stars in the porthole looking at the back of his head in judgment.
Grace too kept quite, his gaze hard on Simon's boots.
"Would you have taken 30 years of knowing everyone was going to die, or 3 hours with the chance you could stop it?"
Simon's nose scrunched. "Stop it? How would I have stopped the fuckin' Rapture?"
"Hypothetically!"
Simon sighed and readjusted in his seat, bouncing a leg in thought. He like many others had dreamed that one day, just maybe, the rapture would reverse and things would come back. But never once had he thought about preventing it before hand. It had just been such an instant thing– an act of God, Father whispered in his ear. There was nothing anyone, anywhere could have done.
If it cost him his life at 11 years old to save everyone on those space stations, would he have done it? It didn't take him long to think about it.
"No." He said resolutely, staring at the ceiling of the sub and shaking his head. "If I could've had thirty more years with my mom– then fuck'em."
He glanced down, and Grace was still staring at his boots. His eyes looked a little redder.
"What–," Grace's voice cracked, "What if you didn't have your mom? Or your brother, or anyone?"
Oh. So that's what this is about. Simon thought, as the question clicked the puzzle pieces into place. It was the Light, taunting him with Filament Station again. His brothers, Simon's unwillingness to do what needed to be done to stop the bomb.
If he had just been quicker, if he hadn't let the love of his brothers slow his hand– if he had seen the betrayal coming– he could have saved them. Everyone.
The cold iron of guilt burned in his gut again, shredding him from front to back. But underneath it burned that ever-familiar rage toward the Light and what it took from him.
First it taunted him with images of earth, of a beautiful beach he'd never seen and would never experience, then had the cruel guts to ask what he would have done for it. Who he would add to the list of people he's killed just for something that didn't exist.
Fighting for a future when the stars were already ghost-light.
Simon stood abruptly, too fast for Grace– the thing pretending to be named Grace. Simon planted his boot squarely in the mans chest, slamming him to the floor of the submarine with little resistance.
The thing gasped and cried out when it's head hit the floor. Hands flew up to grab at Simon's boots and ankle, struggling against the weight on it's sternum. His– It's– eyes flicked up to Simon with a look of horror, the slam having knocked loose the tears it was trying to keep in. How could something already dead so clearly look at him with fear for it's life?
"Why–?" It choked, But Simon caught it off with more pressure.
"I'm not playing your fucking games." He snarled, "You wanna know what I woulda done? I would've killed whoever I fucking needed to to live, just like I have my whole fucking life."
Simon pressed down harder, leaning his whole body weight down so he could get his face closer to the ma– the thing. It gasped and writhed under his boot, nails sinking into the leather as it struggled. It was saying something, pleading for it's life, but Simon had heard that so many times now it fell on deaf ears.
"I lived just so I could live and look where it fucking got me!" Simon raised his foot to bring it down, and between one second and the next he was looking at his own corpse again.
The rotting black skin broke like twigs under his heel, his foot going straight through it's chest to the floor of the submarine. Tar-like blood squirted from the cavity in its chest and splattered up into Simon's face with the force of it. The blood burned and split his face but he was blind too it, bringing his foot out of the chest cavity so he could bring it down on the corpse face over and over again.
He grunted and screamed as he stomped stomped stomped the twice broken jaw of his own rotting corpse. Until his thighs strained with the effort and his knees ached, he kept going. Screaming until there was nothing left of the head but a leaking mass of bone shards and smashed flesh.
As the adrenaline slowly faded Simon heaved and gasped, trying to get air back into his tight and drowning lungs. He stumbled backwards, landing hard back into the broken and uncomfortable chair of the SM-13. He dropped his head almost between his knees, tugging at his hair with his remaining arm and gasping, furiously trying to blink away the tears of blood.
"I lived just so I could live and look where it fucking got me!" His own words rang back at him, painful with the truth. He'd lived, he'd fought so hard to live his whole life, just like his mom told him too, and where did it get him?
Hell.