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Simon rages.
Rages against the COI, the damning circumstances on Filament Station that had cast him into this godforsaken blood ocean, and against the half built sub that will be his tomb.
Rages against those that had given up hope; tying off the black box securely to the life vest (what a laughable thing to put in a submarine)- because fuck them, maybe it would give someone else hope.
Rages at the whole universe. At God; who had carelessly created him and every other human only to snuff them out slowly and terribly, like rats in a sticky trap, biting and killing and eating each other in a vain attempt at survival. He lets howls come out of the deepest part of himself, every fiber of his being fighting to stay alive, every bit of survival that had passed down from his ancestors pushing through him in a hopeless battle against the red tide engulfing him.
The submarine creaks.
Simon rages against the monster that has been tormenting him, chasing him down with razor teeth and false promises. He is spitting and yelling at it, the words lost to even him as he thrashes in what will be his death throes, the blood invading his ears, his eyes, his nose, his lungs. If Simon still had his nose above the tide then the stench of it alone would burn him. Instead the impossible heat of it does, rushing down his nasal passages, around his clenched teeth, into his mouth, raping its way into his body.
The thick and nauseating iron sensation of it will be the last taste he will have on his tongue.
The awful, dark red of what was supposed to be the ichor of life, warped into an unknowable something else, will be the last thing he sees.
Still he fights as the unfathomable clenches around him like a fist, eyes blind and body coated from this unconsensual baptism of blood. His mind flashes with memories of all the faces he has ever known. His enemies, his strangers, his Brothers, his jailers, his Father, his cellmates, his neighbors, his victims, his mom. He finds that in his last moments, he wishes that they could all live, free from the sticky trap of their uncaring world, their cruel God. Wishes that the most for himself.
Then Simon is no more.
A trilling. Multitudes of sounds, overlapping, urgent.
Heat. Pain. Everywhere pain. Searing, inside, outside.
Sounds sharpening, raising, louder.
Pressure, jostling. Bumping, moving.
Relief. Cool.
Nothing.
Light.
Air pushes out. Expansion, cool comes in.
Air pushes out, warm against skin. Muscles expand, cool comes in.
A breath pushes out, warm over his lips. His chest and lungs expand, cool air being sucked in.
Awareness blossoms.
It was so damn bright.
His eyelids are closed, heavy and sealed like they have been shut for a long time. But it is still so damn bright.
His chest raises and falls. And then stutters. He, Simon, should not be able to breathe. He feels his body, his mouth, crack open without his input and wail.
It's a sound between an inhale and an exhale, an animal thing, long and from the depths of his being. Like the cry of a newborn, but horribly twisted.
Simon's spine curves upwards with the crescendo of the sound being exorcised from him. His fingers contract, and his limbs shake like they are going to break off of him. They scrape and jump and bite into the material encasing him, underneath of him. Very, very distantly, his mind registers that he should feel the material under both hands. He only feels it with one.
Strange discordant musical tones and skittering sounds reach his ears through the thundering, rasping, wailing of the flesh cage of his existence. The sounds are very close. They grow sharper, closer.
Simon grapples control over his loud, flailing body and flings himself away from the music, gasping for breath between twisted cries. His knees and palm slap against a cold, smooth surface, but he fails to fully catch himself because -
His other arm is not there.
Memories of it shredding off his body like wet paper flash behind his closed lids, piercing his brain. The wash of red twisted metal and flesh refuse to stop playing on repeat. Maybe he is still there? He has to open his eyes, has to see where he is. He howls and paws at them, fingers numb and stupid against his eye sockets. The iron curtain of his eyelids finally relent at the pressure and he is pierced by sight. Tears immediately flow from his assaulted eyes and he doubles over, stomach sloshing, keening out more animal noises. Everything is just a wash of colors with no defined edges and it is too damn bright.
The rising and dipping music and skittering keeps getting closer and more music is joining from further away and-
" -but that can't be right that- "
Ice rips through his veins. The memories of every human face that he has ever known rise like a wave in his brain. Their ghostly hands push him down, hit him, hug him, hurt him. They shout and cry and whisper. He is terrified of adding another to their number.
The ice pins Simon down and his body won't stop shuddering but he manages to whip his head around, causing a wave of nausea to spike in his gut. He pants as blurry shapes swim in his vision. A fuzzy rectangular shape to his side that he fell off of, something strange and moving behind the structure, the music seemingly coming from it. He lurches to his feet and forces his body to move, move goddamit, away from the thing. The voice of ghosts is getting closer.
He squints his eyes and scans in desperation, dragging feet that won't quite obey him so he is constantly a moving target, harder to hit. Large swaths of white taunt him, boxing him in at all sides. His throat hurts from the force and rapidness of his breath and his wailing. A gray, vaguely human sized rectangle seems to materialize on one of the walls. He flings himself towards it, though he feels like he is wading through the thick blood again. It chokes him, he can smell it, God he never escaped did he, and he barely registers his own hand on the cool surface of the grey shape, the catch of the handle- until the shape slides forward and away from him.
The light is somehow even more blinding.
"Oh my god - you shouldn't-"
Simon bolts, tripping over the edge of the blurry gray shape into the void of light. The ghost is right behind him, trills of music accompanying the human noises that Simon knows but cannot bear to process. He forces his limbs to move, move, move though they still feel like they are impossibly weighed down. His head is screaming in pain, like pins were being pressed into it, like he is his mother's little round pincushion, the vibrant pink fabric faded and worn.
The pins press further in. He is used to his body being a well oiled machine, following his demands dutifully. But right now it feels like he is a collection of severed live wires, sparking and flailing uselessly. He lungs are failing him, his legs are cramping, and he can't fucking see because it is brighter than he has ever experienced in his whole goddamn life, with the barely remembered exception of his toddler years on Mars. The ground drops out from beneath him and he falls, and mercifully it takes him away from the human voice and it's accompaniment faster.
What is not merciful is the pain that comes with the fall, his body bouncing off of surfaces that are mere smudges of color to his eyes, words finally coming back to him as he curses. After what seems like forever and also a no time at all he is rolling to a stop on rough, oddly textured ground. It shifts underneath his body and palm as he groans and peels himself off of it, little bits of it coming away with him. Sounds from where he must have fallen from waft down to him.
"-don't move, we're-"
Simon is up and running before he can hear the rest. Every part of his body hurts, with his pincushion brain and his eyes that are actively being stabbed by the unbearable light. But he keeps going. He does not know what faction the voice belongs to but he does not care to find out. He's not going to be a prisoner or a butcher again. Never again.
He trips and stumbles, curses, and tries to focus in on his hearing, the one sense he has that is not shot to Hell. His labored breathing is so loud, and his feet are crunching across the weird uneven ground that seems determined to slow him down. He listens for the sounds of machinery as he runs, for the familiar hiss of pipes, the hollow clanks and incessant buzz that have been his metronome for almost all of his existence.
They are not there.
There is the softest of hums above his head and all around him. And a sound stretching in front of him, slow, calm, and rhythmic. A rush, and then a noise like a hush, only it is too loud. It is nothing that he has ever heard before.
A crazed laugh bubbles up from his chest and slips over his lips, causing his stomach to lurch further in his diaphragm. This is impossible. He has to be dead - he just never expected Hell to be so searingly bright. It's definitely not Heaven. He isn't stupid, he knows he does not deserve such mercies. The ground beneath his feet seems to solidify for a few steps of his shaky run then-
His legs catch on wetness and he is falling again.
His hands- hand fails to catch him. And he is baptized again without his consent.
Liquid captures his body, pressing into his front and face. Simon cannot help his body's instinctual gasp, the liquid crashing into his nose and mouth and ah yes, he must still be in that red Hell-
Then the taste registers. He has ripped his face out of its hold but it's memory is still on his tongue. He sputters. It is…salty. Clean. Not thick and suffocating.
It is nothing like blood.
"What the fuck?" He hears himself slur.
It is also cold. It drips off of him as his body shudders uncontrollably as the last dredges of his adrenaline begin to slip away. It is moving around him, gently pushing against him then retreating away, swaying his body. The movement sparks a long buried memory is his otherwise shocked-still brain.
His mother gently rocking him. He is pressed to her chest, can feel her heartbeat in his cheek. She presses a kiss into his little head, right into the part of his dark curly hair. "It will be alright, you are my little star, forever. I don't need any others." she whispers softly to him.
Simon is a stone, frozen solid at the warm, barely remembered vision. The liquid mimics the one he loves, caressing him cooly. It rocks his kneeling form calmly, resolutely, steady as the seams of his being are further unpicked and Simon unspools. A thread of himself comes off as a tear and joins the aqueous mother rocking him, slow and steady, echoing his recovered memory. More threads come loose and he sits back and lets them be washed away, embraced and erased.
His vision, already blurred, does not become any worse with his tears.
He cups his hand and picks up a portion of his amorphous comforter. Squints his wet eyes at it, as parts of it run off his palm and between his fingers to join the whole. In the haze of his vision everything is one united blur. The liquid sparkles and dances against the color of his palm, making his skin like crystal. Simon, trembling, brings it to his lips, making the choice to allow it into his mouth and body. He swallows.
"It's fucking water."
Hearing himself say it out loud grounds him, pulling his mind back from a precipice he didn't fully register it was teetering on. Its salty taste is a luxury he has not partaken in many, many years. There is enough salt mixed into rations to sustain human life, but it is there solely for that purpose alone and not for taste. He licks his lips and teeth chasing the last whispers of it. His mind feels slow and numb. "It's water." he whispers again to himself.
He scoops more of it up, slowly sipping it out of his palm as he marvels at the alien taste. Beyond the tang of the salt the water is the cleanest he's ever tasted and remembered- every drop he had in the stations tasted like the pipes it had run through and was stale with the never ending recycling it underwent. All rust and mildew, tinged an orange-ish or yellow. He narrows his eyes into the distance, beholding the color of this miracle. Everything is blue- a light vibrant blue bleeding into a slightly darker one. Shards of the light blue seem to flit and dance on top of the darker one. His head pounds, straining to make sense of all the non-representational shapes.
He dips his hand back into its wet current and tries not to cry any harder as it weaves softly between his fingers. Where had all this water been? If he- no, if everyone had access to just this water then there would have been so much less bloodshed. They could have lived a different life, he could have lived a different life. Maybe there would not have been a knife pressed into his small hand. Maybe the destruction of Filament Station would have never happened. Maybe he would not have been sentenced to his horrible, claustrophobic death in that terrible submarine. Maybe, maybe, maybe-
He is suddenly very, very tired.
So Simon sits and lets himself be rocked gently by the waves while drinking it all in, through his exhausted eyes and his raw throat. His pain has returned full force now that his wall of adrenaline has fully come crashing down. He remains seated with the water curling and unfurling around his waist, tugging at his torn bloody shirt until the ghost and it's strange, trilling accompaniment draw close enough for him to hear.
He lets himself be found.
As they draw near to him their blobs of color slid into shapes more recognizable to him (a man, not a ghost. And a…pile of moving rock? It's been forever since he's seen a rock. Such things are much sought-after relics of their lost planets). The shape of the man walks with a soft, confident ease that is wholly unfamiliar to Simon.
The man stops a couple paces from him and shifts, seeming to prepare himself to speak.
Simon is suddenly reminded of his last thoughts before his death. The memories of all the faces he has ever known. His enemies, his strangers, his Brothers, his jailers, his Father, his cellmates, his neighbors, his victims, his mom…and now this new man. He remembers his greatest and last wish.
He wants to live.
He wants this stranger to live too.
So Simon rejects everything that has ever been trained into him by a cruel universe, a cruel God. He stills his urge to rage and hurt before another can hurt him. He waits for his fellow man and listens.
And wrapped in the cool, rocking embrace of a miracle, he hopes.
