Chapter Text
Hazy light filters in through the bedroom window while Simon’s been awake for hours already. Greasy hair falls around the pillowcase he’s been forgetting to wash for months. Every ten minutes he shifts into an equally uncomfortable position trying to force his body back to sleep. He’s not ready to be conscious yet. Despite what he wants, his joints hurt from increasingly worse sleeping positions that last few days and it’s impossible to sleep again. The gravity can’t be helping.
He grumbles and pushes himself up. Messy hair falls over his slumped face and each step of removing himself from bed seems to take at least three minutes longer than they should. He finds himself hovering at his closet, yanking the same baggy shirt again off the rack, sweatpants he has lying around, figuring he’d do laundry today to make up for it. Various items of clothings lay on surfaces in the room.
Simon rubs a hand over his face, locking eyes with his reflection in the bathroom mirror. He allows himself to zone out for a good five minutes.
He gets on with brushing his teeth, washing his face, the works. Arm heavier than usual. One of those days, he dismisses. It will pass. His head jerks to the side at the sound of knocking on xenonite. He’s still so jumpy, even now.
“Hold on Grace, I’m coming.” His morning voice still making it come out rougher than usual. He moves through the dark house, blinds closed with light vainly trying to force its way through the cracks. The room floods with sunlight when the door opens, greeted with a second, smaller sun.
“Good morning Simon! Am I interrupting? I can go back if you need.”
The light from the biome shines off of Grace’s golden carapace. The eridian shuffles on his legs, making soft clacking sounds against the stone of the front porch. Simon sighs.
“It’s okay, you can come in.” He steps back to let Grace through, eyes sweeping the living room and kitchen, feeling a pang of shame.
He’d specifically requested for there to be as little obstruction to the layout as possible when they were drafting the plans. Still near-death from starvation and at the will of his learned instincts, he didn’t hesitate to make sure he would see anything and everyone coming from all angles of the house. What he was afraid of, he had no clue. Some amorphous being he felt the need to protect against.
“Why did Simon leave blinds closed?” Grace whistles. Simon lays a hand on his neck. Grace has always been so damn observant.
“Ah, I like the dark. Sometimes.” He wanders around to the couch. He doesn’t mind the occasional morning chats, most days. Strands of hair he didn’t bother to tie up fall over his face, hands sweeping them behind his ears.
“I thought it scared you?” Grace tilts his carapace like a confused dog. It’s forever endearing to him. Simon turns away and flops himself onto the couch.
“It’s complicated.” An old therapist once told him he’s the best at repression she’d ever seen. He decided to take that as a compliment.
“Humans are confusing.” Grace patters around the room, settling in front of Simon’s feet.
“Sure as hell are, sunny.” Simon notices Grace’s claws move at that.
“Why Simon sleep in so late? No reason to stay up for too long.”
“Just tired, Grace.” He lays his head down on the arm rest, feet swinging over onto the pillows. Grace chitters.
“If Simon needs to talk, I’m right here.” Simon cringes.
“I’m fine, don’t worry.”
-
Simon had been homeless for about a month following the fallout at the Eden camp.
While the officers had swarmed into the houses, he’d taken the opportunity to run out into the surrounding forest, the shouting drawing people out of their still untouched houses, the eventual violence unfolding providing the perfect opportunity for him to run. He’d nearly lost himself in the woods that night, the yelling growing further away still, heavy breaths echoing in his ears. Rough bark scraped at his hand, the grain comforting. His head rang.
Old dirt and bugs welcomed him on the ground, trembling in the late spring heat. He’d been in the gardens, hands rummaging through green-brown leaves, the wheels crunching on gravel distant. Every adult preoccupied with their own duties and chores, he’d been left alone, trusted to return after sundown. He’d see the sun set through holes in the tree cover that night. It watched him back.
-
Water rippled around him as he wades deeper into the clear water. The biodome construction team couldn’t replicate mud or dirt, so he settled for coarse gravel instead. Still, he grips the sand for purchase as he settles down into the almost pool-like pond. It doesn’t ever feel right. Ponds are meant to house life, be teeming with it, and there’s nothing here but sand, rocks and water. He likes feeling the water move around him, like one big wave, an organism encompassing him. It felt heavy on him and yet so still. The sand crunches under his head to anchor him and he floats.
Grace is on the far side of the pond, tapping out a rhythm. Simon knows he worries. Anyone who’d seen their only company for over forty years slowly starve to death over the course of three and a half years would come out the other side with some trust issues and codependency. Simon gives up his relaxation and swims his way over to him, muscles flexing in a freestyle. He lays his head on his hands.
“What’re you doing today, Grace?”
“Mmm… Have to check with construction team and maintenance workers, then must go to lab. Much work to do.” He raises his arms up, shuffling his carapace lower like a cat. The artificial sun may be duller under the fake trees, but his carapace still shines like gold. "You?" He trills.
"Garden, watch a movie, you know. Nothing's changed." He runs a hand through his hair and gazes out through the rough facsimile of a forest the eridians tried desperately to recreate. His favorite biome. He couldn't blame them, they'd never even heard of a tree before. Despite all that, forests run on life, the pure abundance of it. All the same as a pond, a lake, a field. He used to like the way bark would feel on his skin, rustling always in the low plants. He would know he wasn't alone. He'd never be alone among such life. Simon dips under the water and pulls back up, shaking his head out like a dog.
Grace lets out a confused chitter. "Why Simon drown self?!"
Simon huffs. "Not drowning, just waking myself up." He gives him a joking smirk. "Why don't you go get your chores done and stop bugging your soggy alien friend." Grace answers him with an annoyed tap of his claws. He relents and promises to come back by the end of the artificial day.
Simon wades his way back to the shallower end, sand clinging to every part of his wet body. Can’t escape it, even in space. He lets out a huff. Grabbing a towel from the nearest xenonite branch, he loosely wraps it around his hips, collecting water. There may not be much need for clothes among so many eridians, but he hasn’t gone completely feral yet, he hopes.
Stone cold on his feet, he walks his way along the lakeside further down in the biome, water lapping at the sand yet again, lonely house in the distance.
-
Alarms blare through the Hail Mary, red lights flashing.
“Simon! Simon, something is wrong with the Taumoeba!” Grace impatiently punches the xenonite barrier between him and Simon’s bed. Simon, disturbed awake, growls and rubs his face.
“Did it leak again?”
“Yes! Very bad. Bad bad bad. Simon need to shut off engines now!” He scrambles his way into his side of the airlock and into his ball. God, this can’t be happening again. He’d put full faith in Grace to breed the Taumoeba, they’d been so excited to save their stars. Can’t he have what he wants?
“Got it.” He follows all of Graces instructions to the T, confused but adamant that if he ever wanted to survive the almost four year trip to Erid, he needed all of the fuel. The Blip A is all the way back in Tau Ceti’s system still, they’d have to add at least an extra month to back track and return with extra fuel.
After shutting life support off, he shuffles into the Orlan suit faster in the zero gravity, opening the emergency valve on the outer airlock door and releases the ship’s oxygen into space, Grace safely in his (hopefully) air-tight xenonite tunnels. After about twenty minutes, he hears Grace’s voice trill into the headset.
“Pressure is good, can close and release nitrogen now.” I nod to him through the walls, opening DuBois’s nitrogen tank yet again. He’d never been more thankful for suicide this much in his life. It’s about saved his ass twice now. He flushes the ship with nitrogen to kill any of the greedy Taumoeba escapees.
After the whole ordeal is over, the life-support system dutifully returning everything back to normal, the ship’s engines still stay off. Simon watches from outside the partition as Grace takes apart the farms and voice-types an unfortunate amount of instructions for Simon to carry out. He really misses DuBois right about now. Everything would’ve gone smoother if the only human scientist survived. Now him and the rock-alien he thankfully discovered have to play telephone with the highly advanced lab equipment only he can use.
Correction: now that the gravity is off, he can’t use any of it. Impatience scratches at his chest. The fuel tanks must be swamped with Taumoeba if Grace’s assumptions are correct, and they always are.
Nothing Grace has said has ever failed him. He tilts his head, cheek against the warm xenonite.
“Grace?”
“Yes?” He distractedly answers.
“Do you think the fuel tanks are okay?”
“Don’t know. Must do tests, need a spacewalk to check. Will Simon do?” Simon nods.
He was the secondary engineer before ilyukhina died, he’s well trained in space walks. He knows how to work with this ship, reason with it. Which is nearly worthless when the actual life or death problem he was sent out to fix requires a scientist-
He shakes his head and floats towards the airlock, grabbing onto conveniently placed handles. Grace taps into the headset through a microphone inside his tunnels.
“Gather samples from each tank. Should be enough. Worry.”
“You don’t have to worry, I’ve done this a million times.”
“Is a lot. Still worry.” Simon smiles. That’s sweet.
-
The air is colder on the cliffs, fans blowing out of sight. Simon wraps a blanket around himself. Patchy, a little itchy, the eridians haven’t quite perfected the texture yet, but he doesn’t mind. It does its job. He stares out at the rhythmic waves for quite a while.