Chapter Text
Turns out those damned religious zealots on Eden, who'd infested dingy corners of the station and raved about the Glory of Heaven were right, because Convict sees a fucking angel when he wakes up.
One second he was swallowing down warm - disgustingly warm - blood, desperately trying not to let it go down the wrong pipe and fill his lungs even more. The next, he opens his eyes, a tube miraculously doing the breathing for him, no pain, clean light up above, and a holy angel looking down on him.
The tube is removed but there’s still no pain, just clean air smelling fresher than anything he’s ever tasted.
The Convict keeps his stupid mouth shut. He’s not that much of a fucking idiot, despite recent events where he acted as smart as a rat dying of heat stroke in a metal box. It’s obviously a mistake that he ended up here - where the light is soft and clean and he’s dry and smells nice and laying down feeling like his limbs are oddly heavy. His skin isn't burning or peeling or itching. Tentatively, he wiggles all ten fingers which, last he checked, he’d only had half of those.
Somehow, some way, he’d tricked his way into Heaven with his one sort-of good deed at the very end of his life. The moment he opens his mouth and says the wrong thing, they’re gonna know how shitty and sinful he is. It was his fucked up brain that got him arrested in the first place: his shitty decision making, his following-the-leader lack of impulse control, his delusion that he could make things better.
He learns slow, but, like a dog kicked hard enough, he does learn. Better to stay silent and still, before he says something that gets him into trouble. It’s not like he was able to argue his way out of the submersible.
(he can’t think about the submersible, the clotted blood and the way the air smelled iron rich like drinking rather than breathing towards the end. He can’t think about how his body felt sick from the inside out, burning with the weight of his sins and radiation eating his soft insides until organs turned into mush he could manipulate with his remaining hand, sticking into his torso to keep the insides where they belong - the remaining skin boiling off his bones)
Anyway.
He doesn't remember how he got here. Maybe no one does because that’s how Heaven works. They don’t want the kind and goodhearted muckety-mucks to feel any suffering. All he knows is that he woke up and saw the Angel. The Convict knows it was an Angel, even though it looked like a person, because no one’s eyes could ever be that kind. The angel was smiling, with perfect laugh lines that looked soft and friendly. It spoke in quiet sing-songy tones, never frowning when Convict didn’t answer.
It says things like, “your eye movement is looking excellent today!” and “it’s so great to see another person again,” and “we’ll get you back on your feet, Buddy,” which make Convict feel as warm and fuzzy as the patchwork quilt tucked around his body.
Even the quilt, raggedy as it is, is another sign he’s in Heaven. Cloth of any kind on Eden was always grubby, always rough hewn and sticky from washing in grey water thirty times past drinkable. Everything was pieced together out of fabrics not meant to be worn. Plastic garbage.
The Convict had been surprised they'd let him keep his clothing when they’d welded him into the submersible. If they knew it was a one-way trip, they should’ve stripped him bare to save resources. Hell, they should’ve just put him in the cycler in the first place. At least then his body would’ve been fed through the processor to fan the guttering spark of humanity left.
Maybe they didn’t so he’d stay delusional about the possibility of forgiveness: dumb as a sheep led to slaughter.
...Was it sheep again? He only knows them from Bible stories - Abraham sacrificing one in place of his son. As an unwanted kid, he once followed around a maintenance worker for a few months for lack of anything better to do. The man had mutton-chops, which were fuzzy, which Convict assumed was sheep-like.
The maintenance worker had gotten tired of him following him around after awhile - he’d asked too many questions, and he’d been left to wander again, slipping in between the widening cracks of Eden’s society. For awhile no one knew his name except him. He’d murmur it in the dark to hear it.
In the end, he died a Convict rather than a person.
The Angel frowns slightly at something that is beeping rapidly. “Your heart rate is up.” A button is pushed. Voices trickle over him like Divine Rain.
Convict doesn’t think about anything for awhile.
The Angel isn’t alone. There are others, shaped differently - built out of earth and rock in a way that soothes his eyes so used to straight metal lines and the void of space. The Convict assumes they’re more of the “be not afraid” style of Angels while his main angel is the kind that makes people feel calm before they receive righteous news. From his listening and staring, he learns the others call his Angel, Grace. It's fitting since Grace must have some sort of divine spirit in him in order to shine like the light of stars lost in the Quiet Rapture.
The others are many-limbed and no-eyed, which is the opposite of what Convict thought he’d heard - something about angels with a lot of eyes and halos that burned to witness, but then he was a stupid little shit back then. They all were: the ragtag few dozen kids that were orphaned. Their numbers fluctuated as parents died, and then kids were picked off. Religion was a good way to stay alive on a dying space station. Priests, and people like it, were more willing to share food - some with resigned eyes and shaking hands, some with burning faith and hope that kids would carry humanity onward. It was all bullshit. The Convict’s belief was faked in the hopes of an extra large ration of whatever they had for dinner: grisly mystery meat and expired dried goods. The priest’s kindness felt equally transactional. The Convict didn’t even know if he’d believed in any sort of God. Obviously Hell existed. Obviously the damned and pain and horror of the ending universe was there, but God was as dead as the last tree.
…But then he woke up in Heaven, so he was wrong, again. He’d never been more happy to be wrong.
“Grace doing okay, question?” The mechanical voice of the other main angel said. “Walk the beach with me, question?”
“Yeah, Rocky. In a few minutes. Just, I’m going to read him something for a little while first.” Grace laughs. It’s fucking beautiful. “I know it’s kind of silly.”
“Not silly. Biologists say brain waves active and reacting positively to stimuli. Reading smart.”
The other angel, the one in an iridescent bubble The Convict thinks might be some sort of halo, plops down and settles into a loaf of rocky limbs on the floor.
The Convict allows his eyes to shift around his room, but the slice of salvation is as indistinct as ever. His eyes are weak to the holy light. He can’t see more than a few feet in front of him, although every day he’s here he seems to improve. It’s a miracle: improving. He never hungers - a multicolored bag of goo empties into his stomach. He never needs to soil himself - a different bag carts everything away. He gets to lay, still and silent so they don’t know he broke into a place he doesn’t belong, as the Angel Grace clears his throat and reads him fairy tales about gas giants and white dwarfs and everything in between.
The Angel Rocky visits him often. He sings in that holy choir that makes The Convict’s ears ring, the mechanical voice spitting out translations The Convict can usually follow. Sometimes the mechanical voice that translates their song changes to a different language, one he vaguely recognizes as being spoken by some of the older folks on Eden. It’s like they're trying to fine-tune things to what he can understand. After a while, they stick to English. Something about his brainwaves going extra wavy when he hears it compared to other things.
They obviously want him to understand them, they want to make contact, for him to respond, but if he does all will be lost.
“Reattachment and nerves working on appendage. Good good. Radiation still present. Bad bad bad exclamation! Fading. More fading soon! Thrum again soon about brain. Grace said human brains stupid. Squishy. Bad at fixing. Rocky fix! Second human wake up! No radiation for squishy human!”
The Convict listens to someone care about his well being and works very very hard not to cry.
Others also come. Angels that don’t have names The Convict understands. Through it all, he stays still and silent, like a dog curled up around its stake - being good for a benevolent master. If he’s obedient enough, he can eat the scraps he scrounges: the attention from Grace, the soothing machinations of those who empty and fill the bags attached to him.
Still though, the more time passes, the more he begins to wonder if he was...off...a little bit with his guess of where he is.
Somehow, his stupid fucking brain gets bored. That shouldn’t be fucking possible, after the adrenaline and panic he’s been through, but still, it was his short-ass attention span and desire to stir shit up that got him mixed in with the bad crowd in the first place. Apparently in Heaven, or fake-almost-Heaven, he’s still the same guy who couldn’t sit still for more than five minutes.
He gets claustrophobic. As his eyes heal, the size of the room becomes more visible. It’s small, and metal, although a metal he doesn’t recognize. It’s well lit, and there’s a giant-ass door that opens multiple times a day, with the faint sound of moving water outside
(water, NOT blood, which sounded deep and viscous)
The air smells more alive every time the door opens. His toes twitch, hidden under the quilt, as he wants to get up and see what’s beyond the space set aside for him.
The next sign that this isn’t Heaven comes when the soothing lack of sensation fades. The colored bags hooked up to his veins are lighter shades and holy fucking shit he feels the difference almost immediately.
“Are you okay?” Grace asks on his next visit, frowning benevolently down at his wretched form. He turns and looks over his shoulder at one of the Angels in their translucent garb. “Is he okay?”
“All metrics are accurate for healing humans. Lower cortisol and stress hormones than the ones you had when you were healing on Erid when you first arrived.” There was a low chiming sound the mechanical voice didn’t translate. “It’s within acceptable parameters.”
“Yeah, well, acceptable doesn’t always mean comfortable,” Grace says. He squints at the monitors. “Plus you guys can’t just use me as the baseline for normal humans. Towards the end there, I had a pain tolerance like you wouldn't believe. Don’t tell Rocky I said that.”
The heavenly chorus sings the song that means disagreement and Grace hangs his head and groans. “Great, gonna deal with a mother hen all over again.”
Pain isn’t the problem. It’s mild discomfort at worst. More so the issue is the tingling, like his skin is coming alive after a long night’s sleep. There's tightness, like his body is made up of patchwork just like the much-loved quilt over top of him.
How many grafts did they use to make him whole again?
A tingle of dread creeps down the Convict’s spine.
…How much was this whole thing going to cost him?
If this was Heaven, he’d stolen divine healing and care. Would his body be ripped to pieces? But worse, what if it wasn’t?
Grace talked about anything and nothing around him. He’d spoken about wormholes and alternate dimensions and string theory - things the Convict could barely process for how miraculous they sounded, but what if somehow he'd gotten caught up in the dumb luck of the universe? Fortune, for once, favoring him instead of shitting on him? He'd somehow ended up in a society like Eden, only with better technology and kinder people, and he’s been using up so, so many resources.
The drugs. The manpower keeping him clean and fed. Fuck, the air he’s breathing - the CO2 he’s pumping out - how much is it all adding up? Is there interest accruing every second he does nothing?
He doesn’t have any skills to work it off. That's how he ended up in the submersible in the first place. Convicts in Eden don’t stay convicts for long. A ship running on fumes isn’t going to feed prisoners for nothing. Instead, they’re practically chattel: doing scut work in the bowels of the ship, or hard labor until they prove they can rejoin society. If they commit a crime of terror and destruction as bad as his own, then prisoners are usually killed: bodies stripped clean and processed to enrich the meager soil used to grow crops. That's if there even were crops anymore. The more nasty rumor was the bodies were used to make the mystery meat given out as rations.
His skin is breaking out in goosebumps, breath coming in gasps that will draw the attention of the Angels-the Eridians-soon. Forcibly, he calms down.
It’s the story about the cat, isn’t it? Schrodinger’s cat - where he kills it and puts it in the box, but you don’t know one hundred percent if it’s dead or not until you open it.
…He may be remembering that story wrong.
Either way, he’s damned if he opens his mouth. If his first guess is right, and it’s Heaven, they’ll kick him out to fall into that ocean of blood again. If his second guess is right, and somehow he’s alive and someplace new, they’ll soon realize he isn’t worth the resources they’ve poured into him and then…
Then…
He frowns before smoothing out his brow again before anyone notices.
The problem is he can’t think about what would happen next. Grace would look disappointed, which would be a fate almost worse than death. His sweet eyes would drop and his smile would fade like the sun burning out. Convict would feel one inch tall. But what would happen after that is a mystery.
The problem is, Grace and the Eridians don’t seem like the sort of guys to throw him into a conscripted labor camp. Grace, the man who read him The Velveteen Rabbit yesterday and cried at the end when the rabbit became real, didn’t seem like the kind of guy who would sentence another man to death or torture.
The problem is, The Convict has no clue what to do with the roiling energy under his skin. Nothing is happening to him, for once. He doesn’t have to react and defend himself. He has to choose to act first, which, he’s finding, is much harder.
Time passes. It flows in and out like a distant tide. The bags that contain nutrients and drugs eventually seem to contain only nutrients. Thoughts crystalize and clear. Eridians focus on different things now: the conversations he's able to mildly understand shift from organ failure to things like skin elasticity and haircuts. He feels as healthy as he’s ever felt before. Strong. Dangerous and feral in a place of soft things.
Every time the door opens there’s a rush of clean sound of the tide coming in and the crunch of steps of Grace. He’s always smiling, though it’s starting to turn down at the edges.
One visit starts differently. Grace comes in uncertainly wielding a cane. He uses it awkwardly, barely putting any weight on it - more of a prop than an aid for walking.
Grace sees the Convict look towards the cane. He smiles and talks as if the body laying on the bed, like a useless lump of flesh, asked a valuable question.
“The scientists are saying the bone loss I experienced from vitamin deficiency is going to start impacting me sooner rather than later. It’s not like the increased gravity is helping matters. Not that it’s that bad…hopefully. I hope you aren’t feeling it too much.” He dithers around, swapping the cane from hand to hand. Grace fidget's quite a lot. Another sign the man is mortal instead of holy, although most days The Convict is convinced he is both.
“I’m worried it makes me look old but it’s not like any of them have any frame of reference to care.”
Grace laughs in that self-conscious way of his. “Anyway, I’d thought I'd give it a try. I suppose I’m just grateful to grow old at all, with everything that entails for fleshy space blobs like us. I forget sometimes, that I'm even a human.”
They sit in silence together, Grace’s hands grasping the cane tight, then releasing, rhythmically.
“It’s nice having you here, to remind me. Still though, sometimes I look at you, and I think I've never left my ship. That I never woke up out of that coma, and you’re proof of that.” He squeezes the cane tight enough his knuckles blanch white. “Sorry, that’s rude to say. I just-”
He pauses. Wiping a hand on his skirt, he raises a shaking hand to rest against the Convict’s cheek. With only Convict's face exposed to air, his hands tucked away warm at his sides, the touch of human skin is like…like…
Fuck, he’s no fucking poet.
It's the final taste of water hundreds of meters under a blood ocean, when you’d thought you’d never get that taste again. It’s a light in the dark when you thought the batteries had all burnt out.
The touch lingers, feather light, down a cheek bone, before drawing away.
Grace laughs high and reedy, hand flapping.
“Sorry! Sorry! That’s not cool of me. That’s not-”
He cuts himself off, clearing his throat and plays with his glasses. The cane falls to the ground with a clatter. He yelps and reaches for it, only for the glasses to fall. It’s the most endearing thing The Convict has ever seen.
“Anyway, today we’re going to read The Little Prince.”
Grace turns around his tablet so The Convict can see the cover art, as if he wants to share what’s there, as if he’s as achingly lonely as he seems.
He starts reading and The Convict stews in silence.
He could get away with it, is the thing. He could probably lay here forever and they’d take care of him: the stupidly kind Eridians and still practically an angel Grace. He could lay here and let his muscles atrophy and never be hungry or tired again, and Grace’s face would get that little bit sadder as he’d discuss lesson plans and stories. He could do that, no problem. Nothing bad would ever happen to him ever again. He'd live a benign sort of peace he'd barely hoped to achieve.
He clears his throat.
Grace lowers the tablet.
“He-”
Halfway through his first word he breaks down coughing. Grace scrabbles up to help, but The Convict gets his arms out from under the blanket, waving him back as he coughs. It's a struggle to sit up.
Machinery wails. The camera on the ceiling swivels to watch everything - a thousand Eridians probably on the other side going insane if the Convict is right about theory two.
Grace shoots at a hand and jabs at a monitor until the room is silent again.
“Hello,” Grace says clearly and loudly. “You’re safe. Everything is going to be okay. My name is-”
“Grace.” The Convict says in a gravelly rasp. “I know.”
He clears his throat again. It's hard to make eye contact as Grace’s eyes well up and somehow get bigger.
“My name is Simon.”