Chapter Text
The first thing that happened was this:
Simon lived.
The Lung collapsed under the weight of a hundred thousand tons of near-boiling blood, his left arm tore from his body with ligaments taffy-stretched around brittle, radiation-sick bones, and the clear resin medallion around his wrist burst apart with the force of a mutant tree growing faster than light. The submarine cracked, burst, and imploded. Anything inside had no chance at survival.
Except, somehow, Simon lived.
He lived.
The second thing that happened was that he woke up.
He regained consciousness in fits and slivers. Each time he slipped back under, he was surrounded by blood. It filled his mouth, his nostrils—his lungs felt sodden with it. He was made of it, consumed by the ichor that poured inside of every crack the tree split in the Lung. His veins were full, pumped to the point of bulging, swollen things peering out from underneath his skin.
Even when he was nearly awake, the blood came for him. The smell of it, the taste—somehow, it was worse when he tried to claw his way through the thick fog of sleep, so he kept falling back into the warm embrace of the clotting cells at the core of a bloody moon.
When Simon finally managed to take hold of consciousness, it happened all at once.
He went from a deep, heavy sleep, a healing fugue, straight to alert and upright without pause. Adrenaline shot through every inch of his body.
He was on a cot, of some sort. A metal hospital bed. There was a long IV snaking into one of his arms, blood filling the clear tubing, moving sluggishly. He tracked it to a machine that seemed to be sucking blood in and then sending it back, and he had no idea what it could possibly be doing to him. He moved to yank it out, reaching for the tape pressed into the crease of his right elbow, but when he moved his left arm, nothing happened.
That was the third thing that happened: nothing at all.
Because Simon’s left arm was gone.
Ryland Grace woke to violent screams echoing through his Erid biodome.
He was awake in an instant—it might’ve been a while since he had another person to worry about, but he still had that deeply ingrained automatic response to react to the sound of another human’s screams. His quilt fell to the floor in a heap and he slid a little across the smooth floor, his socks too soft to provide much traction. Rocky was there too, tapping frantically at the floor, clearly anxious.
“Grace! New human awake, seems scared. Grace help!”
“Yeah, I got that, Rocky,” Grace replied breathlessly as he sped out of his house to the second, much smaller domicile the Eridians had constructed a little bit away from his. It was made mostly from xenonite, but parts were salvaged from the wreckage of the bizarre submarine that had washed up on the beach over a week ago. It came together into somewhat of a steampunk, futuristic building, just big enough for Armando, the rest of the medical supplies, and a human-sized cot.
Grace had washed the stranger in his own house, as oddly intimate as it was to touch another human being after so many years of being alone.
And not just the nine years he spent on the Hail Mary—Grace was pretty damn alone for the years leading up to his execution, as well. The feeling of warm human(ish, the man did have some…odd mutations, but Grace was 99% sure he was human first) flesh was flipping weird.
He still tried not to think about that intimacy very much, the way it felt to touch another man’s burning flesh, to wash blood from his hair.
Another scream echoed through the biodome. Grace flew out his front door and across the bluff towards the second building, where he hesitated for just a second outside the door.
“Grace fix new human. Go!” Rocky said, voice turning up at the end in a shrill whistle. Grace bit his lip and then, after another moment’s hesitation, rapped his knuckles on the door of the small hut.
“Uh, hello,” he said, and immediately winced at how lame he sounded.
Hey, at least he didn’t have much of a chance to dwell on it, because just seconds after his initial knock, the sturdy figure of the man from the submarine came barrelling out the door, shirtless and wide-eyed, and pushed Grace to the ground. They rolled for a moment down the grassy hill before the man’s large hand came down in tandem with his knees, pinning Grace into the dirt by his throat. The man’s hair fell in greasy curls around his face and dark purple circles rimmed his tar pit eyes, one gleaming with an odd, oil slick wiggle. He looked very, very afraid, and very, very capable of violence, which was made exceedingly clear very quickly.
The ragged man’s hand shifted, and something sharp pricked against the scientist’s soft throat, sending blood already dribbling down his pale skin to stain his shirt. Grace tipped his head back instinctively to squirm away from the weapon, realizing far too late that it was a clear sign of submission. He bared his throat to the violent man, the stranger he found cocooned in a metal womb of blood.
“My name is Grace,” he rasped through the pressure. “You’re on the planet Erid. I do not—” he wheezed— “I do not want to hurt you.”
“New human hurt Grace! New human attack Grace, Rocky help Grace!”
Grace barely managed to throw a hand up in Rocky’s direction as the eridian barrelled towards them, but stopped just short of ramming into the stranger, held off by Grace’s palm.
“Rocky,” he exhaled and tilted his head to the side, shaking it minutely. He was careful not to move any more than that, not trusting himself not to get his throat slit on accident. He opened his mouth again to speak, but was only struck with a rattling cough from the heavy pressure. The stranger’s grip loosened slightly, allowing Grace to speak and breathe, but not to get away. The blade still pricked. “Don’t—go get Adrian, okay? I got this. It’s okay.”
Rocky made a low, sad whistling sound. It made Grace’s stomach hurt.
“Grace hurt and afraid. When Grace afraid, Rocky afraid,” Rocky said, and Grace forced a smile despite the terror filling his chest.
“It’s okay buddy. Go get Adrian. I’m going to talk to our new friend.”
Rocky hesitated a moment longer, but then he sprung into action, scrambling across the cliffs of Grace’s home with his spindly limbs. Grace immediately turned his attention back to the large man pinning him into the dirt and tipped his head back.
The man’s eyes were wild, wide and terrified. The left one was a bulging, cloudy white, like that of a deep sea creature. He didn’t speak, but the expression across his face was significantly easier to read when Grace wasn’t running out of oxygen. His stomach fluttered and the blade cut another small, sharp line, but when Grace whimpered, the man pulled the blade back and jerked his head up in a nod. It took Grace a moment, but he realized the man was telling him to speak. To explain.
So he did.
“A couple of days ago, I was walking on the beach, trying to workshop a way to manufacture higher nutrient density for soil because, uh, the dirt on Erid is loose and not at all compatible with—with—sorry, irrelevant. So I’m walking along, and then there’s this awful sound, like metal on metal. I looked out into the water, and—and from far away from shore, it was getting darker. Something was contaminating the sea. I got closer, and looked, and…it was all blood, bubbling up from somewhere deep down. All blood.”
The man seemed stricken., he turned and looked out at the beach and the lapping water, the manufactured perfect foggy day. It was clean by now, siphoned up by the eridians who managed his biodome and cleaned thoroughly. From this new angle, Grace could see the left side of his face, and his breath caught in his throat. He had seen it some when he was cleaning the man, and he sat by his bedside plenty in dazed confusion over the sudden appearance of another human, but this was different. This was alive.
Sharp white points of tooth-shaped bone protruded from his skin, beginning just below the eye and stretching down along angry red scar tissue and torn skin to the corner of his lips. There were visible holes in the skin, almost like melted plastic, and Grace could see the man’s pink tongue through them, darting back and forth like a snake. Even his actual teeth, the ones in his mouth, seemed sharp and dangerous.
“Your ship washed up a few hours later,” Grace continued. His mouth was dry. “It took us a while to get you out—you were…fused, with the metal, somehow. Like you had grown around it, and it had grown around you. But we—me and the Eridians, they’re the rock guys who actually live on this planet—got you out. Well, most of you. You’ve been unconscious ever since.”
The man’s eyes landed on the final pile of metal scrap salvaged from the wreckage of the submarine, and something shocked and scared rippled across his face.
The man turned his confused gaze back on Grace. It was quiet for a moment, still and tense, and then he pulled back, sitting on his haunches across Grace’s thighs. Grace watched him toss the blade away—a scalpel. He shook his head and reached up with his right hand—his only hand—to feel at the ridges of his face. He traced the scar tissue with wide, terrified eyes, and then threw himself off of Grace, hurtling back towards the small medical hut. Grace was slower to rise, but managed to climb to his feet and followed the man. He pressed his palm flat to the cut on his throat, hoping to hold most of the blood inside, but he knew his shirt was already stained.
It wasn’t his favorite—Be like a proton, stay positive—, but it was still a loss of a finite resource.
“Hey! Hey, get back here!” he yelled and hurtled towards the hut. His feet slid on the rocky surface, grass and dirt sticking to his socks. When he threw the door open, he froze in the doorway.
The man was kneeling on the floor with his back to Grace. The scarring across his back and shoulders was more prominent than ever—rigid circles from burst boils, streaky acidic burn scars, and creeping vine-like lichtenberg marks from under his stringy hair to beneath the loose pants Grace dressed him in.
He held his hand tight against his chest, and when Grace tentatively walked around the side of the room (keeping a wide berth because heck, he didn’t want to get stabbed again), he saw two things.
One, that the man had something clutched against his heart: the small pendant the eridians had found wrapped around his wrist when they extricated him from the submarine. His grip was white-knuckled and violent, like this was the only thing keeping him grounded.
The other thing was that the man was crying, silent sobs racking through his body.
“I’m sorry,” Grace whispered. He wasn’t sure what he was apologizing for, but it felt like the right thing to say.
The man pressed the pendant to his mouth. His breath fogged up the clear material, matrixed over with xenonite. Grace slowly sank to the ground beside the man, not touching, just present, and the two of them sat there in silence for a long, long time.
Simon was in heaven. He had to be.
What he had done to deserve this beautiful eternity, he had no idea, but it was the only explanation that made any sort of sense. An idyllic planet with water, air, and plants? A gentle, golden savior whose cheeks go pink at every touch? The Iron Lung, dead on the beach, the monstrous blood eel nowhere to be seen?
Except in the mirror, his tortuous mind reminded him.
Even his pendant, the only thing he might’ve been upset to possibly lose from the ship, was safe—with some minor adjustments. The seedling remained, trapped in that disc of pure clear glass, but some of the material had broken and cracked. It seemed that whoever made this dome out of thousands of triangles created some fine, metallic structure to encase the disc in spiderwebbing supports.
The strange rock spider came back a while after Grace—another tally in the heaven column, because what else would an angel be named?—sent him off to collect “Adrian”.
Adrian, because nothing made sense anymore, turned out to be a massive teal rock, easily the size of the Iron Lung. It spoke in a lower, gentler tone than the whistling tune of the one called Rocky, and Simon found himself much less overwhelmed when speaking with Adrian than he did when trying to talk to Rocky.
Because, he figured out, Rocky didn’t like him much, which he honestly thought was fair.
He crash landed in a painstakingly-crafted psuedo-ocean on a planet uninhabited previously by humans, contaminated it with gallons of congealed human blood, and then attacked Grace, who Simon understood to be Rocky’s best friend (or maybe pet, Simon wasn’t quite sure yet). Simon would’ve hated himself too.
He expected Grace to hate him most of all, but the wild-eyed blond man just kept grinning and trying to talk to Simon. He kept getting within arm’s reach, kept willingly baring his bandaged throat to the brutal killer that washed up on his beautiful shore. He kept trying to get Simon to talk, but Simon couldn’t. The words caught in his throat, breath trapped between speech and sucking in lungfuls of air like it was the last he’ll ever get.
And, in the most infuriating way possible, Grace was kind then too. Simon hadn’t spoken to him once, and Grace was still kind. He wanted to, fuck he wanted to, but words were impossible to force out. He had written a few crooked notes for Grace, but his scarred-over hand was still healing and holding any sort of writing utensil hurt like fuck.That, at least, told him that they spoke the same language, which felt like a miracle, but he couldn’t find the words.
Still, Grace stayed with him, still lingered until he knew Simon was settled enough to be left alone.
All of it—the silence, the trauma, the blood—came to a head when he tried to take a shower for the first time, right around day three of mostly-consciousness. He got inside, more than ready to wash the grease out of his hair and sweat off of his skin, but the moment the warm water began to fog up the inside of the small room, he was back on the Lung.
Sweat dripped from his nose onto the neon green control panel, blinking ever-changing numbers back up at him. His skin crawled with radiation and fear, his pores oozed crimson blood, and the ever-present feeling of being watched pinned him in place. The button behind him snapped, and when he turned to look at the picture, all he saw were his own exhumed bones.
He threw himself out of the flashback and bathroom in one, collapsing in a mostly-naked heap on the floor of Grace’s room.
Within seconds, Grace appeared, summoned by the thud of Simon’s body hitting the ground. The blond man knelt beside him and didn’t touch him, just murmured numbers until Simon finally matched his rapid breathing to the rhythm of Grace’s low, comforting voice.
“You’re on Erid, you’re safe. You’re safe, my friend.”
That was what Grace called him. My friend. It felt like a cruel trick, because everything Simon did just made Grace’s life harder. He was another mouth to feed—one and a half mouths, really, with the goddamn teeth splitting across his face—, another body to wash, another person to care for. And Grace took care of everybody, it seemed. It was in his blood.
After the shower incident, Grace led Simon to his bed and pulled the old, worn, patchwork quilt over his shoulders. Simon slept without nightmares, and when he woke up, Grace was humming in the kitchen over a cup of coffee with his glasses hanging low on his nose.
“Ah, my friend! You’re awake!” Grace said with an effortless smile when Simon walked in, quilt pulled around his shoulders. He reached up and adjusted his glasses, fully pulling them off his face to dangle by one ear. His hair was sticking up on one side, and his blue eyes were full of light and kindness.
Simon opened his mouth to reply, and for the first time in days, the shapes came, the sounds emerged.
“My name is Simon,” he said, and Grace’s smile lit up the whole fucking kitchen.
It took Grace five days to realize he had a crush.
Now, in his defense, he hadn’t seen another human being in a long time. He hadn’t talked to another human in even longer. It was somewhat inevitable that, when presented with another large, handsome human after nearly a decade alone, he would develop some kind of embarrassing feelings for them.
In his OTHER defense, it had been even more time since he had experienced these specific embarrassing feelings. Even when he was back on Earth, romance wasn’t exactly his strong suit. He was fine being alone—it’s half the reason he was forcibly chosen for Project Hail Mary, anyways. Nobody to miss him. Nine years in space made it feel even more optional, and plus, he had Rocky. Hugging his xenonite shell had gotten him this far, he hadn’t even considered the fact that he might be touch starved.
Or, at least, he hadn’t imagined it would ever matter. He hadn’t thought he could ever change it.
But now, with this new human, dropped right off on his doorstep? He had so much about him that made Grace want, and it was making him feel insane. It was his broad shoulders, framed by a too-tight t-shirt and a leather harness. It was his eyes, mismatched but sparkling with life. It was how he stretched, and Grace’s eyes couldn’t help but trace down the hair beneath his arms, the jutting of his ribcage, the dark of his nipples.
He knew that was part of it, but he didn’t think this new little flutter in his stomach whenever he looked at Simon—Simon! He finally got a name after four days of the man being almost entirely non-verbal, and that was a HUGE win—was entirely due to the man’s attractiveness and his own touch starvation. If it was, he could talk himself out of it. Simon had just been through a massive trauma. He was trapped in an unfamiliar body, mutated beyond his control. He was fighting with such severe PTSD Grace barely knew how to help sometimes (psychology was never his strongest subject), but he did his best.
No, it was everything else, too. It was the way Simon’s eyes lit up when he looked at the meager garden Grace had been trying to cultivate before he showed up. It was the way he bit down on his lip to conceal a smile when Grace and Rocky argued in front of him. It was the way he visibly relaxed when Adrian came over the bluffs, and even more so the way they sat pressed together, Adrian vibrating just barely with a low, soothing tone that Simon just soaked up. It was the way he slept curled in so tight on himself that he barely covered a quarter of the mattress Grace and Rocky provided.
It was the way he almost smiled when Grace said his name.
So yeah. Grace wanted to touch Simon, sure. But he also wanted to fall in love.
And that was far more dangerous.
On day seven, Simon went down to the water. He sat on a rock—a real rock, not an eridian half buried in the sand like when he almost sat on Rocky all nestled into the beach a few days back—and looked out into the ocean.
He hadn’t entirely stopped panicking, not yet. Things kept coming up that terrified him, or forced him to face the reality he now existed within. And, for some reason, speech was still exhausting sometimes. Noise was too much. He could feel every piece of fabric against his skin.
He wasn’t sure if it was his new scar tissue, his ‘mutated’ DNA, or if he was just sensitive now, but it was driving him crazy.
He wasn’t always overwhelmed like that, but it happened often enough that he had to come up with a solution.
Thus, the water.
Something about it soothed him. The waves, the gentle sounds—the reminder that he was so, so far away from the blood ocean on AT-5, and he would never have to go back. Even the cool water against his feet was relaxing, and sometimes he would sit at the edge of the wet sand and let it lap at his toes for a while.
On day seven, though, he sat on a rock and he tried to convince himself that he didn’t want to kiss Ryland Grace.
It was moot and he knew that, but he still thought it was worth it to sit down and go over all of the reasons that it was both unreciprocated and a very fucking bad idea.
Not only was Grace the only other human he would ever see for the rest of his life, allegedly, he was also good. He was kind and gentle and only ever treated Simon with a softness the convict didn’t deserve. His throat was still cut, still knitting itself together with a white bandage plastered over it, and still Grace only offered him…well, grace. It was suffocatingly pleasant, and it made Simon’s heart shatter a little more every day.
He knew he couldn’t have this. Grace was so, so beautiful, and he was a broken man who couldn’t sleep for longer than a few hours without a full flashback, sending his mangled skin burning and tingling into awful, sharp pain along the edges of every single scar across his body. Simon was the Butcher, a killer who watered the last tree in blood. He was a prisoner who survived solely due to dumb luck.
The water surged up the rocky shore again and Simon tossed a small flat stone out into the waves.
He needed to recalibrate. He needed to stop wanting, because he would never be the kind of man Grace deserved.
He would always be drenched in the blood of his sins. He had to remember that.