Chapter Text
While practicing walking in straight lines, Simon had taken to snooping through Grace’s things. What else did he have to do with his free time? He tried not to look at anything too personal. He’d save digging through underwear drawers and emptying tubes of toothpaste for when Grace started fully torturing him.
All of Grace’s clothes were a bit obnoxious. Simon dismissed the thought with a small shake of his head. Not obnoxious. They had personality. Always comfortable pants with small seams, worn down simple shirts with writing on them (I’m not weird, I’m just quarky; Ah! The element of surprise; etc.), seemingly hand-knit sweaters and cardigans, and socks with little graphics on them. All interesting touches. Grace’s clothes might fit Simon, but his shoes certainly wouldn’t. If Simon ever took off running, he’d have to do it bare-footed.
The majority of Grace’s papers made very little sense to Simon. The ones that did looked like children’s homework. Simple spelling sheets with strangely printed letters that extended off of the page stood out among the ones littered with math that made Simon’s head spin and writing he couldn’t even read. Those weren’t in English, or any language anyone on Eden was trying to pass down from dying cultures. Maybe that’s the language he was hearing constantly breathed into his ears during the latter half of his suicide mission.
Simon found photographs in a drawer of a little table in the biggest room, one that looked like it was once used to store some kind of lab equipment. There was only one photo of Grace. He was standing in a mostly grey room with two giant… somethings behind him. His glasses were slid into the zipper of his jacket. He looked younger. He looked exhausted. His hair was ruffled and he was holding his face with two fingers while the rest relaxed. With it, he found drawings probably done by middle-aged children with colored pencils, mostly. “Save the world, Dr. Grace!” one proclaimed. Simon’s jaw worked as he put them back.
The other pictures were of people Simon had never seen. One man and one woman showed up repeatedly, both with family members, perhaps. The man was photographed with a child and a woman and was always making some variance of a silly face in each picture. The woman was with an older man, another woman, and scaling the wall of an important looking building Simon had never seen. Each new thing gave Simon a strange, sick feeling deep in his gut. He didn’t want to feel it anymore, so he put everything back into the drawer in roughly the same order he found them. He probably wouldn’t mention them to Grace.
There was nothing remarkable in the bathroom. In fact, Simon found very few remarkable things by his standard. Nothing helped him understand his situation more. He still didn’t know if any of this was real or if he could trust Grace.
By the time he had looked through everything he could, the time he dreaded had come.
“It’s time to remove your stitches,” the nanny bot said in a tone that felt too pleasant for what was about to happen. He realized as she called him into the bedroom that he’d been doing all of this to put it off, or to at least put his mind somewhere else. There was no running anymore.
“Is it going to hurt?” Simon felt like a little kid asking.
“No. If it does, please tell me, and we will numb the area.” She always sounded like she was smiling, even if she didn’t have a mouth. Simon supposed it was meant to be disarming. No pun intended.
He gritted his teeth painfully as the newly applied rubber sheet on the bed squeaked beneath him. The sensation on his palm made his bones ache.
“Are you ready?” the bot asked, smiley as ever.
“Ready as I’ll ever be.” Simon’s voice tickled his throat.
He stared out the window at the top of the wall. The sky was a greyer shade of blue today. Simon enjoyed every color of the sky. Sometimes it was an unreasonably bright blue that reminded Simon this was some kind of simulation one way or another. He’d heard tales of blue skies from The Father, specifically, and that one day they’d all see a blue sky again, but that color was just ridiculous.
The stitches tugged at Simon’s skin and he winced slightly. He swallowed hard as he felt himself tilting again. As much as he didn’t want to, he used his hand to stabilize himself. His stomach turned. Somehow, the rubber sheet was worse than the stitches tugging on him from the inside of his bicep. Maybe. Both sucked.
Simon redirected his gaze out the window. Other than the sky, he could see an outcropping of rock, the one he could see from the window in the biggest room. (He’d have to ask Grace what the rooms other than the bedroom and bathroom were called.) It was in an interesting shape; not quite solid and littered with holes.
This wasn’t helping very much. The stitches were still pulling on small bits of his flesh and the rubber was still squeaking against his palm. He was pretty sure he was sweating too, but he didn’t have a shirt to stick to his back, so he couldn’t be certain. He could feel pins and needles down his absent arm, something he worked hard to ignore constantly now pushing through with the other horrible sensations.
There was noise in the other room; thumping, sniffing, running water, and finally, approaching footsteps. Simon sat up a bit straighter and looked over his shoulder. Grace was home and heading toward the bedroom, gaze locked on the floor. Simon’s jaw tensed.
Grace cleared his throat before looking up and speaking. “Hey, I was just look– oh, I’m sorry.” Grace took a few quick steps backward, covering his eyes as if shielding himself from light.
Simon made a small noise of acknowledgment. Grace did not acknowledge him back. It took him a while to realize Grace was trying to be polite. It’s fine, he wanted to say, I don’t care, but that felt weird somehow. So did his silence.
“Hello, Dr. Grace,” the accented voice of the nanny bot said.
“Hello.” Grace said the word as if he was being strangled. Simon almost laughed.
“Your stitches have been removed.” Simon was confused for a half-second before his brain caught up and he realized she was now talking to him. She was right; it hadn’t hurt. The arms worked deftly to reapply bandages. “The ones that remain will dissolve with time. Please monitor the site for signs of infection. Report to me immediately if you experience a fever, drainage, swelling, or red streaks around the wound.”
“Thank you.” Simon felt strange not saying thank you to something with a voice.
“You’re welcome!”
Simon hissed through his teeth as he stood; not out of pain, purely from discomfort and underlying aches he tried to ignore. He scratched his beard to remove the sensation of the rubber from his palm. Everything around him was still unfocused, fuzzy at the edges. “You were looking for me?” He assumed that was what Grace was saying when he entered the room.
“Oh, yeah, uh…” Grace’s feet locked back on the carpet the moment it was his turn to speak. “Just checking on you.” He sniffed softly. The tips of his ears were red again. What is going on with this guy?
“Can I move past you?” Simon didn’t know what else to say. He wanted to be back on the couch ASAP, blanket around his shoulders, familiar view in sight, Grace distant from him. Simon was grateful that Grace wasn’t bashing his head in with a rock for now, sure, but that didn’t mean he needed to cozy up to him. Just because he wasn’t being malicious now didn’t mean it wasn’t coming.
“Oh, yeah, sure. Sorry.” Grace pressed himself against the wall of the hallway. “How are you feeling?” He asked as he trailed behind Simon before breaking off toward the room with the table. Sweet, sweet distance.
“Fine.” Simon all but collapsed onto the couch and pulled the blanket up to his chest. He kept Grace in his periphery as he gazed out of the window.
“Hungry?”
“Nope.”
After a few moments of silence, the shuffling of papers sounded from the room across from Simon. Grace was removing large stacks of papers from his bag and setting them next to the small screened thing he carried with him seemingly everywhere.
We’re not getting anywhere like this, Grace had said. Could have been manipulation. Could have been…
“How are you?” Asking the question was like setting his hand on a hot piece of iron. Bad idea, bad idea, bad idea, chanted a small voice in his head.
Grace must not have picked up on the agony in Simon’s tone, because he lit up by a few lumens. “Good, I’m good.” He began to smile. “I was, uh, spending time with Rocky, the Eridian I met on my… mission.” Grace paused, thumbing through some of the papers as his expression fell slightly. “We were actually talking about that explosion that let us find you. Do you… Do you want to talk about it?”
Two thoughts butted heads in Simon’s skull. Yes, tell me everything you know and tell it to me now, and you're going to lie to me anyway. No matter what you say, it’s not going to help me get out of here. “I don’t know.” That felt like a proper response, until the curious part of him took over completely. “Yes,” he said with a heavy breath. “Yeah, I do.”
Grace’s fingers began to drum on the counter. It was another thing he seemed to just do, like never wearing his glasses (they were off of his face again) and rambling. “Well, I honestly don’t know much about it.”
Simon almost screamed, a sharp and violent sound that he shoved back down behind his sternum with a clench of his teeth.
“It’s frustrating to me how little I know, so I can’t imagine what it’s like for you. What I told you before is still true; big explosion, then we found you, but I really can’t tell you anything else about it because I don’t know either.”
“What do you know, then?” Simon spat. That was the nice version, the part that left out, I thought you were supposed to be smart. Why the fuck would you bring it up in the first place if you know nothing else?
“Very little.” Grace sounded a bit ashamed. Good, Simon thought bitterly. “I know the explosion was the biggest one we can see. A supernova.”
Oh, Christ, here we go. Grace either knew nothing or everything, it seemed. “What’s that?”
Grace exhaled through pursed lips. “That’s when a star collapses. A very big and very old star.”
The lava pit reopened. There were no stars. That seemed to be such a fundamental misunderstanding between the two of them that Simon didn’t even know where to begin with telling Grace how wrong he was. He didn’t know how much of the universe Grace had seen, but Simon had seen enough to know that there was no light out there; at least, nothing natural.
“One like this should cause a supernova, which is just a… a really stunning display, I’ll have to show you sometime.” Grace glanced at that screened thing he carries with him. “That should have then become a black hole, which is a super dense... thing in space. It's so dense that the gravity pulls everything near it, even light, into it.”
Through Simon’s rage, he could imagine Grace speaking like this to a child. Not in a demeaning way; in a way of sharing knowledge, and the drawing he found flickered through his minds’ eye. His stomach twisted, and he dismissed the image with a slight tilt of his head.
“So, I popped out of a giant... vacuum?” Simon asked slowly.
“Yes,” Grace said with a relieved sigh. “Well, not quite, but for the sake of our conversation, sure. You popped out of vacuum–” Grace began to make strange, indefinable gestures– “that should have dragged you and me, once we were as close as we were, no matter how fast we were moving away, into the infinite abyss.”
“What? That…” Simon’s face was drawing into a grimace. “That doesn’t make any sense.”
“I know, you’re telling me.” Grace, in contrast, had a wide grin on his lips. “Rocky tells me they’re working on it. They’ve got a whole team of people who study space, people who know this stuff way better than me.”
Simon’s hands wrung in the blanket as he continued to stare out of the window. He was disconnected from it all somehow, sunk back into himself like his body was a suit. This made less and less sense day by day.
This could hurt. This could hurt very badly. The rug could be pulled out from under him and Grace could be the literal Devil in disguise. And no marvel; for Satan himself is transformed into an angel of light. Not a literal angel of light, of course, but something kinder than Simon had seen in a very long time. He played “confused” really well, at least.
What else did he have to lose?
“Grace.” Simon clenched his fist when his voice shook. “There are no stars.”