begone

a foreshadowing dream…

like imagine how simon even figured this out. he’s trying to pull his own weight on the hail mary, when he accidentally cuts himself on some mechanism. those voices in his head, he’s almost grown used to all of them. they’re chattering and talking and telling him that he needs to go back to the ocean of blood (yeah FUCK THAT), normal stuff. for him. hell, he’d even say he’s found comfort the constant voices. now when grace sees him just nodding or shaking his head to seemingly nothing, he doesn’t bat an eye at it.

he curses and grace immediately goes over and before he can even start fussing, simon says he’s okay and it’s just a surface level wound. it wasn’t even bleeding that bad by his standards. he’ll just go disinfect and clean and bandage it, and then he’ll be right back to work. he’s walks away, closes himself in the bathroom. he’s about to patch himself up when the blood just…rises. literally rises. in small little warbled bubbles. but the gravity’s on the ship, so it can’t be the low gravity. he hears those voices getting louder and louder and he feels his breathing quicken and oh god why did it have to be blood, hasn’t he seen enough fucking blood, he doesn’t want to go back, please, he doesn’t want to go back—

enter ryland grace, coming in to check on simon when simon yelps and the blood zooms past. it nearly cuts grace but grace dodges it in time and it lands as a jagged piece in the wall. they both hear rocky yell, “IS GRACE AND SIMON OKAY, QUESTION?!” and grace yells, “yeah buddy, we’re fine! were okay!” they are NOT.

grace so clearly thinks simon NEEDS to experiment with these newfound abilities because this is everything against when he’s learned while simon doesn’t want to go near it with a ten foot pole. why would he? he’s seen enough blood in his lifetime. he doesn’t want to give that giant eel monster the satisfaction, regardless of it being apart of him now. but he can feel the ability like an itch if he doesn’t use it. annoyingly persistent and chipping away at his stubbornness and fear by the day. paired with those voices? yeah.

so when simon finally agrees, grace is ecstatic. he hasn’t had something as wonderful as this since astrophage! he makes himself a very willing test subject (since where else is simon supposed to get blood), simon scared to even do so not just because of the goddamn horror he experienced but the idea that he could kill grace if he makes one wrong move. one wrong flick of the wrist or passing thought and he could fucking explode the guy’s brain stem. so he’s says no, at first.

no—he needs to practice on himself first. he doesn’t even have a good idea of human anatomy, he just can…feel it. and hear it. like rocky can hear grace’s heartbeat, but simon can feel the blood going into grace’s heart. he can hear every breath he takes and feel his lungs expanding, and those goddamn voices in his head reminds him that he knows almost instinctively how to steal the breath out of those lungs without grace ever knowing he was holding it captive.

he starts with slow things. healing cuts or bruises, playing around with his own blood and body. then, slowing a heartbeat, slowing a pulse, calming chemicals in the brain, anatomy study. then, knocking grace out. reducing oxygen and blood flow, a painless ticket to unconsciousness. and it’s slow, but simon gets more comfortable. he gets a little more accepting of this part of him, just like the recent teeth on the side of his face or the webbed ears. just another thing he has, another thing he can do.

believe me if grace and rocky could be in the same atmosphere theyd be all over eachother

Absolutely fair!

The hard part here is the opposite—what headcanons do I have left that I haven’t been posting incessantly for the past three months XD

I’ve given Carl the headcanonical name Carl Weaver. He comes from NASA, an administrator/management role there similar to Eva Stratt in her position as an ESA administrator. They met very early on after the discovery of the Petrova line and the conclusive proof that the sun was dimming and that these things were related. Stratt was the leader of the ESA’s Petrova Taskforce at the very beginning, before anyone had even started proposing solutions yet, let alone settled on any. Stratt was representing the ESA in a meeting with NASA about getting a probe to Venus ASAP to see what the Petrova Line actually even was, and Carl was the person there who seemed, to her, to actually truly understand what an existential threat this was going to be. The one person she talked to who seemed to realize that this would not be a quick fix, that this was going to alter the world in unrecognizeable ways forever. Even among the panic and frenetic work by the other scientists on the early Petrova Taskforce trying to figure out what the hell this was and what they were even dealing with, there was this sense to her that… it just wasn’t sinking in for them. What this was going to mean. In Carl she saw someone who got it. And it scared him as much as it scared her, and because of that rather than despite it he was ready to actually face what had to be done about it for the long haul, and that’s when the global Petrova Taskforce 2.0 was truly born.

Stratt saw the implications rolling out ahead of humanity very early, before anyone else was willing to emotionally grapple with it. In Carl Weaver she found someone else who was also actually seeing the long-term vision and was willing to commit to what needed to be done about it, way past just launching this probe real fast.

Stratt had hoped she’d found the same thing in Grace—a glimmer of something fierce and brave and seeing what the future held and refusing to let that happen—and was just. Perpetually frustrated and disappointed that he refused to be that man again after those first astrophage trials.

Carl was the one Stratt planned to hand over the keys to the project to if/when anything happened to her. But she expected Grace to be there, too. Carl gets her and she kept trying to get through to Grace, kept hoping that it would finally click and he would get her too. She does want to be understood! To have the people she’s been trusting with the fate of the world more than she trusts pretty much anybody else understand what that means! And Carl does, and Grace keeps refusing to. And it hurts. Because they were all kind of supposed to be a team, together at the end of the world after the Hail Mary launched, and. well. that was not allowed to happen.

Man thats one weird... submarine???