“I Love You” -Keith, June 15th 2018

Is this punishment? you wonder. Do others get freed from pain, but not you?

Maybe your sins weighed you down too much. Maybe this was just, all of you that could make it out of Hell? The idea fits, in a depressing sort of way. God forsook you a long time ago. But, here you are, in the light, and even though it's not perfect, it actually isn't so bad either.

The angel is called Grace. He looks like a human, like a humble man from some old story, vids from before the energy was too precious to spare on entertainment. He doesn't walk around with gleaming wings or in a white dress or anything, no, he wears a sweater and glasses and he talks kindly.

Purgatory is called Erid. The other angels don't bother taking on human forms, instead they look kind of like spiders and kind of like rocks. Incomprehensible and surrounded by full-body halos that glitter and gleam wherever the light (so much light) touches them. They sing to speak, and Grace translates for them, setting up a gleaming silver machine so that you can understand the others even when he's not around.

But he's usually around. You don't believe in guardian angels, for a lot of reasons, but it seems like Grace has taken you on. He's doing a better job advocating for you than your old legal representation ever did.

Though, tenderly dressing your wounds is probably not something you could have reasonably expected from your old counsel.

"Hey, you're okay," Grace says. His tone is conversational, easy. He doesn't talk like an avatar of divine judgment, and you are really, really glad for that. He feels normal, human, as he takes your hand and awkwardly encourages you to breathe with him. You didn't even realize you were panicking until the tight, nauseating sensation and the hammering of your heart starts to gradually recede.

You don't remember the last time someone touched you kindly. You didn't notice exactly when it stopped happening, but having it again makes you keenly aware of the long, devastating stretch of its absence.

When you've calmed down, Grace tells you a story.

It's a familiar story and an unfamiliar one, about the stars growing dim, about a desperate mission, a man sent out in a sealed metal vessel to go die on behalf of humanity. You think about God lovingly entombing one of his angels, but the more Grace talks the more you think he might also be a man. Or somewhere between the two concepts. It's hard for you to think, to keep it all clear. Sometimes you drift, and when you do you can hear the chorus of screams, the pleas and demands of the blood.

It's still there. The barrier of light keeps it separate, but the price of standing in the daylight is hearing its whispers, seeing it crash crimson against the shore.

You ask Grace if they sent him to die for them. Grace says that they did. You ask if he volunteered. You did, after all. But you didn't know you were doing that, and you wouldn't have done it if you had.

Grace says no. No, he didn't volunteer. He was dragged aboard and drugged.

The straightforwardness grips you. The rueful way he describes it, as if not being brave enough to face death for humanity is embarrassing. But as the story goes on, it's clear that he did it anyway. Not just for humanity, either, but for the other angels -- Eridians? -- instead. A Quiet Rapture, defeated in its infancy.

You put together a better picture of what's going on. Aliens, not angels? Other people, albeit strange ones, lost in the deep dark of space, losing their light?

And Grace saved it. He found the secret, a way not only to save the stars, but to feed a man lost in the depths of space. To live on a planet that saw far less light than the Earth did.

You revise your opinion. Grace isn't an angel. He's a man, but he's a man who saved his people, even though he nearly didn't. This is his near-heaven that he's pulled you to, the purgatory of a sinner too saintly to exile.

Grace thinks you're both alive. You know better, but you won't spoil it for him. One day he'll pay the last of his dues, helping mankind from afar, and then the gates of Heaven will open full for him, the last little stain on his conscience redeemed a thousand times over. He will hold paradise in his gentle hands. You want that for him, you do.

But you also want him to stay here, with you, in this place that can only glimpse the splendor of redemption from afar.

You've brought your sins along with you. Your darkness, your blood.

"I'm sorry," you say, and can't stop yourself from spilling out your innumerable crimes, the devastating missteps that have cost countless others their lives.

Grace absolves you, ever time.

"We're good, buddy. All's forgiven."

You're just. You're so tired. You just want to rest. Is that really so bad? For you to just stay here, to curl up safe in his arms, to leave the remainder behind? What do you owe to anyone else, really? You already tried, you truly did. Where did it get you? Pain, torment, a brutal end, the ocean of blood that still won't let you go.

But that's the thing. It still won't let you go. It's still here. Sometimes you dream of it, of the ocean expanding, flooding over Erid. Beating back the gleaming barriers until it fill the streets, drowns the angelic Eridians, covers their beautiful dark cities in red and the stench of iron. The little ones cry for help as they are swallowed up.

You did this, the blood screams. Give it all to me!

No!

You wake up sweating and struggling with yourself, panting as you bite back an actual cry of denial. Your body shakes, your breaths heave. You want to shove yourself off of the cot, but the only result of that would be a hard landing on the floor, and enough noise to wake Grace.

You check. The man's a light sleeper. But he's still curled up in the bed not far from yours. He'd offered you the use of his quilt, materials kind of hard to come by here, but you'd declined. Textiles are valuable, you won't rob a man of his blanket. The air in the house is always the right temperature anyway, bleeding into neither the desperate cold of a resource-conservation period, nor the perilous overheating of damaged radiation shields.

It might be nice to curl up with him. You let yourself picture it for a moment, using the fantasy to help calm down. Solid arms around you. Blanket over you both. Grace's lips against your skin.

When your breathing has evened out, you push the notion aside. You don't have anything to offer Grace except for yourself, and a lack of competition aside, that's a poor offer indeed. Especially when you've brought evil to his doorstep.

You give it a few more moments. There's an itch on your shoulder that you can't scratch. A maddening burn, like the blood eating away at you again. You have to go check. With a last glance to make sure that Grace is still asleep, you roll yourself off of the cot, moving carefully and using the bar beside it to get onto the ground. Regular meals and reasonably good sleep have helped recover some of your strength. In fact, you think this one arm you've got might be stronger than it's ever been.

Once you're on the floor, you use some of the ropes that Grace's Eridian companion, Rocky, helped set up around the house, and pull yourself a few feet to where the exo-arm is. Xenonite, the substance of angels. Grace had hurriedly tried to clarify something about it being a gas, but you're not sure you grasped the particulars there very well. It's not a normal substance, but you could already tell that.

The exo-arm is lightweight, and its mechanisms are simple. It fits over your stump, smooth and offering relatively little pressure. Even so, your flesh aches to have anything pushed up against it. You feel some of the ever-present disorientation over your lost limbs ease up at the same time, your mind accepting that you once again have two 'arms' now, even if one of them is a holy metal claw.

With the exo-arm on you're able to move yourself more easily out of the house. You don't bother with the full suit or the chair. They're noisy, and you don't really need that much right now anyway. You don't want to answer Grace's worried questions.

Outside is dark. Days pass quickly here, like a station running on some experimental cycle. But even the dark has a quality to it that's different than the one you're used to. It isn't the oppressive, all-consuming bleakness. Grace says that there are lifeforms in the upper atmosphere of Erid, a blanket of nature that blocks out the sunlight, like the almost-forgotten canopy of trees that once grew in such abundance, they could shield the world below.

But the Eridians keep a patch of sunlight clear over this place, for Grace's sake. At night, you can look up and see the stars.

You can't do it without seeing the blood as well, though. The barrier that keeps it separate does very little to quiet the way it can call to you. Come back, come back to us. You're ours. We're so lonely without you.

The worst of it isn't that it's threatening, but that it isn't. Not always. It's right, that's the worst of it. You don't really belong here, in this peace. No matter how conditional it might be. This is a better life than the one you left, a better hope of survival than you've had since Filament Station. Maybe even before that.

It's a reprieve. A period of Grace.

But the Hell of it all is still out there. This won't last, and if you try and hold onto it, you're afraid you'll destroy it. You'll destroy this, and in the meanwhile everyone you ever knew will still be lost in the dark, dying slow, agonizing deaths.

Grace thinks he can help them. That he can them food, energy, a means of fighting back and surviving, maybe even figure out a way to move the stations out of dark space. Maybe there's something to all of that. That old idea, the one nobody on places like Eden even glanced twice at, that they weren't the survivors but the condemned, and the only hope lay in finding a way out of the universe... isn't that what you once risked everything for?

Only for Filament Station to end up destroyed. The darkness inescapable after all.

Can you take a leap of faith again?

Oh, that... that stings. The thought of it. You shake, even though the air's not cold. The exo-arm grasps around sand, and you run your hand down your face, swiping tear tracks down your cheeks. The waves rustle like leaves, whispering.

You don't think Grace has the right of it, not completely. He's a scientist, and he thinks there's a scientific solution. That's why he can't find the way to where you've come from, can't understand how he brought you here. It's not physics, or at least not completely. It's God, and too many devils, and the souls of the damned and lost and deified.

You know the way back. What the universe is waiting for.

So, a moment of pity for the lost soul. You don't want to be the hero, no more than you ever wanted to be the villain. At least villainy seemed like a mask you could wear, or maybe just like one you couldn't escape, near enough to your skin to fuse with the flesh and become tolerable through proximity. Maybe heroism is the same way. That seems to be how Grace treats it, like a skin he was shoved into and made his own anyway.

Tears flow. Why you? Why does it have to be you? At least if it has to be, why do you have to choose it?

You know why. You rage against it anyway, despair clutching you, the stars benevolent but distant as you give yourself this last reprieve, to be human and flawed and frightened.

The next day, you ask Grace to take you to the blood again. You grant yourself another mercy, briefly, letting your hand move to grasp the back of his neck. You draw him in and press your forehead to his, soak in the touch and warmth and connection.

You almost beg him to find you again.

But you won't leave him with that burden, just in case he fails. You won't say anything, because it's better to leave some things unspoken, especially when they haven't really settled yet. You'll just take this one last moment of connection, and hold it close when the vast anger of a less forgiving god tries to consume you, like a candle in the storm.

Well you'll take that and the exosuit, too.

You walk back to the blood.

You don't hesitate, because you can't. If you do, you're done for. You've gotta keep it simple, avoid of the folly of Orpheus, and do not turn.

Going back to Hell is easier than getting out of it. There's probably something poetic in that. I'll come back, you think. I will. The red tide rises and swallows you, dark and deep, unspeakably heavy. The whispers mingle with your thoughts until they become a roar in your mind, nearly indistinguishable from your own rising panic, from the terrible familiarity of it all.

For a long time, you drift. The exosuit holds up, but the pressure remains immense, and the screaming, sobbing, furious commands and desperate pleading do not relent. At some point you think you hear someone knocking, hammering as if on the metal side of a sub, you hear Grace's voice calling and begging for help and oh, that's low.

"Simon, please. Just come out of there. Come out and you can be with me, I want to help you buddy but I can't quite reach..."

You scream back. You struggle, kick the suit's legs, flail and fight until all the cries and pleas merge into the same dull roar, until you grasp something with your hand. A long, black, iron trunk that seems to reach upwards and downwards in every direction. Not that you can completely which is which. Even so, you pick your best guess and start to climb.

You're not sure if it matters that much in the long run, but eventually you grab hold of something else. A metal hook of some kind. They fish you out, some group or other. The hook connects to a chain that connects to an outpost, rusted metal flooring already stained with copious amounts of blood, figures in whatever battered PPE they could salvage hanging back and watching warily as you swipe the blood off of the suit.

Dull, minimal electric lighting flickers. Haggard and unfamiliar faces stare at you. You look around. This isn't the station that launched the Iron Lung, you're pretty sure that one got destroyed. If it wasn't just an illusion, anyway.

Someone decides to aim a gun at you.

You raise your hands.

"Whoa, whoa. Easy," you say.

"What the fuck are you?" they reply, though there's already a communication channel crackling to life, someone with a stern and authoritative voice telling them to stand down.

You know how this must look.

Well... actually no, you have no idea how this must look. Weird as shit at least. You glance down at yourself. The suit is mostly holy metal. It's thick and darkly opaque over the legs, but transparent at the top, not doing much to disguise your missing arm or your scars. Sweat drips down to your chin, itches over the ruined cheek you're self-aware of.

"Uh. Hi," you say. "I've got some news."

Nobody looks terribly reassured, but nobody looks like they're keen to pick a fight either. Eventually you're escorted with varying degrees of hostility to a sealed room, with an observation window taking up much of a nearby wall. It looks like a lab. Apparently, nobody wants to sit down at a table with you.

You shrug, consider your options, and then resettle yourself inside the suit. You press the button to retract the top half. The air tastes of iron and of filters that haven't been cleaned in too long. Nostalgic, but not really missed. You take the opportunity to stretch, to itch your brow, rub at your eyes and knead some aching muscles. Somehow, for the first time, it occurs to you that you... might actually not be dead?

You don't know what to do with the thought, so you put it away.

When a light comes on in the other room, you put the top of the suit back up. Just in case.

Three people shuffle into the observation room. Once upon a time, they would have looked pretty put-together and authoritative to you. Maybe even dangerously so. Now, they mostly look like they've gone too long with too little of everything: too little light, food, water. Hope.

"Your resemblance to the convict pilot from the SM-13 has been noted," one of them states. "What are you?"

They're trying to sound like they have some idea of what's going on. They don't, of course, but it's interesting to recognize it and to wonder how many times this kind of seemingly cool, collected, knowledgeable front has worked on you in the past. Surely someone out here knows what they're doing, right?

They don't. You get it now. You know more than them, and you are also still just stumbling through the layers of this, looking for the barest slivers of salvation.

But there's only one thing you can do at this point, and that's give them what you have. So you do. You launch into it, describing everything: the mission, what happened to you, as best as you can still understand it. Then your rescue, Erid, meeting Grace, the stars that are still out there somewhere in a place that might still be reached. The people who are still out there, trying to reach them.

Stone faces meet your story. It shouldn't be frustrating, it shouldn't be distressing. It's exactly what you'd guessed would happen. But oh, you'd almost forgotten how much you hate it, the blank faces, the assessing eyes and the remote, dehumanizing distance of it all. The way they don't even tell you what they're doing when they file back out to go discuss all your claims, to decide what they're going to try and do with you now.

They come back, eventually. They want to know if you have proof. You admit you don't. You thought about trying to bring something with you, but in the end you couldn't trust that the blood wouldn't change it. Even the suit was a gamble. You anticipated skepticism, even hostility, and even though you don't like it, you hold cards that nobody else here does. And you know one thing very well:

They need this.

They need a miracle more than you need their cooperation.

So, you just leave it be. You do what you imagine an honest man would and tell them the truth, hold up this small, flickering, improbable candle for them to see. They try and demand you relinquish the suit to them, and you laugh and tell them no. There's more furious debate, someone puts a gun on your again, and you tell them that they'll just cause a ricochet. They don't know enough to try testing it. Neither do you, actually.

Okay so maybe that's one lie you've told. It could be true, so it's really more of a warning and a bluff rolled into one.

Three weeks into it, after enduring the most begrudging rations, one-sided interrogations, and getting sick to death of sweating in the exosuit, the sky above the outpost warps and distorts, and a hundred xenonite canisters raid down.

The person inside is in... rough shape.

Even weirder, he's human? Or at least he sure seems to be human. On the one hand this is fortunate, because Erid's scientists have been studying a human for a while now with a particular focus on finding ways to potentially intervene for medical emergencies, and boy howdy is this guy a medical emergency. On the other hand, you are at a loss to explain how this happened, and it turns out that the whole warping situation might have been interacting with space and time in ways you did not previously account for.

Anyways, somewhat miraculously, this dude does not die. It also turns out that the blood pool in your enclosure has the initial composition of human blood (baffling? neat?) but also contains a multitude of other microorganisms, and basically is itself an alien life-form that has infected your new emergency house guest, as well as his submersible. Vessel? It's fascinating, the whole thing is coming apart so even though your guest isn't consciousness enough to ask for permission, ultimately everyone determines that there's no salvaging it so you all might as well study it before the blood-pool finishes, uh, eating it?

Samples are taken, with care. Exposure to the pool is minimized. Rocky hovers because he doesn't trust you not to fall in, even though you're not going to fall in, everyone's built some pretty great scaffolding and you know not to touch the weird lightly irradiated not-human blood with your bare hands, Rocky.

Anyway, the blood pool seems to mimic back sounds fairly often, sometimes screaming, talking with various voices, or echoing Eridani language that it picks up. It doesn't seem to have the actual cognitive ability to be processing language, but since you can't figure out how it's doing most of what it's doing, there's no ruling anything out. It's creepy, so the scientists on Erid build you a temporary barrier that seals you off from it, both as a genuine safety precaution but also so that you can sleep at night without hearing the screams of the damned. You coat it in a thin layer of astrophage as an extra precaution against potential radiation leaks.

The guy who was in the submersible also seems to be human, but badly infected by the stuff from the blood pool. However, you can't rule out that this infection isn't actually part of his own natural systems either, given that the blood also seems to be sort-of-human but sort-of-not. Coordinating with some experts on Earth, and doing a lot more medical experimentation than you ever anticipated, everyone concludes that whatever the case with this guy is, some of the not-human factors in his physiology are the only reason he's still alive. So trying to get rid of it would probably be a bad idea.

Instead you work together and make a lot of less-than-ideal "best guesses" and eventually get him stable. After the dust has settled, the man is a triple-amputee with significant facial scarring, and mostly comatose. But sometimes he sings, screams, and pleads with somewhat religious-sounding prayers before dipping back under again. He seems to speak English. You have so many questions for him. You talk to him while he's unconscious, asking some of them, speculating, or even just narrating what you're doing. Sometimes when he seems distressed, you just ramble soothing nonsense, the kind of comforting non-comments offered to distressed kids sobbing over scraped knees and sprained wrists.

When he finally wakes up, he's confused. Wary. You think he might have reflexively lashed out if he could, but he's hooked up to several monitors and is, again, a triple amputee, so his singular flail is not very threatening to you, Dr. Ryland Grace, who sometimes gets the zoomies and scales the cliffs of your enclosure, and does quite a bit of routine heavy lifting these days.

The man doesn't really seem to be violent, anyway. Just startled and disoriented. You ask his name, and he hesitates, looking around like he's waiting for a trap to be sprung, or an illusion to fall apart. When it doesn't, he tentatively introduces himself as Simon. He has some trouble speaking, due to the facial scarring, and also probably the coma. But he can speak, and he can count backwards and forwards, can track objects with his eyes and recite the letters of the alphabet, the days of the week.

He asks what station he's on. You tell him he's not on a station, he's on a planet, Erid. He says that's impossible. You open the windows to show him the sky, and he stares for a long time. You understand, even if you don't know the particulars of his situation. If, somehow, Simon is from a part of the cosmos that was going dark, then he probably cherishes the sight of a healthy sun even more than everyone else in the known universe does.

You try and get him to answer some of your questions, but he tires quickly and you have to shelve them for now. Having another human around is doing a number on you, you gotta say, whether he's conscious or not, injured or not. You love the Eridians and you wouldn't trade Rocky for anything, but there is something to this after so much time spent without anyone else that's difficult to put into words.

While Simon slowly recovers, you work on some mobility aids for him. Luckily some projects were already in the works to help you safely navigate more of Erid beyond your enclosure, so it only takes some modifications to a few those designs to get a few basic necessities hammered out -- a mobile chair, a walking exosuit, a prosthetic arm based on designs that were initially meant to help you safely interact with volatile objects, and so on.

Day by day, Simon spends a little more time awake. Everyone's anxious to get more information out of him, but you're the barrier to entry, the one who gets to actually make those calls as the only other human on Erid, and you decide to take it slow. There's no impending catastrophe that you can see, just curiosity an apprehension. The warping projects have been scaled back in case there's some unseen detrimental effect. Most of the taumoeba that can be distributed elsewhere has been, too.

Simon eventually starts to answer your questions, and responds with some more of his own. He seems to think that he's dead, and it's difficult to talk him out of it. He regards his lost limbs and scarred reflection mournfully, weeps and asks if this is punishment, if the fact that it's 'not so bad' is mercy. You call on everything you ever learned about talking to traumatized people to try and explain that it's neither, it's just a result of his grave injuries, and of you kind of accidentally warping him to Erid from wherever he had been. You explain what you can, breaking things down in their simplest versions to describe astrophage, taumoeba, the Hail Mary, the Eridians, Rocky, and your own one-way trip to try and save the stars.

That gets him.

"They sent you to die?" Simon (still no last name) asks.

"Yeah. They did," you say, because it's true.

"Did you volunteer?"

You laugh, rueful.

"I wish I could say I was that brave, but uh. No. I didn't. The project lead had me drugged and dragged onto the ship."

Simon doesn't seem disappointed. He thinks about it, nods, and looks at you a bit different after that. Not in a bad way, thankfully. If anything he seems to become more relaxed, more trusting. He also seems to decide that he's in purgatory of some kind, not punished but not redeemed, a place for men whose sins and virtues alike are too innumerable for even God to judge.

He tells you that where he comes from, the stars went completely dark. What humanity remained survived on space stations that were already built to withstand the void, but even they couldn't operate indefinitely without food from their worlds or light from their stars. There was disagreement, he said, on whether the stars had truly gone dark, or if somehow the stations had been dragged into some other lightless place.

Your first instinct is to think that the stars did go dark. The astrophage got them, infestation reaching a critical point where they dimmed the stars completely. But, you don't actually know. You don't know where Simon comes from relative to the known universe. For all you could tell, he might indeed have been from some dark layer of existence that was folded open by warping physics. The fact that he seems to be from some far-future Earth, that he's mostly human and mostly speaks English and can mostly understand references to a lot of human culture, definitely implies that some alternate reality situation is afoot.

You pass along all of Simon's comments to the interested researchers assigned to this project, even though you wince to consider the reception some of it will get. The Eridians handle it a bit better than what you hear from Earth, for them it's probably less creepy overall, but there is definitely an upswing in wild speculation on both worlds.

Apart from the science, what you can focus on is helping Simon adjust to the realities of his new situation, so that's what you do. Once his health seems to be about as stable as anyone can determine, you set him up in the walking chair. He doesn't want to see the blood pool, so you get permission and take him outside into Erid instead, traveling in your exosuit while Simon reclines in a dome-topped, four-legged sedan chair with a lantern hanging from it. Eridian cities are fun to look at. In some places they're virtually impossible for a human to navigate, gas or shadows too thick to see past and terrain too uneven to traverse. But in others they are a wonderland of towering structures and natural features, colors the Eridians can't perceive contrasting in dramatic mineral formations, light passing through clouds in rare spears of unimpeded brilliance and reflecting off of smooth structures in dizzying, boundless splendor.

"Like we can glimpse the gates of heaven," Simon says, as he tips his head up towards the sky. Not an unfair description, to be honest.

Simon's not a picky eater, which given the previous living situation he described isn't a surprise. Just eating until he's full is a luxury to him. He perks up more over time, reading books, watching movies, talking about little things. He confesses aspects of his life to you which you opt not to forward to the researchers. They don't seem like they would change anything, and he gets anxious at the prospect of being reviled.

"I didn't know the camera would do that," he insists to you one night, after waking in a panic. Sometimes he sleeps better in the dark, unaccustomed to light, and sometimes he has episodes. Tonight's an episode.

You tentatively offer him your hand. He reaches, fumbles, and then clasps it tightly.

"What camera?" you ask.

"On the Iron Lung," Simon tells you, which you know is the name of his vessel. He hasn't said much about what it was doing, or why he was on it. But you do know that it had a pretty strong x-ray camera on it. The Eridians had to be strenuously warned about the radiation. And you do know that however he got into it, someone must have welded him in from the outside.

"I didn't know it would do that, I just wanted them to listen to me. They weren't... they weren't listening."

You squeeze his hand. There are scars on the back of it. Pockmarks, like someone dripped acid onto it.

"So you hit the camera to get their attention," you surmise.

"I didn't know," Simon repeats, insistently.

"Why didn't they tell you?"

He barks a laugh at that. It's not funny, it's a broken, battered sound that's barely removed from a sob. He shrugs. The stump of his other arm moves, gesturing with the hand he doesn't have anymore.

"Pick a reason. Maybe they thought a convict like me would irradiate them on purpose. Maybe it never occurred to them that anyone would use the camera like that. Maybe they just sank so many other poor bastards down there that they forgot which ones they'd told what. Which answer is worse?"

Convict. He's mentioned that before, although never with context. You've been deciding not to ask, and you definitely haven't been mentioning it to anyone else. Rocky's picked up on it, but you don't think he's said anything either.

"So they sent you down in this thing, on this moon, into this ocean of blood, and they didn't even tell you what the equipment could do?" you ask.

Simon lets go of your hand to scratch at some of his scars. You halt him with a touch to his wrist, crane around and grab the ointment that some of the Eridians figured out for you instead. It doesn't do much except moisturize, but it'll help more than Simon's nails will.

He swallows, and lets you apply it.

"I'm sorry."

"All's forgiven, buddy. The past is past," you say, because you've found that's worked better than any other response. You tried telling him he had nothing to apologize for in the beginning, but it just seemed to make him spiral worse.

"I pressed the camera. Everyone in that room got hit by the radiation. The person nearest worst of all," Simon tells you. "I really... I wasn't trying to hurt anybody. I just needed them to stop."

"I know."

To be honest, while you wouldn't say that anyone deserves that kind of thing, you think it's their own fault. They could have put a chimp in that Iron Lung and run the risk of some ignorant button-smashing irradiating them, let alone an uninformed, panicking man whose concerns they were ignoring.

Maybe one day that will be the right thing to say to Simon, but right now you don't think it is. He's too lost in his head, so you keep it simple, just nod and shake your head at the right parts. What you hope are the right parts.

"It's like the station," he says. "No one believes me. I'm the Butcher, why would they believe me? But it wasn't supposed to happen like that."

You don't know what he's talking about, but you squeeze his hand a little tighter anyway.

"I believe you," you say. You do. Simon really just doesn't strike you as a man who would deny doing something he intended to.

It's not that it hasn't occurred to you that a guy who sometimes refers to himself as 'the Butcher' and 'a convict' might have done some serious crimes in the past. Frankly, you spent enough time working on the mission to become acquainted with a fair number of people who had done shady shit, up to and including killing. As things around the world started to worsen, violent crimes went up as well. Desperation is not a good look on anyone.

Erid's not that different. The Eridians are less prone to some types of violence and more prone to others, but they've also got concepts like 'desperate times call for desperate measures' and that what a person does when they're in a harsh survival situation, is not generally indicative of what they do otherwise.

"Grace," Simon murmurs.

"Yeah?"

You pause, then apply some ointment to the problem areas on his cheek. Simon's eyes close, and he doesn't answer or offer any further clarification.

You watch him sleep for a while. A habit you've picked up from Rocky, but Simon doesn't seem to mind.

Eventually, Simon starts joining you for your classes. The pebbles are fascinated by him, jumping up and down and clamoring to ask about why he's a different shape from you, why he's not from Earth if he's human, what colors he thinks they are (a fascination of theirs, that there's some unique feature they have that they can't perceive) and how this aligns with your statements on the subject, what Simon knows about physics, and so on. You intervene when you have to, but keeping things pretty straightforward seems to work best. Eridians understand the concept of lost limbs and trauma, Simon is bemused but does tell the pebbles what colors they are, and while he's not a scientist or engineer he knows enough about physics to participate in the class experiment.

The blood pool has been sectioned off from your home and the classroom, the beach reduced to a mere sliver. Simon stays well clear of it at first, but after a while he starts to venture closer. Your offer to let him go see it. For a long while he declines outright, before tentatively agreeing to it under the stipulation that both of you wear exosuits. You put on the one Rocky made for you, and lift Simon into his newly completed mobility aid version, that lets him walk around more or less steadily now.

His arm curls around you to help distribute his weight. You feel him lean into it, rest his head against your shoulder, let out something suspiciously close to a sigh. But he's leaning back as soon as you have him seated in the suit, arranging himself to keep the pressure off of the wrong parts of him.

You go in and pick up your usual tasks in studying the pool. The mysterious thing has long since eaten away the last of the Iron Lung, raising the overall iron levels in the pool and altering aspects of its composition, but you got plenty of samples and inspected and salvaged some parts before it finished the process. There are Eridian-made models of the Iron Lung all around the walkways. You've warned Simon that sometimes the pool distorts the surface into shapes that can resemble faces made of iron, and that sometimes they seem to scream, although there's no indication that the sound is actually originating from the mouths made of blood.

It's pretty freaky, of course, but you're compartmentalizing it. By the sounds of it a lot of people died in that blood ocean, and it's inclined to mimicry, so it's probably copying and distorting shapes from the only living beings it's had physical contact with. The Eridians use xenonite tools to interact and copious astrophage shielding to keep the radiation contained, so none of them have interacted directly with the materials of it.

Simon doesn't stick around for long, but you don't press him about it. Honestly, you're fine with him avoiding the blood pool forever if he wants to, you don't really need him to interact with it for anything that's more important than his own recovery. It's just that it's eating up a chunk of your enclosure and no one's figured out how to safely move it somewhere else yet, and it's kind of a shame to limit Simon's ability to go places.

The Eridian researchers take advantage of Simon's lack of scientific credentials to involve him in studying or questioning other things, like human psychology, the ways in which he seems to differ from you and from most other humans, and what insights he can offer about space station technology and living conditions.

You also involve Simon, at least on some levels, with your other big project: trying to trace back his point of origin, and warp some astrophage and taumoeba to his people, along with a message about what they can do and what the risks are. From what Simon has described, wherever he's come from is experiencing a degree of desperation that merits whatever intervention can be managed. Taumoeba can make food, and astrophage can provide power, and together they can be used to keep each other in check. Simon knows the interstellar coordinates of every space station in his people's records, but that's only potentially useful if they can find out how to reach his point of origin and warp things in relation to that, since it's possibly (probably?) a different parallel universe.

Honestly even you aren't sure what you're trying to do half the time, but damn if you're not trying to do it anyway.

"I think maybe I was in Hell," Simon tells you one morning. "But now I'm in purgatory. I have to cross this last hurdle, and then I'll be able to rest with you. I have to help you save everyone else. I just don't know if I can do it."

You're only half-listening, because he often says these kinds of things, and you're not wholly sure how to approach the subject.

"We're not dead, and you're doing just fine. All you've gotta do is focus on recovery, buddy. Everyone is doing so much science, we'll figure it out," you assure him for the umpteenth time, and reach over to pat his shoulder. He doesn't sound distressed, just thoughtful as he savors his glass of water, and eats his breakfast.

He tells you he wants to go see the blood pool. You ask if he's sure, but he seems determined. You and Rocky help him into his exosuit. He smiles, and then before you close him in, he reaches out with his hand and settles it onto the back of your neck. He tugs you in to press your foreheads together. The touch is close, intimate but solidly affectionate in a way that halts your breath. You don't think you've actually ever done this kind of gesture with anyone before, this sort of masculine, comrade-like near-embrace, close enough for your breaths to mingle. Simon is handsome, and he'd probably be kind of beautiful to you just for the sheer humanity of him, but you're not usually effected by those kinds of things.

'Not usually' isn't 'never', though.

Rocky interrupts.

"Simon hugging, question?"

Simon gives the back of your neck a squeeze, then lets go. You let out a shaky, kind of nervous breath of your own.

"Sort of," you say, since Simon doesn't seem inclined to answer.

"Good," Rocky decides. "Contact important for human skin, hug more."

You clear your throat.

"Uh we'll take that under advisement," you decide.

You head in to what you've started to think of as the Pool Room, even though it's still just a cordoned off section of the enclosure that's separated by a semi-transparent wall of xenonite.

So you're Dr. Ryland Grace, right, and the thing is that you often have trouble anticipating the actions of the people you care about. Like Stratt drugging you, like Rocky almost dying for you, and right now, like Simon just walking full-on into the radioactive blood pool that he's spent the past year or so visibly terrified of.

"Simon?!"

You nearly charge after him. It's thoughtless, not brave. Rocky stops you, exclaiming so fast that the translator can't pick up on it. Your ever-increasing Eridian linguistic comprehension tells you it's about what you would expect, though, several expletive-heavy variations on 'what the heck?!' and 'bad bad bad!'

The pool goes eerily still. The Eridians on the walkways watch, vibrating with confusion and uncertainty. Simon keeps going, ignoring your calls, heading into the pool like he's heading in for a baptism. The blood rises, swelling into a singular wave. You bolt for the mechanical arm that some of the researchers set up to pull bits off of the Iron Lung, some unformed half-idea that you could grab Simon's exosuit with it clamoring in your mind, but by the time you get there the pool has risen up and crested over Simon, and swallowed him up completely.

It flattens again.

No no no, you think, irrationally, trying to act anyway.

But there's nothing. The water has gone still and empty, and not only is there no sign of Simon or his exosuit, there's no sign of the blood, either. No traces of the Iron Lung. Just water, the same as it was before your warp experiment touched something it wasn't supposed to and once again dramatically reshaped the context of the universe.

No one is certain what to make of it, obviously. Speculation runs rampant.

Your house is quiet.

You sit on the beach, listening to the perfectly ordinary waves crash, the picture of some forlorn figure out of tragedy. Then you throw yourself back into it.

Not the water, obviously. The science. Whatever way Simon and his blood pool arrived by, that's probably the same way it all went back. Which means it's connected to your warping experiments, which means...

You get another signal.

It's Pride Month, so if you'll forgive me I'm taking a two minute break from the One Piece, League of Legends, Marvel Rivals, Final Fantasy and Pokémon shorts to tell you… Sylveon is trans, Taliyah is trans, everyone on the Straw Hats is queer, there are no words to describe how queer superheroes are as a concept let alone how queer they all are individually, and here's a fun fact for you: Cloud Strife's story gets ten times better when you understand it as an allegory for a trans coming out experience.

As for me, well, I'm not trans, but I do occupy my own little space in the rainbow flags which looks like this. I am aromantic.

We are generally not as visible as many of our queer siblings, probably at least partly because it's kind of a difficult identity to even discover in yourself, you basically have to prove a negative.

But what is this thing, "aromantic"? Well… okay, let's say you're a straight guy, right. You know the way you feel romantically about other men? I feel exactly the same way, and then I also feel that way about women, and then also the same way about all of the other genders.

Now, aromantic often goes along with asexual, there's a lot of co-occurrence of the two, but not always, and that is my situation. Yes to sex, no to romance, which being a man, yes, I know, that just makes me the same as 90% of the men you match on Hinge. "Ha ha ha didn't realize "fuccboi" was an orientation now," I know. I get it. I understand. I have had all the same thoughts myself, especially when I was questioning.

Which is the difficulty with being aromantic, because in order to figure out that that's what you are, you have to prove a negative. I have never been in love, and I have no reason to think I ever will be… but what if someday I meet The One??? What if there's a special divinely designated perfect soulmate out there, just waiting for me, and one day our eyes will meet across the room and it will be love at first sight forever?

And like. I can't prove that won't happen, anymore than I can prove that there isn't a flowery pink teapot currently hiding somewhere in the orbit of Saturn. And frankly, if it did happen, I wouldn't be mad. Why would I be? I would have a soulmate! That's a pretty big W, I think.

But… I've had over thirty years to encounter someone—anyone—who can spark my romantic interest, and thus far, every challenger of every gender has failed. So either I am aromantic, or else you people have a skill issue.