Freedom is a Length of Rope

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.