• Aro •

His mother, pleading with him as they left the colony: "Oh, Simon, don't be like that. It has a tree! It'll be just like home."

Simon grabs his head, eyes stinging at those few vocal fragments echoing in his head. Her face is already muddled and her voice is fading with it. He's terrified that, someday, he'll forget what she sounded like.

You'll be dead soon, his traitorous mind jeers at him, and then the universe will forget.

Shut up. Shut up.

Shut the fuck up.

"Why do you care, anyway? There's nothing left."

Simon turned to face the younger teen who'd spoken. Thomas, he thought the boy's name was.

The kid was wearing clothes not much better than Simon's own patchwork robes, right sleeve rolled up on itself several times over to prevent it from hanging beyond his fingers, while the other sleeve was stretched out fully, hem barely passing his wrist. Thomas' face was just as patchy, blotched with grime, long hair tucked messily into his hood.

Simon looked away and ran a thumb along the worn leather handle of his knife, feeling the way his fingernail scraped along the frayed wrappings as he worked out an answer. Blood still stained the hilt; a remnant of Eden's most recent COI raid.

"Dunno," he said, finally, returning the blade to its sheath on his shoulder. "Guess I hope there's an end to all this. Some light out there that isn't dead."

"The Father says hope is fruitless," Thomas said, tone taking on an irritating lilt that told Simon he was about to be lectured by a kid 4 years his inferior. " 'Hope detaches the devoted and arms the fool.' "

"Yeah, well. I'd rather be an armed fool than a devoted madman. Hope keeps me sane. I wanna live, simple as that."

"The Light…" the voice in the radio had murmured, "It illuminates. It blinds. It thinks, and therefore, we are."

Simon forces his eyes to open despite the blinding pain that greets him. He's spiraling. Not thinking straight. The world is flickering. Dizziness assualts his senses alongside a sudden wave of nausea; Simon rolls onto his side just in time: Dark blood spills from his throat, stinging like bile and burning on his chapped lips.

Simon stares at the pool with bleary eyes, his breathing harsh even to his own ears. He clenches his jaw.

"Shit," he whispers, the word falling like lead in the isolation of the submersible.

Yeah, he'll be dead soon.

Ava's gone, left him here to die in the darkest pit of hell, even after she swore to him. She'd promised to give him his freedom. This is a fate well-earned, she probably thinks. She's right, of course. Doesn't change the fact that she's a fucking liar and a fucking cheat.

The voice on the radio is gone, too. If it was ever here in the first place.

Simon supposes it's not the worst way to die at the bottom of the ocean: succumbing to some poison or other.

Better than starvation, at least. Or drowning in blood. Or being eaten by whatever horror is lurking outside the submersible's rusted walls. Simon shivers at the thought, wincing when even that small movement sends waves of nausea lancing through his gut.

Surely a tablespoon of rubbing alcohol wouldn't do this to him, would it? No, it's probably the camera's radiation. Didn't the manual say something about that?

No, it can't be that. Back in the spaceport, David said that the sub's hull was too thick for...

He said...he wouldn't just...

But why the hell wouldn't he lie? A little faux reassurance kept the X-Ray running, after all.

Simon can't help the half-crazed grin that splits his lips, the broken laughter that echoes and congeals with the bloody stench in the air.

Yeah, David's a fucking liar, too. The Consolidation is nothing if not consistent.

Simon lets his eyes slide closed, keeping his breathing short and shallow to keep the pain and vertigo at bay.

"Would you still give everything to survive?"

It's just another hallucination, he knows. The throes of a dying mind, desperately clinging to dreams.

"Yeah," he murmurs to No One, the answer coming easily.

Yeah, I would.

Silence, then:

"Are you certain?"

"Yes."

My ao3

Stratt hires a climate change scientist and then nukes Antarctica and paves the Sahara desert and the scientist just sobs

Rocky calls Grace a leaky blob

Rocky thinks humans are crazy for doing EVAs

Stratt gets sued by Everyone for plagiarizing Everything

Grace gets scurvy

Grace drags Rocky back into his habitat after Rocky saves him, and he gets really bad burns from coming into contact with Rocky's atmosphere

Grace also power washes Rocky, but we don't talk about it

Rocky was orbiting Tau Ceti for 40 years before Grace came along

Rocky has anxiety about oxygen after he gets lit on fire by Grace's atmosphere

Rocky also has anxiety about Grace using the centrifuge because of how it almost killed him that one time

Grace also pulls that maneuver a few more times and repeatedly passes out (at least he doesn't get crushed by a metal chair after the first time, though)

During the confrontation with Grace and Stratt, Stratt calls Grace a coward and Grace says that Stratt is murdering him. Just much more aggressive language all around

Grace doesn't lose his memories from the coma; Stratt injects him with memory altering drugs. Her hope was that by the time he remembered, he'd either already be done, or he'd be in too deep to stop

Eridians don't know about relativity, which is said in the movie, but in the book Rocky talks about how he was basically running the ship alone with a faulty trajectory and STILL managed to make it to Tau Ceti

When taumoeba leaks into the Hail Mary's fuel, Grace immediately dismisses the possibility of Rocky's boxes failing because Rocky is such an incredible engineer

When Grace and Rocky separate, Grace does loser amounts of math to figure out how long he'll be able to see Rocky's ship

When Grace does something stupid, Rocky forces him to take a nap to be less stupid

Rocky doesn't have a voice, Grace just learns Eridian by using his laptop setup

Grace gets arthritis at the end from Erid's intense gravity

Grace also gets a slew of other diseases from malnutrition

He survives by eating taumoeba until the Eridians can figure out how to feed him

The Eridians feed Grace by synthesizing human meat. Grace calls them "me-burgers" and they're his favorite food

Rocky's blood is mercury and he eats toxic heavy metals

When Grace teaches Rocky about radiation, he gets Rocky to cover his side of the tunnel in astrophage to protect him. Rocky tells Grace to do the same, but Grace just lies and says that humans are immune to it. On the inside, he thinks that it doesn't matter if he gets cancer because he's going to die anyway :(

Rocky's ship is the first actual spaceship Eridians ever made. Rocky has to fix so many things on the way over, because they just have no experience with space travel