#ap0ptotic

─────── 𝐓𝐇𝐈𝐒 𝐈𝐒 𝐓𝐇𝐄 𝐏𝐔𝐍𝐈𝐒𝐇𝐌𝐄𝐍𝐓 he gets for wanting change. This is the culmination of all the hopes and dreams and the dying sun that withered before him. The stars, they dim, and all he believed in was that together, all of humanity would survive once again, the way they once were on Earth, before the Epoch. Was that not how humans should live?

"FUCK YOU! FUCK YOU! FUCK YOU!"

The alerts were screaming into his ear, the walls were narrowing and narrowing as the submarine struggled to keep itself together against the currents of the blood ocean. The convict pummelled with his extinguisher through growing strands of muscle and flesh that were intent on pulling the brakes down. Perhaps to digest him the way it did the others.

"YOU ARE WRONG. YOU CAN NEVER KILL US. THE STARS HAVE TRIED AND FAILED AND HERE WE ARE. I WILL CONTEND YOU. I WILL NOT ABIDE BY YOU. I WILL SURVIVE!"

Bright light streamed through the cracks of the hull and he knew it was over, and yet he kept bashing against the growing meat that was swallowing up his controls. Blood rose to his waist, now chest, and he felt the submarine throttle hard, slamming the convict hard on the port side of the cockpit. The extinguisher followed, slamming against the side of his head violently.

. . . was that music? Noises, humming, some excited, some pensive. He could feel himself moved, light, so much light, pouring through his closed eyelids.

. . . human? yes. of course he's human. what else could he possibly fucking be, unless the fucking ocean had turned him into one of those things. or the ambient radiation from the gun had finally eaten away at him that he was no longer recognisable.

. . . name? what was his name?

name. name.

He gestured with his hands. Stop. Stop. Stop touching me. Buried his face in his palms, the lights were so fucking bright it was giving him a headache.

@ap0ptotic // plotted

The last couple of weeks had been a lot to process. Selected to be sent down into that damned blood ocean to die. Almost dying multiple times. Being assumed dead by his C.O.I. captors. Then making a deal with the captain only for her to die on her way to him.

Oh yeah and he met God. Which is apparently the only reason he didn't meet the same fate as Captain Ava... he felt bad about what happened to her. He could say that much at least. She didn't have to. But she kept her word. Came down to get him herself. Only she didn't make it.

He still couldn't believe they'd sent him down without even knowing his name. It couldn't be any clearer. The C.O.I. wanted him to die from the start. They wanted Simon to be gone and forgotten.

Nobody ever cared that he didn't want what happened to Filament Station. That he tried to stop it. Maybe they had hoped he was lying, just so they had someone to punish for it all.

Well, he was done being punished for Filament station. Simon hadn't pulled himself up out of an ocean of human blood just to let them keep him in a cage until they could put him down some other way.

It had taken a lot of effort to get aboard the RV-19, and even more to get the crew to evacuate it. At least some of which had made the mistake of attacking him. Simon really didn't want yet more blood on his hands, but he had no say. He never had any say in it, if he were being honest with himself.

He'd watched his arm grotesquely change in color and shape to counter every attempt to attack and subdue him. Just as quickly as it had taken care of the threats, it had returned to normal, the entire process from start to finish being one of the most disturbing feelings he'd ever been forced to go through. It was as though Simon's body wasn't his own and he could only watch as it did things he didn't want to do.

He dwelled on it, like everything else. Even as he made sure the whole ship was clear of stragglers. Even as he commenced lift off and the RV-19 made short work of getting away from AT-5. Simon never wanted to hurt anyone. But since when did he ever get what he wanted.

There was thankfully, a shower aboard the ship. Guess he should count his blessings. Two. He survived the blood ocean and was allowed to clean off the remaining traces of the very same ocean. Was also able to wash and make repairs to his clothes. Which he'd previously thought would be done for after his dip in the blood ocean.

He'd still been trying to process these events days after take off. Simon had quickly realized that the navigation mechanisms were damaged during one or more of the fights his shape changing arm had ended. It was the only result of those encounters that Simon hadn't been able to clean up.

Navigation itself was sort of an expertise of his. The mechanics behind the very sensitive equipment used for navigation though? Maybe if it were an Eden ship he'd have no problems fixing this, sure. But he'd never seen this particular model's inner workings.

He was fucked. Again.

There was no way he'd risk damaging the navigation equipment even further. And it would be near impossible to know where he was going without it. He could only guess what direction he was going in.

And that's what Simon did. He picked at random and went forward. It was the only option left to him. At least the whirring, beeping, and clicking of the ships other functions kept the vessel from being totally quiet. The silence might have made his mental state worse.

He'd also found something to spend his time with. A small sapling. It was in a sort of green room. The light was of course, artificial. There was no other kind anymore. So it wasn't growing very well. It likely had been grown from one of his fallen brother's pendants.

He wasn't upset about that. It was good to grow the seed. Almost symbolic even. Simon was however. upset at just how bad of a job they'd been doing. He found himself going to tend to the plant as often as he could.

Simon slept near it more than a few times. He talked to it as much as possible. Something he and his brothers at Eden were taught to do even before the quiet rapture.

He also talked to himself often. It was the best he could do, given that nobody else was around. Only, sometimes he could hear a faint whispering if he wandered too close to the lab area of the ship. He decided to steer clear of that area.

Along with his frequent night terrors, it made him question if any of this was real. If he was still at the bottom of that ocean, hallucinating all of this. Or worse, wonder if he'd actually died down there.

A sound brought him out of the current train of thought he was on. It was familiar, but not very welcome. One of the few things working of the bridge's navigation console was the radar. He wasn't on the bridge but the sound was noticeable from several rooms away.

Simon got up from in front of the little tree sapling and went to investigate. It would be an unfortunate twist of fate to have the C.O.I. discover and catch up to him so soon. But that would be his luck.

Looking out the cockpit windows, he saw... a ship. The model wasn't familiar. Simon debated internally if he should just continue past it or see if he could get help with the navigation console.

He would have known if the ship was either from Eden or the C.O.I. and he could tell it wasn't just by looking at it.

something was wrong with rocky.

between the time the hail mary had landed on erid to now, the eridian spent most of his time assisting ryland grace in whatever manner he could. from aiding other eridians in building a livable environment and home for the scientist to just being there for the other as a force of familiarity, rocky was busy from the time he stepped off of the ship. he’d barely even returned home to adrian, and the distance was truly straining the bond he had with his mate.

ryland was improving more and more each day. he was getting stronger, adapting to his new home, and making a life for himself. but, rocky? rocky wasn’t feeling right and he was only getting worse, but he couldn’t figure out why.

maybe it was exhaustion finally catching up to rocky.

he gradually stopped coming around to see ryland as frequently. he started going home more often to rest, adrian watching over him as his body entered its paralytic state of slumber, but each day of rest seemed to drag on longer and longer. even though he was resting, he started waking up with less energy. breathing — which was more for heat regulation than gas exchange — became less effective over time, and his internal temperature started to rise. his carapace, comprised of various minerals, was even hotter to the touch than it normally was.

eventually, he stopped coming to visit ryland altogether. his condition was just too poor.

his condition reached a point where erid’s atmosphere, previously comfortable and easy for the eridian to live in, started to feel stiflingly hot. it was as though he was no longer compatible with his own environment, but that didn’t make sense. why would his own environment suddenly be incompatible with his biology? in his two centuries of living, he had never had an issue with it. so, why now? what had changed?

well, okay. a lot had changed. for one, rocky had gone into space to solve the astrophage crisis! for decades, before returning to erid with his new human friend in tow! but, nothing that happened would make him feel this way. did he contract some sort of illness from a bacteria in space? ...was that even possible?

but rocky wasn't prepared for what happened next. he had woken up abruptly from his state of sleep because everything burned and he couldn't breathe properly. he felt strange, but he couldn't see due to erid's perpetual darkness.

hold on... he couldn't see. couldn't sense anything around, and the ammonia in the air stung his eyes.

...his eyes?

his limbs felt like they'd been rearranged in his sleep, and he swore he was missing an appendage. but through the pain and the suffocating air quality, he couldn't think straight. if it didn't feel so real, he might've thought he was imagining it.

with rocky's new and abrupt alterations, he'd been quickly ushered into the biodome with hope that he would adapt better to ryland's atmosphere. his arms and neck were red with burns from the eridian heat and pure ammonia in the air, and they were still aching as he entered the biodome. he was coughing, pulling in deep drags of the oxygen in the biodome in between each cough. his lungs — lungs, those were new — hurt, and he clutched his chest as though it would make it feel any better.

“grace!"

it wasn’t the sweet, melodic multi-tones of eridian that called out for ryland, but a panicked and ragged human voice. he squinted for ryland’s house in the distance, but he had to snap his eyes shut again. the artificial sunlight caused a dull ache to blossom through his skull, feeling as though his retinas had just been seared. for someone who has lived a life surrounded by darkness due to having no eyes, the world around him was suddenly very bright and disorienting.

the sand between his toes was a textural nightmare. his skin — fleshy and squishy and gross — was far more sensitive than his hardened carapace had been, his body now housing millions of touch receptors across his thin frame. despite how much he loathed the sensation, rocky started to blindly step in the direction of ryland's home with his eyes still closed, each step questioned and uncertain. he'd traveled this route sightlessly many times, but he no longer had passive sonar to guide him. worse, he couldn't even hear ryland's heartbeat from here.

"grace!"

dread consumed rocky for a fleeting moment, and he stopped calling for his friend. ryland wouldn't even recognize him, would he? he might even think this is a joke, that the eridians had just thrown a newfound human into his biodome to keep it safe. there were very few signs that pointed a wary finger towards who this mystery man was: his broken english, and strange tattoos of circles and jagged lines lining his arms and the sides of his neck. still, he could be anybody.

maybe rocky didn't even deserve his help after he'd stopped visiting without any warning.

─────── 𝐃𝐕𝐘 𝐇𝐀𝐃 𝐁𝐄𝐄𝐍 𝐆𝐎𝐈𝐍𝐆 in and out of sleep since then. Mostly asleep, and whenever he managed to be awake, he could barely string together coherent sentences on the tablet to Ryland -- though he tried, desperately so. They were mostly greetings in the morning as Ryland gets ready for his morning runs; something Dvy had noted and worked extremely hard to convince Armando to try to align his medication and breakfast with. Ryland seemed far away in his own head most days, but kept his promise to him that every time he left through the main door, Ryland made sure he would lean in to let him know, and leave a written note on top of it.

It was slowly becoming a ritual between the two, one that Dvy looked forward to every dawn. Some days he was more lucid than others, yet still played it out as if he was too drowsy to respond, closing his eyes as Ryland drew nearer. Every single time it happened, Dvy felt queasy from their narrowing distance, felt like he was motion sick, stomach churning and flipping on every brief goodbye. The drugs were really, really getting to him, it seemed. No wonder the Elder was frothing at the mouth against these things; even with the best intent it was slowly leading Dvy to hell regardless.

One particular morning, he was already propped up on his bed as Ryland swung out from his bedroom, geared up and ready for his daily morning run. His hair was up in a half bun, head down as he wrote something down to the last quarter inch of blank space on his pad. The handwriting was slanted and coiled, most certainly not written in English.

“Ryland,” he called out to @ap0ptotic, clear as day. It was at least two and a half weeks since he’d mysteriously washed up on Erid, finally saying again the first word he’d uttered in earnest since he arrived. Aside from rads, of course.

“Good morning.” He nodded. His voice was rich and deep, having recovered fully from screaming at the top of his lungs weeks ago, in what would have been his coffin under a murderous blood ocean. “You look great today. Did you sleep well?”

“I was wondering if you could spare me another writing pad,” Dvy waved the old one, “and I think Armando was a bit too overzealous with the pencil sharpener.” He showed Ryland the stubby pencil he was working with for almost a month. “That, or I’ve been writing a lot.”

─────── PUMPING HIS FIST MOROSELY, Dvylikh tapped his foot, which Armando admonished with a very stern “Please stay still while blood collection is ongoing”. When @ap0ptotic said he wanted his, quote, frickin’ blood, unquote -- he didn’t quite imagine it would literally be thirteen bottles of the shit straight out of his arm.

To top it all off, he couldn’t quite voice the discomfort, since Ryland Grace was pressed up against his back on a stool, half-straddling him while he fussed around with Dvy’s locks. Something about learning how to braid -- he knew when it’s utter bullshit, by the way -- which was probably a front to justify soothing him with the one thing Ryland knew Dvy was weak for.

And weak to it he was. He took a deep breath, exhaled, and allowed Ryland’s fingers to rake through his jumbled-up emotions. “I didn’t think I’d hate having my bloods done. At least, not in this way. Back on Eden, we have equipment that makes this a lot less… gruesome.” Dvy pointed at the straw leading into sample bottles after sample bottles. Never mind the needle in his vein. “I guess I was fine with a little bit of blood before they threw me in an ocean full of it. That kind of shit does fuck with you, I guess. While I was wrangling myself free from the meat creature, blood was rising up to my knee through the hull breach. I should have died then, crushed from the pressure. Guess it was right, it wants me alive. Something to inoculate.”

“Gross,” he mumbled after. “Nothing loves you like a mycelium could.” Dvy canted his head to the side, his free hand resting on Ryland’s knee. “How are you feeling now? Better? You know we can take the day off and just relax, right? It thrives from your excitement. It’s like a… a really deprived child. Acts out for attention, thrives from it whether it’s positive or negative. Can’t reinforce its behaviour by reactively giving it what it wants, it’d only teach it to do more of that. And we can’t risk our sleep cycle over this.”

“Or so I assume anyway, OW!” Dvy winced as the needle was pulled away, and a smaller mechanical arm jabbed the site with a cotton ball. “Hey! Bedside manners!”

‘Unidentified request.’

“Now I know you know more than basic commands, I taught you to be a bit gentle,” he waved a finger at Armando, which the nannybot answered by swerving away, placing all sample bottles into a sample box.

rocky listened patiently to grace’s whining. nothing that the human said made the eridian change his mind: grace was safest in the dome. but something about grace’s last statement seemed to touch something within rocky, whose carapace tilted downward in thought. if rocky didn’t have the ability to create and design, he would probably throw a fit, too.

they could create a transparent xenonite extension onto the dome to allow grace to see erid and eliminate a panel or two from the inside to build a dome-like window he could walk into if he wanted to see erid, without messing up the atmosphere they had worked so hard to perfect for him.

but, even if the eridians succeeded, what would he see? erid’s atmosphere was so dense that light didn’t penetrate through to the surface. the eridians could work with a lack of light because the eyeless species used passive sonar to “see”, so they didn’t need light to see. grace, however, needed light, so they had made him artificial sun and moonlight which ran on a day/night cycle to simulate earth’s day/night cycle.

“…you say you stay put; you stay put,” rocky insisted in his melodic language, tapping one of his five limbs against the sand a few times for emphasis. rocky meant business: he didn’t tolerate excuses, and he wanted an apology! soon, though, the tension left his limbs and he began to walk to one wall of the dome, anticipating that grace would follow. when he reached it, he tapped on it, then turned back to grace.

“dome keep grace safe in rocky atmosphere. some fauna big big big, would crush you,” he began to explain, but it was hard to explain what eridian fauna was like when he couldn’t see and was unaware of the lack of light. “no go outside dome in xenonite suit, could get hurt and you die. i am afraid of grace get hurt and die.” when they had worked so hard to get grace comfortable and surviving on erid, rocky wanted to make sure that he lived a good life and didn’t have it cut short in the name of scientific curiosity.

but, through rocky’s own fear, he wondered if grace was becoming unhappy due to his lack of ability to see beyond the dome. that thought made rocky feel something worse than fear: the sickening, sinking feeling of guilt. was his own selfish need to see the other live making grace’s happiness plummet?

"you are not the first," david remarks, offering ryland a smile that does not quite reach his eyes. at least in this instance the human was aware of his ignorance, much to david's delight.

the synthetic however doesn't push his feelings on the topic further, his head tilting as he regards ryland again.