#leamf writes

Grace doesn't know why he asks. His mouth is always moving faster than his brain, always, always, always, always getting him into trouble, always asking questions better left alone. 

Grace knows this is a question better left alone, knows that Simon tends to conceal these parts of himself for reasons Grace can't quite pick apart— he can guess, sure, but he doesn't know. 

And oh, how Grace yearns to know. 

Simon swallows, dropping his gaze to the bathroom floor. He knew that Grace was there, of course— it seemed like he always knew where Grace was in the house. Simon could tilt his head and chitter just barely low enough for Grace to hear, sending soundwaves through the walls and waiting for them to come back. 

Slowly, so slowly, Simon picks his head back up. He exhales in a rush, pressing his lips into a thin line before nodding. His eyes finally lock back onto Grace's, rich brown irises utterly unblinking. 

Unblinking by human standards, that is. But Simon wasn't quite human, was he? 

Grace takes a tentative step forward, telegraphing his movements in an effort to make sure Simon didn't feel backed into a corner. That was probably the best course of action when you had a predator in your bathroom. 

Grace steps in front of Simon, cautious of the way the other man seemed to back further against the bathroom counter. He didn't seem panicked, though— just nervous. 

"Hey," Grace murmurs. He holds a hand up in the small gap between them, palm upturned. An offering. "You don't have to, y'know." 

Simon shakes his head. "No, I, I want to. It's just-" 

Simon growls under his breath. It's a raspy, tonal noise tempered with frustration. It reminds Grace of whale song. 

"I want to. I'm just…" Simon carefully lifts his own hand. It hovers in the air between them, movements hesitant before eventually dropping onto Grace's own. Grace is interlocking their fingers the second he gets the permission. 

"I don't want you to be scared of me." 

"I won't be." Grace says on instinct, the words threaded with conviction. 

"Fucking liar-" Simon's lips draw back in a half-snarl, exposing rows of too-sharp teeth that he always kept tucked away. A hiss begins to writhe out of Simon's throat before he freezes, guilt flashing across his expression. "Fuck. Fuck. I'm sorry, Grace, fuck, I'm sorry-" 

"Hey." Grace squeezes their hands. "Look at me." 

Simon ignores him but Grace persists. "Simon, look at me. Do I look scared?" 

Simon's hand tightens in Grace's own— like he's scared to look. Grace waits. 

Slowly, always so slowly, Simon picks his head back up. There's jewel-red blood beading on his bottom lip, flesh giving way beneath viscous incisors. 

Simon stares at Grace, eyes wide and expression blank in… disbelief, maybe. 

"No," He breathes. Simon's nails dig into the back of Grace's hand hard enough to hurt. Grace doesn't say a word. 

Grace smiles, eyes crinkled gently. "I'm not scared of you, Simon. Whatever… whatever you think you are. I'm not scared of it." Grace swallows around the ball in his throat. "Or you." 

"You should be." 

"But I'm not." 

The bathroom fan whirs above them. The almost sickly light in the small space casts sharp, unnatural shadows and angles on Simon's face, highlighting scars and places where the skin is a little closer to scale. 

He's the most beautiful thing Grace has ever seen. 

"You gonna let me see?" 

Simon stares up at Grace. He blinks slowly.

Grace's return to consciousness feels like floating in warm syrup. Sensation returns gradually, the slip of sheets against Grace's bare skin and the firmness of a body beneath his. There's an arm wrapped around Grace's waist, firm and fast in its possession as Grace sprawls atop the other man. 

Grace sighs, pressing his face into Simon's neck and drawing in a slow breath. His lungs are flooded with the scent of iron and shared shampoo, a clean musk that makes the anxious critter in Grace's mind settle every single time. Not that Grace is anxious right now— Grace can think of little other than the rise and fall of the broad chest beneath his, a calloused hand lazily tracing the knobs of Grace's spine. 

Neither of them speak. They're both awake, content to simply luxuriate in the undemanding presence of the other. Their bedroom is lit by a sunrise just as sleepy as the pair, reds and oranges falling over blankets deemed favorite enough to earn a place on their bed. 

The hand fluttering over Grace's back disappears, an action that begins to earn a protest before Simon is slipping his hand into Grace's hair. Simon drags his nails along Grace's scalp, twisting through soft strands of gold with a practiced ease that makes Grace purr with contentment. 

Simon chuckles as Grace drags his cheek along Simon's collarbone, stubble scraping over soft skin in sleepy delight. Simon continues his ministrations, movements sluggish but no less affectionate as the pair gradually wake with the rising sun. 

Grace lets one of his hands wander along the side of Simon's ribcage that he can reach, the tips of Grace's fingers trailing over the thin material of a borrowed shirt and finding the dips and divots where flesh softens between bone. Simon grumbles above him, a half-hearted protest pressed to the top of Grace's head. 

Grace giggles sleepily, delighting in the reaction of the other man enough to redouble his efforts. Grace is intentionally light with how he skirts his fingers up Simon's side, grinning into Simon's neck when the man jolts beneath him. 

"Quit that." Simon mumbles, voice hoarse with disuse. He sounds far from displeased, more of a fond protest for the sake of protestation as his nails dip to scratch at the nape of Grace's neck. 

The placation works easily, Grace dropping his hand and humming as he leans into the gentle touch. Simon makes a small, pleased noise, clearly delighting in how pliable Grace became when lavished with enough affection and Grace is far from complaint.

Simon ducks just enough to press his lips to the top of Grace's head. A smile blooms across Grace's face, a delight so pure and simple and raw with affection that it makes Grace feel like his chest is going to burst. 

Grace opens his eyes and immediately squeezes them shut once again, recoiling away from the source of light and wincing as his body protests the motion. Grace groans, head swimming and body aching as he parses through thoughts that move like syrup. 

Grace has been drifting in and out of conciousness for… 

…he's not sure, exactly. It's hard to say where days began and ended when Grace's only metric of time was how often he awoke, managing a few seconds of painful awareness before he was dragged back into a fitful sleep. 

Grace is awake now, though. He almost wishes he wasn't. 

Grace opens his eyes once again, squinting up at the white above him as he tries to reorient himself. He blinks a couple of times, weakly raising an arm to rub at his face.

A ceiling. Grace is looking up at a ceiling. He's lying in bed, looking up at a ceiling. 

Oh, yeah, I'm dead. There's no way the Eridians could have made all this so fast. 

There's no way they could have made beds this soft, blankets that smell like apples and iron and cushion the way my bones protrude. 

There's a whirring at Grace's side. He turns his head, squinting as something moves in his peripheral. 

I thought you were supposed to be healed of all ailments in Heaven. Do glasses follow you into the afterlife? 

There's a tugging on Grace's forearm, a slight pinch that's gone as quickly as it came. Grace is already finding himself exhausted once again, pulled back towards the tumultuous deep— 

"What is 2+2?" 

Grace reels back as a mechanical claw appears in front of his face. He scowls, hand weakly raising to swat it away. It complies, receding back to wherever it came and leaving Grace alone once again. 

He's not alone, though. Grace isn't sure how he knows that. 

Grace rubs at his face, atrophied muscles weakly protesting as Grace moves for the first time in far too long. He's tempted to sink back into the bed, to indulge himself in the meager comfort when— 

There's a laugh. 

It's muffled but it's distinguishable, low and softly delighted. It's the most beautiful thing Grace has ever heard. 

Grace moves towards the source of the noise unthinkingly, rolling onto his side beneath sheets on a bed that feels far too forgiving. It's an arduous process to use a body so intimately familiar with comas. 

Grace squints, blinking rapidly as his pupils adjust to the light. He's looking out of a window, he could gauge that much, brain puzzling through the contrast of a wall decorated with frames and a pane of glass in the middle. Grace blinks, and blinks, and— 

Oh. I am dead. 

Grace thought a lot about what Heaven might be for him during those last few weeks on the Hail Mary.

(Grace knew he wasn't getting into any kind of good afterlife but it was a nice distraction from the way his skin drew over his ribcage and how his hair fell out in clumps.)

For some reason, Grace always returned to the Garden of Eden. 

Grace wasn't religious. He wasn't raised in any kind of faith and never felt particularly called to choose one— but the tale was always uniquely compelling.

A bright and beautiful place with no worries, where food was plentiful and companionship was always to be had in your other half. A utopia in every sense of the word, only to be shattered by humanity's inherent greed. 

It was a tale fascinating for Grace because he knew exactly how it would end for him. The apple would be just a little too tempting to resist, a little too shiny and appealing with the secrets it promised to reveal. 

Maybe this was a test. Maybe this was the universe throwing him a bone and saying, hey, you know better. Here's your shot. Don't screw it up. 

Because there, just outside, reaching up into a lush tree just feet away from the window was a man. A man with hair that tumbled down his shoulders, silhouette draped in soft materials that made no effort to conceal places where flesh gave way and had since healed over. 

I'm dead, Grace thinks, thoughts echoed in tremendum. I'm dead. This is the Garden of Eden. 

The man outside plucks an apple. 

And there's my Adam. 

--

Beep.

Beep.

Beep.

Eva Stratt observes the heart monitor, watching as the green line jumps up and down rhythmically. The machine reads a BPM of 65. SpO2 reads 99. By all accounts, Ryland was perfectly healthy.

And it was a shame.

Eva sits in a plastic chair, one leg crossed over the other as she watches the man in the hospital bed and follows the slow movements of his chest. There's a scrape on Ryland's cheek— likely from when he was chased down.

She doesn't feel guilty about it. Guilt was an emotion meant to drive change. It was an emotion that forced hindsight, that said, "You could have done better. You could have been stronger, smarter, faster. You should have done this differently."

Eva feels guilty about very little. She's said and done things that— a few decades ago, when she still had a spark in her eyes and the world in the palm of her hands— would have revolted her. She's had a direct hand in things that, in the past, would have encouraged her to take out the bottle in her cabinet labeled 'VENLAFAXINE HCL 225mg' and down it in one go.

She's had to come to terms with quite a lot. If there is a hell— if it is not the planet she lives on and is instead another, nebulous location— Eva knows that is where she will go. She is content with that fact.

Humans are weak. It is not a criticism. It is a fact. Humans were motivated by survival— their survival, individually. Humans were animals who reacted on instinct, who were entirely motivated by making it to the next day.

Eva is not concerned with the next day. She is concerned with the next decade, the next century. She is concerned with the children who streamed out of Ryland's classroom with bright laughter and wide, oblivious grins.

She has accepted her role in ensuring the future of these children. It makes her hated. It makes her reviled. It makes people confused and scared and, "Why, why, why are you doing this please don't do this-"

Ryland Grace was one of the few that understood. He knew what it was like to be misunderstood. He did not see Eva as cruel because she did what needed to be done. He did not look at her with the fear that so many others had. She will miss that.

Eva does not lie to herself. She knows that she will miss him. She will miss his intelligence. She will miss his— admittedly endearing— fumbling. She will miss the ease with which he smiled in the face of adversity.

Yet Eva does not feel guilty about putting him on the ship. It is what must be done. It is the only chance humanity has to see another sunny day, another generation filled with beauty and warmth and the desperation to survive.

"I will not apologize for this," Eva begins, voice unwavering. Ryland does not respond, eyes closed and oxygen mask strapped to his face. She continues, "We both know it is necessary. But,"

She swallows. Her eyes tingle in the way she only allows after 10:30 PM, when she lays in bed and tries to find something to be guilty for.

Beep.

Beep.

Beep.

He just appears out of the void one day with a verified channel, standing in the costume in a random driveway somewhere and is like, “My PR agent says I need to interact with the public more. Today I’m showing you how to change your car’s oil so you’re not paying out the ass for something that takes less than an hour.”

He’s explaining everything really well, actually, talking about the different kinds of oil and why it’s important to get it changed regularly. Obviously the channel does really well (the amount of dead dad jokes he makes while deftly keeping the dirty oil off of his hands makes him a pop culture icon overnight), so he start regularly posting household maintenance tutorials.

They get popular for being useful, sure, but that’s not the main reason. No, the real reason the Mecha Man youtube channel gains millions of followers overnight is because of Robert’s habit to huff and grunt and swear under his breath when he’s doing manual labor.

He sounds, frankly, like a whore, pausing to catch his breath and panting as the particularly stubborn showerhead refuses to budge. He gets it off eventually, showing a variety of products and tools that viewers can use if they’re having the same problem.

Flambae doesn't think he can be blamed for how long it took the words to sink in. He was tired, he was sore, he was fucking sick of wrapping these fucking plates in bubble wrap. He barely looks up from his task as Robert walks into the kitchen holding a years-old moving box. 

"Thought that stuff was already in the new garage?" Flambae asks absentmindedly, watching appreciatively as his boyfriend balances the box in one arm and wipes the sweat off his brow with another. One of Flambae's t-shirts hangs off Robert's shoulders, loose and well-worn after years of thievery. 

Robert shrugs, dropping the box on the kitchen table with a loud clatter. Flambae pauses, eyes narrowing slightly at the specific, familiar clinking and shuffling. His hands still from where he had been moving to cut more bubble wrap as Robert spins the box in a circle, head tilting to the side as he tries to gauge the contents veiled by cardboard. 

"Well, it's not one of my boxes. I always got mine from liquor stores." 

I know, Flambae thinks miserably, I was the one who actually unpacked all the shit you shoved into a closet. Robert spins the box this way and that, head tilting to the side as Flambae watches on from behind the kitchen counter. It's relatively nondescript, just a plain beige box, taped together with clear moving tape and a hasty label scrawled in black sharpie. 

Robert shrugs, nail scraping the edge of the tape in a bid to remove it. "Guess we gotta open it and see. It's weird, I found it way in the back of your closet. Almost missed it." 

He's got the tape halfway off by the time Flambae realizes what exactly his boyfriend is about to unearth. The plate Flambae had been wrapping hits the counter with a worrying clank! as he whips around the corner in a scramble to make it to the table in time. 

He's too late. Robert tosses the tape to the side and lifts the flaps, nose wrinkling at the plume of dust that shoots up. "The fuck…?"

It was easy enough to run away to Canada, right? Flambae could fly, he wouldn't even have to bother with the passport stuff. His parole officer would understand. Actually, he wouldn't, the guy was such a bitch-

"Chad."

"Yes, beloved?"

"Mhm. Mind telling me why you have a box of Mecha Man merch you never told me about?" A rifling of items, vinyl figures clinking against enamel pins shuffling against cardstock. "Specifically of Blue?"

"…I'm supportive of the arts." 

"…right." A shuffling of items once more. The crinkle of protective plastic over paper. "Woah, they were really generous with my dick size-"

He’s kept himself alive this long, sure, made it to his thirties without getting carbon monoxide poisoning or contracting scurvy, but he doesn’t actually know how to be an adult.

For most of his life he had taken it one day at a time. That was the most logical option, really. He can’t count how many times he tried to make an appointment or plans only to miss it when he had to go stop some asshole turning people into stone statues at the mall or whatever. It was just a bad idea to make commitments.

Was it depressing? Oh, for sure, but he was honest with himself. His lifestyle just wasn’t conducive to commitment. That’s why he didn’t buy furniture or clothes or any of the other things people seemed to have: it was a waste to buy something if he wouldn’t be there to use it tomorrow. All that money was going to the suit, anyways.

It isn’t until he’s chatting with the team over comms on a slow day that he realizes just how far he’s fallen behind. They’re talking about nothing, really, but it’s a nothing that he should understand. They’re discussing what model of washing machine to buy or which kind of laundry detergent is best and he starts panicking because he doesn’t know, he has no fucking idea.

No one taught him this stuff. It’s March, he realizes faintly, which means tax season is coming up. He’s never filed his taxes before. Fuck, were you supposed to file taxes if you were technically unemployed? How do you even go about filing taxes? He knows there’s a million services for it, but which one is the best? Which ones are scams?

What was the point in milks having percentages? How do you buy a car? You- do you need a license for that? What do you need to get a license? Oh, fuck, he thinks, I don’t know where my birth certificate is. His throat feels tight, a sparkling sensation that curled around his neck and made a home in his collarbone. Anxiety, he’s pretty sure.

The team is oblivious to his spiraling panic as he hunches over his desk and the weight of his circumstances fully sink in. While he was seeing pregnancy announcements from the people he went to high school with, Robert is switching tabs on his computer to look up what a PPO is.