#parent death

He finally passed out after watching her clean dozens of guns and over a hundred knives, and woke up to find her slumped over on the couch, her eyes half-open, her skin sallow and gray. The longer someone hangs on after they should have died, after the other half of their soul dies, the deader they look when they finally let go. She looked like she'd been dead for days, because technically, she had. Her stubborn mind just hadn't caught up to the fact until then.

Simon never really forgives himself for falling asleep and missing her last minutes alive. He wonders sometimes if she waited for him to be unconscious before she released her grip, but he can never be sure. It doesn't matter, anyway. Nothing matters.

The only good thing the Quiet Rapture did was make the chances of finding your soulmate skyrocket, for people who wanted that sort of thing. After all, everyone who was left had a match in this new, diminished world – everyone else was gone. Eden was against it, but there were only so many people in the universe after it happened, and soulmates kept finding each other. Mostly they'd keep it on the down-low, but sometimes Simon could tell because they tended to hang out together on station, but never went on a mission together. That was strictly forbidden, for obvious reasons. If every lucky hit from the COI took out two of their field agents on the same attack run at once, the whole mission would be likely to collapse. Instead, every now and then people just dropped in the halls, and whoever was around would pick them up and drag them to soil processing, cursing the loss of another good body out there in the stars. No one else understood the importance of feeding the soil. They never got their own bodies back from the field.

Simon finds himself wondering, after he's locked into the sub, after he realizes they were never going to let him out, about where his soulmate will be when it happens. He's thought about it before – as a kid in training, running missions on COI stations when a bullet gets a little too close or he nearly misses his grip spacewalking, and especially after Filament Station. He'd been too busy to think about it during the Filament mission, but after, both hating and marveling at the fact that he was still alive, he'd let himself realize that somewhere, his soulmate had just dodged death again, and didn't even know it.

Now, though, there's no other option. He's going to die down here. The captain – Ava – gave him thirty minutes to get the data from the destroyed SM-8 and get out, but there's no way he's going to make it. He's got shadows crowding in at the corners of his eyes, and he feels it like a punch now every time he pushes the button to take a picture – the radiation is getting to him, eating away invisibly at his insides. There's more blood soaking through the bandages on his arms than there should be, and he's too scared to look and see what his skin might be doing – sloughing off, probably. He's seen radiation burns before.

He's coughing up blood every few breaths, and he's hearing voices, and he's dying, he knows he is, he's going to die before he gets out of the cave tunnels again. The map he drew is blurring before his eyes, there's blood dripping down the walls, and he can't stand up straight. Ava's going to have to get another convict to try this again, because he's not going to last.

So it's a bit of a shock to hear her clean and clear over the radio, shouting his name. It startles him so badly that he sways on his feet, stumbling and nearly falling until he catches himself on a pipe, the metal coated in sticky blood under his hands. He'd forgotten he gave her his name.

“I – I think I got it,” he tells her, barely cognizant of her babbling in the background. “It's not – I don't think I'm okay, I think I might be –”

“Simon, shut up and listen to me!” she screams, and he stops talking.

“I need you to get something from the crawl space,” she tells him, and he feels like crying. Hasn't he done enough? What does it matter that there's something down there he needs to keep safe? He can't keep himself safe. She sure as hell can't, especially sounding as panicked as she does.

“You can't be serious,” he says, his voice cracking with stress and exhaustion. “Ava, I just went through hell to get this –”

That other voice breaks in then, the one that he thought was the crew of another sub, the one that was stolen by the thing that's hunting him. He staggers to the back of the sub where the camera button has been overgrown by bubbling red veins of tissue, snapping picture after picture. On the screen is an image of the creature, the monster he's been running from – and between its teeth is a sub just like his.

For a moment he thinks it is his sub, that the camera's come disconnected somehow and he's looking at himself. But then he remembers that Ava told him she'd come to get him herself, and realizes what he's looking at.

“Do you have it?” Ava is shouting. “Tell me you have it. Simon? Simon, you have to go, now!”

“We had a deal,” Simon rasps stupidly, his head full of fuzzy static as the camera snaps picture after picture of the last moments of someone else's life.

Ava screams in frustration, and he knows it's his fault, but he can barely get his brain to understand what he's seeing right now. Any form of higher thinking, including making and executing plans, is long gone.

“Not everyone gets to be saved!” Ava shouts, as if Simon doesn't know that.

“You said you'd get me out of here,” Simon pleads. “That was the deal!”

You can still redeem yourself, the creature whispers, holding Ava's sub, her life, in its teeth. Destroy the data. None can be allowed to see the light again...

“Simon, please!” Ava cries. “Listen to me! It’s worth it. You deserve your freedom, and I’m sorry – I'm sorry I can’t give that to you. But it’s worth it. It is more than me. It’s more than you. This is bigger than everything –”

“I don't understand,” Simon tells her, as the camera goes off again and again, as nausea worms its way deep in his gut and his head spins.

“Please,” Ava says again, begging him, and that's not right, that's not the way it should be. It's always been him begging her for his life, but now it's her begging him to do...something. To try something, to attempt to make this nightmare worth the cost.

“The black box,” she continues. “It's in the crawl space. You have to save it. You're the only one who can do this. Simon? Simon! Can you hear me?”

“I hear you,” he says through numb lips. I see you, he remembers saying, years or minutes or hours ago.

“Simon, please,” she begs again, the radio crackling and stuttering. “Finish the plan. Get the black box, get it to – oh god – oh, no, please – SIMON!”

The next image on the screen shows the monster's teeth interlocked, chunks of the sub caught mid-spiral as it implodes inside the creature's jaws. But Simon doesn't see it, because he's on his knees, his chest hollowed out, his heart run through by a frail spear of agony.

Oh, he thinks. That's what it's like. And then, immediately, he realizes what his mother said so long ago is absolutely true. I need to keep busy.

He coughs weakly, and blood splatters across the already-bloody floor panels of the sub, but his heart starts up again. His extremities are numb – he can't feel his legs below his knees or his arms below his elbows, but he needs his hands for this, so he shakes out his limbs until his fingers tingle like he's come back from a too-long spacewalk, like they were freezing and now they're waking up again. Every breath is torturous, dragging his wet lungs over broken glass, and he feels tears squeeze out of his eyes, because this isn't fair. His soulmate was supposed to drop dead in an instant when he breathed his last – they weren't supposed to die before him, screaming in an imploding submarine in the depths of an ocean of blood while he watched, blind and deaf and unknowing.

“Fuck this,” he rasps, on his hands and knees through sheer force of will and an existential fury at the creature that took his soulmate from him before he even knew what she was. How could he? They never touched skin-to-skin, and now they never will.

Her blood is on your hands, the monster's voice whispers through the intercom, or maybe through the sea of blood itself. How many more bodies would you climb over to save yourself?

“Wasn't trying to do that,” Simon mutters, focusing on every heartbeat even though his chest feels caved in, even though his limbs are still tingling even as he crawls to the floor panel he'd opened before to restart the sub. He knows where the black box is already. He's not sure Ava knew that.

Always thinking of the life you’ll never get back, the creature says, and he changes direction in a sudden burst of spite. Thinking of the mother who wouldn’t even recognize the killer she spawned. Or maybe she’d be proud?

Simon hauls himself to his feet using the pipes as handholds, wiping the bloody gobs of tissue off his palms as he staggers drunkenly to the console. A glance back at the camera screen shows the creature is still in the same place, still chewing through chunks of the submarine that should have been Simon's salvation, and instead is the disaster that's sealed his fate for good.

Half-measures, the monster hisses, half-committed, never enough! There is nothing else for us now!

“What do you know?” Simon snarls, hunched painfully over the console. “You're just a piece of shit that doesn't know it's dead. What do you know of what it's like to lose a –”

We know more than enough, Butcher, the monster shrieks in its stolen voice. The light must be forgotten!

“You think I'm just gonna give you what you want? Fuck that, and fuck you! You wanna eat me, too? Come and try!” And, with waning strength, Simon slams the throttle forward. The sub groans around him as it accelerates, but the monster is too large to maneuver quickly, and he's thrown over the control panel as the sub slams into something, the proximity sensors screaming.

But the creature's voice is also screaming, and the camera button is still being held down by viscera, flashing photo after photo, blasting radiation in a wide radius in front of the sub. Simon throws the throttle back, then slams it forward again, ramming the monster a second time. The proximity alarms are a single tone until he disengages and hurls the sub into reverse, blocking the throttle with a binder again. He's got to know if the creature catches up before he completes the last task he'll ever finish in his life.

The monster screams his name as the sub retreats, but it sounds hurt. Good, he thinks viciously, wrapping an arm around his chest as he staggers toward the back of the sub. Let it hurt. Let it feel one iota of this pain.

His head is pounding. His chest throbs as if each heartbeat is an effort, and every breath scrapes over agonized tissue. How did his mother do this for three days? She must have either deeply loved his father, or truly hated him. Simon's not sure, and he can't think about that right now. He can barely think about anything, except for the all-encompassing horror of the truth: Ava is his soulmate, and Ava is dead.

He hasn't got long.

But he'll admit it's tempting to give up when he levers the floor panel free and is greeted with a flooded lower compartment, sloshing edge-to-edge with crimson blood that would be steaming if the sub itself wasn't already so hot.

“Oh, fuck me,” Simon whispers, then clutches madly at the medallion around his wrist – borrowed and indebted to a previous occupant, some deceased brother who never made it back to the grove, whose body was never turned to soil as it should have been, as he would have wanted.

Simon has no illusions about his own body's fate. There's no soil at the bottom of a bloody ocean, but he can still try to make a difference by following his dying soulmate's instructions. Get the black box. Get it out. It's bigger than us.

He takes a deep breath and plunges into the blood.

Immediately he has to focus again on staying alive. The blood clings to him, crimson liquid dragging at his limbs as he tries to move. He knows where the black box is. It's a straight shot. He can get there and back. He just has to move.

Even though moving is so terribly hard, even though thinking is so terribly hard, Simon pushes forward, gasping for ragged, painful breaths against the floorplates where there's still a little air. At one point he wonders if he's already dead – but then his reaching fingers slam into something solid, barking his numb knuckles and sending shooting pains up to his elbows. He fades out for a moment, and it's only the echo of Ava's voice in his ears that drags him back.

“It's more than me,” he mumbles, gritting his teeth as he grabs the handle of the black box and tugs. “It's – more than me –”

The box scrapes loose with effort, then falls through the blood and nearly cracks Simon's ankle when it hits the floor of the crawlspace. Simon turns and drags it back toward the light of the camera, still flashing regularly above the crawlspace's entrance. He's getting closer, but the blood is rising. It's in his mouth, his eyes, his hair, weighing him down and dragging him back. The black box feels like it's a thousand pounds, and Simon wonders for a moment about letting go.

You're the only one who can do this, Ava says.

Well. Okay then. If she's sure.

Simon heaves himself out of the flooded crawlspace and breathes for the first time in half a minute, hauling the black box up with a surge of furious adrenaline to clang onto the floor panels next to the computer. He has to try three times to drag himself out, though – his strength is fading. He hasn't got long.

A glance at the camera screen shows a wash of red, so Simon wipes blood from his eyes and looks again. He can't see any part of the creature, but he can still faintly hear it as it pursues him. He can't remember where the closest canyon wall is, but if they ram a cliff or ram the creature, the end result is the same. Simon isn't getting out of this alive.

He's not strong enough to climb to his feet anymore, so he drags himself closer to the blood-streaked black box and reaches over it to pull the life vest closer. It had seemed comical when he'd first seen it – how was a single life vest supposed to help him if there was some disaster in the depth gauge's red zone? – but he's grateful for it now, because maybe it gives him a chance.

There aren't enough buckles to hold the black box in, though, and it drops out of the life vest's embrace immediately. Simon despairs for a moment, heart thudding miserably in his chest, until he catches a glimpse of his knife harness, blood-soaked and bobbing in the wash at the base of the wall.

Yeah, okay, that'll do. That seems apt.

Simon's heaving for breath by the time he gets the harness buckled around the life vest, but watching the black box float on the surging waves of blood that lap against his legs is worth it.

“Please keep this safe, okay, mom?” Simon whispers, patting the knife sheathe that's pressed tightly into the orange fabric. “It's more than me. It's more than me.”

The monster's screams are getting closer. You have nowhere to hide! We can hear you!

“It's more than me,” Simon mumbles, tipping his head back and rolling his aching skull against the wall to squint weakly at the camera screen. The next image flash shows the monster accelerating toward the sub. “It's more than me...”

The proximity sensors start ticking, but Simon can't see which direction they're signaling from his place on the floor at the back of the sub. He can only listen helplessly as the ticking increases in pace until it transforms into a buzz, and then something hits the sub and slams Simon into a wall.

It saw you, Simon! The monster wails. It wants you to do this! Can you not see that?

For a moment, Simon almost gives up. He's on his side, half-submerged in blood that's filling his mouth, his ears, muffling his hearing and his sense of direction. The sub is slammed again, and he sees the binder he'd used to hold the throttle in place go flying. The sub is no longer moving under its own power, and Simon is right there with it.

It's worth it, Ava says, or he remembers, or both. It's more than me. It's more than you. It's bigger than everything... It's worth it.

Simon drags in a breath through shattered lungs, needles of pain filling his chest, his throat. How dare this monster tell him he's not enough? How dare it call him a butcher? It butchered the only chance at a future he would ever have, before he even knew it was there.

In front of his face, the black box floats by, the life vest's light shining over the bloody waves. At the front of the sub, the oxygen meter ticks up, the third light flickering back on.

Your ship is alive, the monster howls. Can't you see this is a mercy?

Something in Simon snaps.

“Fine,” he growls, throat full of sand and broken glass, pushing himself up onto hands and knees again, then staggering into a tormented crouch. “Fine! You want the Butcher?”

There are massive ivory spikes protruding through the floor of the sub, and Simon doesn't even know when that happened, but he knows teeth when he sees them. With a surge of angry spite, he yanks the fire extinguisher from the wall and swings it overarm at the closest tooth. It clangs off and nearly sends him ass over teakettle, but somehow, impossibly, he manages to keep his feet and swings the extinguisher again.

“Come on! Fucking – die!”

The tooth snaps, revealing a pink-tinged yellow core. The monster screams, and it sounds like it's inside Simon's head. He drops the extinguisher to clap both hands over his ears, yelling in pain. The sub lurches, and Simon stumbles, fetching up against the pipes running along the sub's walls. Before he can think about pulling away, tendrils of viscera wrap around his wrist, surging across his shoulders and stretching his other arm out to connect it to the opposite set of pipes.

Simon's feet dangle and he yells in pain. Somehow, he can still hurt from external forces – he hadn't thought it was possible to feel anything through the agony of this tremendous, soul-deep loss. Instinctively, like a fox caught in a trap, he fights the hold, kicking one foot up and levering his hand free, even though he leaves what feels like a palmful of skin behind on the burning pipe. Then he turns to the other arm, his left arm with the cracked medallion pinned below layers of tendon or fascia or whatever this shit is. Simon plants his boots against the base of the pipe and leans back, heaving his whole bodyweight against the pull of the blood that's coming through the walls of the sub.

With an alarmingly shocking wrench, he pulls free and goes flying as the sub tilts again, slamming back-first into the bulkhead. His breath is knocked out of him and he flails for a moment, jaw clenched, pink spit bubbling between his teeth. Something is wrong with his balance, and there's a shape dangling from the pipes that wasn't there before...

Simon looks down with muted horror and sees the ragged end of his sleeve hanging over shredded flesh, strings of skin sticking to his torso and blood dribbling from the open wound to drip into the flood lapping against his hips. The surface seems to shine where his blood joins it – but maybe that's just the light of the life vest spinning by as it surfs another frothy wave of red.

Simon thinks he should be more frightened, more terrified at the loss of a limb – but he's already alive after his soulmate's died. A limb is nothing compared to that.

We are salvation! the monster screams, and more teeth punch through the walls.

His mother made it over three days without her soulmate. Simon's not going to make it more than thirty minutes – but even that is incredible, in a universe where most people drop dead instantly from the shock when their soulmate dies. The black box is floating, nearly chest height now as Simon tries to shift, to move, to do – something –

But there are cords around his legs, and he knows the same tendrils that tore his arm from his body have hold of his legs now, pinning him to the floor of the sub and preventing him from keeping his head above the surface for much longer. He's pissed off that this is how it's going to end, after everything. He's always wanted to live. He just wanted to live.

We can save you, the creature says, as its teeth bear down and the sub's ceiling begins to buckle, metal groaning in protest. We can save everyone...within us!

Simon's face feels strange, the blood lapping against his left cheek cooler than his right as he fights to keep his head up even as he's held down. He sputters and spits out blood, and wants to say something poignant to the monster – something about how it hadn't saved his soulmate, something about how it doesn't know what salvation is – but he can't focus enough to think. The depth gauge is dark. The oxygen meter has ticked up to show three out of four lights on. The proximity sensors are screaming, all of them at once, a shrieking tone of warning that there's something out there.

Simon knows. He saw it, and now it's killing him.

Sparks of light seems to dance over the surface of the flood, but it could be neurons misfiring in his dying brain. He's choking on blood, and with the camera's light submerged at last, everything is red. The sub's overhead lights flicker, on the verge of going out, but the life vest swirls by, its tender little light still glowing.

That'll have to be enough, Simon realizes as the blood washes over his head, as the sub's ceiling begins to fold inward. He tried, and he'll die, but maybe this data will do something, will save someone.

It's worth it, Ava promises. You deserve your freedom, and I'm sorry...

His ears fill with blood and he can't hear anything but his own muffled heartbeat pounding in his aching head, slowing as his breath runs out, slowing as his life burns down.

I'm sorry, too, he thinks. I wish we had more time. I wish there was more –

Everything goes dark as the sub's power is sundered, as the sub's hull is breached and all the pressure of the depths of the sea comes rushing in – but in the last moments of his dumb, doomed life, Simon thinks he sees a blooming light, shining brighter than anything in a starless universe has a right to be, burning through his eyelids, burning through everything.

We live, a voice says, and Simon isn't sure who said it, but he knows it's true. Someone will live because his soulmate died. Someone will live because he died. In the end, that's all that matters. He tried, he got the data free, and that means somewhere, someone will live.

The light burns brighter, hotter, consuming him, the sub, the creature, everything. Distantly, the monster screams, and he knows it's dying at the same time he is, and that alone is worth the price.

It's worth it.

It has to be.