#saltsart

After being comforted by Grace after his nightmares, Simon's beginning to open up and slowly accept that he's actually safe. But it comes out as stalking and just looking at Grace and Rocky from various corners since he doesn't really know how to start a dialogue. For Rocky it's fine since yk he can "see" him from anywhere, but when he attempts to talk to Grace... Let's just say Simon walks very quietly and Grace got very used to being the only human on the Hail Mary...

So, like with Simon, 99% of toxic blood (blood contaminated by the eldrich being) has disappeared from the moons when transported to the "perfect timeline" and what's left is just what was the bottom of of the ocean, the bones, some tissue and the submarine orbiting around it, with Simon in it, but they don't know that yet shhhh. They discovered the moon first and decided to name it The Rib (through much discussion and deliberation, Grace wanted to be all sciency bc he sucks at naming stuff and name it USO-BM as in Unidentified Space Object - Bone Moon, Rocky said it's Boring, look who's talking)

In this au and in my opinion on bloodymary in general (relative to when they meet) neither of them are comfortable with touching at first, even if both of them are touch starved. Hail Mary discovers the deserted stray moon about a year in on the way to Erid, Grace wasn't a touchy person before the mission so he's not really affected besides being a bit sad sometimes

When they find Simon, it's bizarre on itself, but he's also a stranger who seems to have memory problems and is very confused and scared, touching and hugging is not on his mind at all, he wants to help the poor soul. If it means touching fine, but at this point he knows nothing about this man

And Simon at this point is in a strange place, with a stranger who speaks weirdly, an alien, has holes in his memory (for now), he's horrifically mutated and hurting. He's struggling with fight or flight response constantly because he can't run away and he doesn't want to hurt the kind stranger, so he's stuck in this static state, barely understanding his surroundings and barely coherent. He doesn't look for any unnecessary contact

It doesn't look that way in the art, but he presses into Grace's hand not because he just suddenly relaxes out of nowhere, he's a bit confused at this time and he also thinks it's appropriate to do so. And Grace is startled (even flustered a bit) at this, but then his stomach just drops as he observers and undertands the state Simon's in

It's going to be many months after this before they start to initiate touch at all

There will be a lot of this in my au in the future and i plan to explore it a lot deeper than this, like his interactions w/ Simon and Rocky being very awkward for one and a lot easier with the other for a multitude of reasons. I also think if any of y'all directly follow my sketches on this au, you should pay attention to colors :)

I think he would experiment with pronouns at some point, but it entirely depends on which identity i decide for this au (leaning into agender or just unlabeled). But i think his gender expression is more leaning into clothing and the new freedom from human social rules. I mean if you're on another planet with the only other human there being from an alternate timeline 200 years in the future, why not find more positives? Plus Eridians don't have genders and they don't care about human languages that much and that's the majority of his social circle, so who cares if he uses he/him? It might as well be it/its or xe/xem there's no real difference at this point.