I'm actually mentally unwell about bloodymary, Simon and Ryland. Si and Ry. Do you hear me? Am I going insane?
"Simon have two names question?" Rocky and Grace are talking about this. Grace continued to throw larger stones from the beach out to the rolling ocean - it wasn't calm enough to skip rocks, but he still enjoyed it. Rocky stood next to him.
"I... Don't think I ever asked him." Does this make Grace a bad person? No. He's been busy, okay?? Finding out you're NOT the only human stranded dozens of light years away from earth is weird enough, and the scientist in him was going crazy trying to figure out how Simon had even gotten here in the first place.
"No, I don't" Grace jumps, Rocky doesn't. Couldn't have warned him that he had walked in right behind them, could he. Simon had a way of stealthing around the biodome they now both had lived in for a few months. Rocky and Adrian, the most frequent visitors, as well as any other eridian visitors could hear where he was, of course, but if Grace was distracting them with his ramblings and Simon was being particularly quiet, he had seen them jump in surprise before. Not something Rocky would ever admit to, of course.
"You don't have a surname?" Grace felt bad that he wasn't surprised. Based on the stories he had told him about the state of humanity, he wasn't surprised that things like "surnames" fell through the cracks. Heck, with so few humans left, it wasn't like they needed surnames to help tell people apart in databases. There was probably only one Simon. He tried not think about it, the thought was beginning to make him angry again. One Simon, and they condemned him to that unfathomably awful fate. There wasn't words for how inhumanely he had been treated.
Simon himself was just staring at him as his thought process played out. He was used to Ryland zoning out to think, he spent plenty of his time asking him questions and talking to him. Simon found relief in asking him questions, compared to on the SM-13, where nearly every question he had was ignored. With Ryland, even if he had to wait a minute, he would always do his best to answer him as completely as possible.
"If I had one, I wasn't told about it." His deep voice didn't give anything away, as to whether he cared about this. Grace cared.
"Do you.. want a surname?" He realised immediately how that sounded and scrambled. "I mean, I've gotten pretty good at naming things this last year, I've had to give each Eriridan a name that suited them, you know? Normally I'd name them after characters though. We don't have to do that. I'm not sure that-"
"Yeah, sure. I don't care either way" It's true, he didn't. Before, all he could remember was being known as the butcher. Or convict. Or bitch, if his captors were being particularly uninventive. Getting to be Simon to Ryland, Rocky, all the Eridians, it was so much better.
"Human change second name when marry. Simon find marry now, question? Grace question?" Rocky asked. Sometimes Grace didn't know whether Rocky genuinely didn't understand the social cues and culture of human conversation, or whether he was being a pest trying to fluster him around Simon on purpose, since he saw that it made his heart beat speed up. As far as his little, innocent, never-to-be-revealed crush on Simon was going, Rocky wasn't helping.
"No! No, he's not- we're not-" Simon laughed. Just a little bit. Honestly it was more of a strong exhale paired with a small smile but if felt like the only thing in the universe to Grace. After finding him floating around the system in his death trap of a submarine, trying to get him to survive the radiation poisoning, and the arm amputation, and then living with the man for a few months, this was the first time Simon had come close to laughing. Around Grace, at least. So compared to how he was when they found him, (alone, terrified, incredibly angry and at risk of violence) this was incredible.
Maybe not such a small crush.
Grace paused his sputtering and his brain tried a different line of logic, instead of trying to deny his interest.
"Wouldn't it be confusing if we were both called 'Grace' though? Everyone calls me Grace."
"Eridians are not *stupid*, unlike Grace. How long since last sleep, question?" As much as he was annoyed at the teasing insult, he had him there. Him and Rocky had been out chatting at the beach long enough that the artificial lights had started to dim to emulate the time between day and night, to make sure that the human circadian rhythm wasn't disrupted. It meant bedtime. Simon was probably here because he was wondering where he was.
"I'll go to sleep soon, okay?" Rocky grumbled something about how he better.
Meanwhile, Simon had been lost in thought. Simon Grace. He didn't pretend that he didn't like how that sounded. Did he deserve such a nice name though? Grace was Rylands's name, the name of the hero of humanity... Not the butcher of filament station. Besides, he had been far too freaked out about the possibility of losing one of his favourite good things to risk actually confessing to Ryland just because he had a little crush. And wouldn't it be weird if they got married before having done anything else? Even on Eden, there was an order to these things. It helped keep people sane despite the bleakness.
The three of them stood there watching the waves until Ryland started fidgeting. Sue him, he wasn't the kind of person good at standing still. Or sitting still. None of that. He never used to punish kids in his class for not sitting still, because that would make him the biggest hypocrite on earth. I suppose if he did that now it would make him the biggest hypocrite on Erid. Although that may still be Rocky, after he accuses Grace of not sleeping then stays up to work on projects himself. Although after the forty something years of trouble sleeping he went through, Grace didn't expect him to be an instant perfect sleeper once back home.
Simon noticed him wringing his handing and rocking from his toes to the heels of his feet and back again and took it to be their cue to go back to the house. It was a weird, weird building. Half in the dome, half sticking out. Half human architecture (or close enough) and half eridian. It was designed this way before Simon even arrived, so that Rocky and Grace could watch eachother sleep and spend time together more easily. Simon didn't mind. He was happy for the company either way. For a while he had been sleeping on Ryland's sofa downstairs, but since he became stable enough to be able to live alone, and then chose not to live alone, Ryland set him up a bedroom upstairs using one of the old bunks from the hail Mary for his bed, in a spare room. It helped everything sink in. This was Simon's bedroom, in his house, with his friends. Not the iron lung. Not the COI jail cell.
Rocky said goodnight and skittered off to the airlock. Grace and Simon walked slowly along the beach back to their house - Grace was telling him what he had been talking to Rocky about earlier, his students, his theories, how the biodome team was experimenting with implementing seasons. Simon was listening but he also wasn't, listening more to the quality of Ryland's voice than what he was actually saying. When he had first woken up on Erid, Ryland leaned over him asking him his name, he thought he had seen an angel. His blonde hair has been backlit by the harsh medical lights and he was suffering from a Lot of blood loss, okay? And also blood gain. And about a million other radiation sickness symptoms. Ryland had asked him what his name was, immediately, just like that. He saw him as a person, not convict, not butcher. Simon had been convinced this was a blood eel hallucination, and it wouldn't have been the first.
Maybe not a small crush for him then, either.
They reached the house and said goodbye before going to their separate bedrooms. Both of them laid down in their separate beds, thinking only about the other. Ryland went to sleep first, then Simon. Grace had managed to convince Rocky he didn't need such close observation anymore, since Simon could wake up at any time to protect him, and vice versa.
While Simon lay awake a little longer, trying to and failing to not think about marrying Ryland.
