imagine, maybe just a few weeks after simon arrives on erid. he's doing better, physically, emotionally. he's healing faster than grace or any of the eridian doctors expected, and he's starting to really come out of his shell. he smiles, he lets the doctors do their tests and thanks them when they bring him meals. he looks forward to his daily meetings with grace, which started as a way for ryland to assess his mental state and learn more about his past with eden and the coi, but have turned into just two friends catching up. grace tells simon about the work he's doing with the eridian scientists to create new food sources for them. simon tells grace about how he's come to understand which musical chirps and whistles mean his name in eridian.
imagine, rocky approaching grace one day at his house in the dome. grace turns to greet him cheerily, only to freeze at how slow and solemn rocky appears. even without a face, the eridian looks broken and despaired. "rocky think...some eridians sick like rocky crew...like before"
imagine, grace running to the eridian medical area, scrambing into his xenonite suit, finding four eridians, his colleagues, his friends, most definitely suffering from acute radiation sickness.
imagine, grace pacing back and forth in his lab, desperately trying to understand where and how and why they were exposed to radiation, and knowing that he doesn't have a lot of time to come up with a solution. knowing that his admittedly impressive knowledge about radiation does not in anyway equip him for treating radiation sickness in a completely alien species.
imagine, grace having not slept for two days, stumbling into his daily meeting with simon. "sorry i missed yesterday, si, I've been...busy"
"you look like shit. what the hell happened?"
imagine, grace crumbling a little, explaining that a fifth eridian is now presenting with the sickness, and he has no idea how to fix it. that rocky barely says a word when he comes to visit grace in the lab, and grace knows how terrified he is of losing his people a second time. that grace feels like hes losing his ming because where would the radiation have even come from-
imagine Simon's face dropping from concern to horror as he realises... this is his fault. the people who saved him, who pulled him out of hell itself, who nursed him back to health and who care for him like he's one of their own, whos hes come to have a rapport with...are dying because of him. the sm-13 was almost certainly radioactive. the eridians must have been studying it. they didn't know. Simon didn't tell them.
imagine, grace staring back at simon, putting the pieces together as simon desperately tries to explain through short breaths.
imagine, grace pinching his brows and squeezing his eyes shut so he wont have to see the look on simons face when he tells him that he might still be radioactive. that he'll have to be quarantined.
imagine, simons world collapsing as he realises he's going to be locked away again. like prison. like the iron lung. hidden away. forgotten.
imagine, grace fleeing the room as simon begins to lose it, panting and yelling and crying. grace has to fix this. he doesn't know how to, he has nothing to go off, but he has to. and he has to hurt simon to do it.
imagine, simon having to be sedated to prevent him from accidentally hurting himself, and he sobs, thinking that when he wakes up he'll be a prisoner again.
just something to think about :)
prguitarman
origamiaround
areudirty
yousharknotpass
tangentwithtanner
vaporwave
blakekathryn
