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Grace awakens with a gasp. His dream still clings to him like grains of sand to wet skin. He frantically reaches out to the other side of the bed, to touch, to make sure that Simon is there.
Are you real? Is any of this real?
He can't see Simon too well without his glasses, but he can feel his warmth. That has to be Simon. It can't be anyone else.
Simon's breathing changes. He makes a noise as he wakes, a sound of confusion. “Hmh?”
Grace grabs his glasses and puts them on so he can make sure that the person next to him is Simon. He needs to know that Simon isn't a figment of his imagination.
His boyfriend's face comes into focus. Simon is more awake each time he blinks, eyes focusing on Grace. Wrinkles of concern settle between his eyebrows and on the top of his nose.
“Ry?”
Grace makes out Simon's torso with his hands. Smooth skin. Hair. The dip of his navel. Scar tissue. Nipples. The peaks of a few too many ribs. Simon is real. He's here. Grace didn't just invent him out of loneliness. Grace remembers him. Remembers his body and how it feels.
“Baby,” Simon says.
“Sorry. Sorry. I—nightmare.”
It's rare that Grace has a nightmare. Or, at least, one that wakes him in such a panic. Simon has more nightmares than Grace. Nightmares. Night terrors. Things he wakes up screaming and flailing from.
Their trauma to nightmare ratio makes sense.
Grace presses against Simon's side. He needs as much skin to skin contact as he can get.
“Do you remember how I… how I have gaps?”
Gap is a funny word. A break. An opening. Chasm. A missing piece.
It's a way of sidestepping the fact that Grace's memory is a little shot from the coma. He has gaps the same way it seems space seems to have gaps. Little empty pockets that can't be explained. (Yet.)
“Yeah.” Simon's hand trails down to trace along Grace's temple. “Did you remember something?”
“Forgot.”
It's the forgetting that upsets Grace more than the remembering. He'd take a thousand remembered embarrassing moments over the moments where he realizes he doesn't know something about himself.
He doesn't remember his parents’ names. If he’s ever burned a CD. How to fly a kite. His first kiss. If he knows how to play pool. What his mother smelled like. His favorite board game. How much of himself is gone forever? How much is lost in fuzziness, maybe for forever? Thinking about it can make Grace feel a little sick.
Simon makes a sympathetic noise and returns to playing with Grace’s hair.
“Si, I-I forgot you. I dreamt that I forgot you.”
Why does it sound like nothing when he says it? It doesn’t sound like a nightmare. It sounds silly.
But it had terrified Grace.
Simon wasn’t a part of Grace’s life Before. If Grace forgets who Simon is, then there’s something fundamentally wrong with his brain now.
(Is there a chance that whatever Stratt did to him will give him some form of early-onset Alzheimer’s? God, Grace hopes not.)
“Oh, Ry, baby.” Simon kisses the top of Grace’s head. “‘M sorry.”
Grace swallows and closes his eyes. He can’t get the image of how Simon looked at him out of his head. The confusion, then fear, as Grace kept struggling to figure out who this man was. How his eyes had grown wet with tears.
“The way you looked at me,” he says, voice breaking. Tears sting his eyes. “Like it was the worst thing I could’ve done to you.”
Simon has to shift his entire body to wrap his arm around Grace, Grace’s head falling from his chest. He pulls Grace firmly to his chest. Grace flails to remove his glasses so they don’t press into Simon’s skin.
“Are you afraid of that?”
With his face pressed against Simon’s pectorals, Grace’s answer comes out muffled, his own breath hot against his face.
“Yeah. Kinda. I guess.”
Casual. Like it’s not one of his biggest fears. No big deal!
“I don’t like not remembering,” Grace says. It’s not an admission of anything, because he’s talked about it enough for Simon to know. “It’s forgetting that I…”
He swallows.
“Because I don’t forget. Not like an Eridian doesn’t forget, but like—I’m good at memorization. I’m good at not-forgetting. And if I forget you...”
He’s not as eloquent as normal. Or maybe the proper term would be loquacious. Wordy. Grace thinks he’d normally be able to ramble on and on about this, but he’s struggling to find the right words.
Is he forgetting language, too?
No. No, that can’t be right. If he can remember the word loquacious, something he only used maybe once in an essay for an undergraduate English class, then his grasp on language remains firm.
“I couldn’t handle it. Because I love you.”
“Love you, too,” Simon says. It’s just as sweet as any other time he says it.
Grace knows this. Knows that they love each other.
“I don’t want to forget anything. Least of all you.” Grace breathes inside of the warm, cramped world of Simon’s chest. It isn’t, by any means, the most comfortable position. His morning breath isn’t a pleasant smell. But it’s safe in here.
Simon rubs his palm up and down Grace’s back. The rough scars on his skin are more soothing than Grace would like to admit. Those can’t be anyone else’s hands. Just Simon’s.
“Then—it was like forgetting you made you disappear. You were there, confused and scared, and then you were gone. It was probably the worst thing that could’ve happened. Which is why my mind did it.”
Thanks a lot, brain. You did a great job of scaring the absolute heck out of him.
“‘M not going anywhere,” Simon says. His voice is firm. Resolute. Grace likes his confidence.
It’s not like there hasn’t been the offer. Rocky and the rest of the Eridians had fixed up the Hail Mary what must’ve been months ago. If Simon had wanted, he could’ve left at any moment. Left the beach and the ocean, left the strange, hot Eridian planet.
Left Grace.
But he hadn’t. He’d elected to stay, because he’d said it himself: there’s nothing out there for him. This isn’t his universe. Or, if it is his universe (a strange theory that Grace likes to hypothesize on), then it’s not his time.
Either way, Simon wants to stay.
He might not say it often, but Simon loves Grace. Grace is certain of that. He might have his doubts as to whether or not Simon is happy happy here, but Simon says he’s happy, so Grace has to accept that. It might not be Simon’s ideal world, even with the changes Adrian’s made to the weather patterns to give Simon more sun. But it’s theirs.
Grace breathes in the hot, stale air in his little cocoon of Simon’s chest. His heart still refuses to slow to a reasonable pace. Rocky would have a lot to say about that if he were here.
“I won't forget you anytime soon,” Grace says, though he’s not sure if he’s speaking to Simon or just to the universe at large. Like he’s challenging some greater power. Try it. Try taking him from me. You won’t.
Simon makes another noise. This one sounds happy, if Grace had to guess, but he might also be going by Eridian standards.
“I don’t think I ever will,” Grace admits. “Even if I start forgetting everything else. I wanna remember you.”
He wants to remember everything. But if he’s going to start forgetting—birthdays, exes, how to ride a bike—, then Grace is willing to forget his own name before he forgets about Simon.
Simon scratches along Grace’s back, from his tailbone up to the nape of his neck. Grace feels like a dog. A very, very loved dog.
Grace cranes his head up to look at Simon’s face. He really just gets a good look at Simon’s strong jaw and his three day old stubble, and also up his nose. It’s a weird angle. They’re just close enough that Grace can make out some of the finer details without his glasses.
“Haven’t forgotten anything yet.”
There’s that logic that Grace loves. Grace is a dreamer; Simon is the grounded one. Simon is exactly what Grace needs in that respect. Someone to bring him back down to the world when his head is in the clouds.
“Yeah,” Grace says. He knows he has that soft, lovesick face on that he tends to wear when he looks at Simon. “I love you.”
“You gonna be okay?”
“Yeah. Probably. You’re here, and I remember you, so… that’s something.” Grace gives Simon a shaky smile.
For a moment, it’s just their breathing. Grace thinks his heartbeat is beginning to slow, or the adrenaline is mostly wearing off. He does feel calmer, which has to mean something.
“D’you wanna sleep again?” Simon asks.
“I’m not sure. Can we just… lay here?”
“Sounds good.”
Grace nestles his face back into Simon’s chest with a contented sigh. He wraps his free arm around Simon and tries to do something with his other hand. Eventually, he manages to wriggle it between Simon’s waist and the bed. The closer they can get, the better. Grace needs to have Simon so close to him that they could meld together like in The Thing.
(He’d shown Simon The Thing, along with several dozen other movies that Stratt had so helpfully pirated for the Hail Mary crew. Simon had watched it silently until he had a panic attack about halfway through. That had crossed any and all body horror movies off Grace’s must-watch list.)
Simon kisses Grace’s forehead again. Grace makes another happy noise that sounds more like an Eridian chirp than something human. It’s a developing habit.
“What did that mean?” Simon asks.
“Dunno. Probably gibberish.”
Simon huffs out the ghost of a laugh. It’s hard to make Simon laugh for real, despite Grace’s best efforts. Grace values every huff and somewhat-humorous nose exhale he can get.
“Mmkay Ry.”
Grace closes his eyes and settles in to try relaxing. Hopefully he can steal a couple more hours of sleep, but if he can’t, he’ll accept the hours of affection instead. As long as he’s in Simon’s arms, he’ll be okay.