Chapter Text
Grace was certain, after nearly a year of having Simon around, that he’d run out of things to notice about his partner. The first few months had been full of noticing things, various quirks he had that alluded to things Grace had trouble imagining, even with Simon’s minimal explanations. The way he flinched when someone touched his left side, how he was never the first to fall asleep even after he’d finally relaxed and felt at home, how he waited for Grace to eat before he even attempted to take a bite- honestly, he could go on for a while. But after a year, he’d thought he’d run out of things to notice.
Unfortunately, he was wrong.
It started, oddly enough, after the first month he’d been living with Grace. They were sitting on the couch talking with a documentary playing in the background to keep their spirits light and to fall back on after the inevitable breakdown.
“So, what was life like before you joined Eden?” Grace asked, running his thumb across Simon’s knuckles. They’d found out pretty early that Simon liked physical touch during these talks. It helped him stay grounded.
A look crossed over Simon’s face and he was quiet for a moment, eyes far away in a way Grace knew was dissociation. It happened from time to time, so he simply waited and held his friend’s hand until he came back to himself.
Simon eventually shrugged, eyes flicking towards the screen. “I don’t really remember,” he mumbled, eyes still far away, “I was a kid when my Mom died. I don’t…really remember any of it. Just that there was a lot of fighting,”
It was all he was able to get out of his friend that night, but Grace was satisfied with it. They’d settled in to watch the rest of the documentary and went to bed when it was done. Nothing unusual.
Until nearly a year later and Simon was finally comfortable enough to unmask.
He was finally cracking jokes and poking at Grace and being the huge dork Grace knew him to be on the inside. Finally sneaking snacks and, when he eventually gets caught because he never learned how to step quietly with his weight being thrown off (and never needed to, he never had to be scared anymore), he simply stared at Grace before cracking a joke and scurrying off to the living room with a small laugh. He was laughing. It was beautiful.
Wait- he was getting sidetracked. Right, nearly a year after they met and Simon had let his walls down. And had begun unmasking.
Grace truly noticed it one morning when they were getting ready for the day. He was making toast while Simon was scrambling some eggs. Rocky had made him a prosthetic about three weeks prior and he was doing various tasks to get used to it. Eggs was something he’d wanted to try after so many other successful trials, so Grace let him. But something seemed to be wrong.
His eyes weren’t all that focused. He was cooking and he was moving around, but he wasn’t really watching himself do it. His hands moved as he wiggled the eggs around in the pan, and his feet shifted when he nearly lost balance turning to get some spices, but he wasn’t fully paying attention. Everything about his eyes were glassy and unfocused. He was dissociating.
“Si?” Grace called, reaching out to gently nudge him (on the right side), “Sunshine? You okay?”
With a quick couple of blinks, Simon looked up, his face carefully blank for a brief moment before he nodded, brows furrowing in confusion. “What was that?”
“Just asking if you were okay. You seemed a little out of it,” Grace said, keeping his voice soft. He was worried, Simon hadn’t done that in a while.
But, strangely enough, Simon just nodded, still confused, and pressed a kiss to Grace’s cheek. “Yeah, I’m fine. Eggs are almost done,”
And they just dropped it. Simon wasn’t concerned, so why should Grace be?
Well, because it happened again that night.
They were watching a movie, Beauty and the Beast because Simon had taken a liking to animation, when Grace turned to ask him about a plot point and saw the far away look in those brown eyes. Like he was looking through the screen and through the walls and out into space. He didn’t look hurt or unhappy, just…gone.
“Simon?” He pressed a kiss to his jaw, sighing in relief when his partner blinked back to reality, “There you are. You were gone again,”
Simon frowned, curling up closer to Grace and tucking his arm (he wasn’t wearing his prosthetic) against his chest. “Mhm, I’m alright,” he mumbled, letting out a small yawn, “J’st tired…”
Grace tried not to frown, instead reaching up to run a hand through Simon’s wavy hair. The man melted with a big grin pressed to Grace’s chest, seemingly done with the topic of conversation. And oh how Grace wished he could be done with it as well.
He noticed it a lot after that, but maybe it was because now he was looking. Simon would zone out all the time, when he was cooking, when he was cleaning, when he was cuddling, heck, he even did it a few times mid sentence. Most times, it would be just a few seconds of a far away look, then he’d be back, but it could last for minutes if Grace let it. There was no rhyme or reason for it, it happened whenever. And the more it went on, the more concerned Grace got.
It eventually got to the point that Grace was researching one day after class with his laptop propped up on his knees. The rabbit hole he'd gone down had been a strange one, but he’d eventually settled on a web page of dissociative disorders that sounded about right.
He’d been in the middle of scrolling through one when Simon had come inside from the garden, covered in dirt and the biggest smile on his face. He was present and in the moment, so when he leaned over to press his cheek against Grace’s hair, he flashed his eyes across the screen with a soft hum of curiosity.
“What’s all this about?” He asked, perching his chin on the spot he’d kissed. He always enjoyed those moments where he was taller than Grace, it made him smile. It made Grace smile too.
He shifted, scrolling up so Simon could see the title of the webpage. “Just researching, trying to figure out why you keep zoning out the way you do,”
“Dissociative disorders?” Grace could practically hear the pout in his lover’s voice, “You…is there something wrong with me?”
“Not at all,” Grace was quick to reassure, tilting his head up to nuzzle his nose against Simon’s chin, “I’m just worried, is all, and when I worry I-”
“You research,” Simon finished, a smile gracing his features, “But, just so you know, I’m not worried. I’ve always done this,”
Grace just laughed a little, reaching up to scratch through Simon’s hair. “That doesn’t help my worry, Sunshine. Go wash up and I’ll start on dinner soon,”
And during a dinner of me-burgers and peppers from the garden, Grace began his questions.
“You don’t have to answer if you don’t want to,” he began, which made Simon smile a little bit, “I just wanna poke around in your brain,”
Simon just rolled his eyes despite the small smile and gestured with his fork, still waiting for Grace to take a bite before he touched his food. “Poke away, Angel, I’ll let you know if it’s too much,”
Grace hummed, taking a bite of pepper before he asked anything. “Okay, so, we’ve talked a bit about your past, but I wanna know how much you actually remember,”
“What do you mean?” Simon still had trouble remembering to swallow his food before he talked, still not quite used to eating without a time limit.
“Well-” Grace tapped his fork against the table as he thought, “When I think of things that have happened, at least now that I've got all my memory back, I can recall the exact details and picture it in my head. It can be blurry or even a little bit spotty with some parts missing, but for the most part, I can remember like it actually happened to me. Is that how your memory works?”
There. Simon’s eyes once again took on that far away look, his head tilting a little bit to the side. His jaw, clenched from chewing, relaxed ever so slightly until he swallowed what was in his mouth. He didn’t reach for his food again, just stared off into space. Like he was no longer in his body.
Grace toyed his bottom lip between his teeth while he waited for Simon to come back, not wanting to break any train of thought he had going on. There was a chance that he’d have to repeat his question, but he was willing to do it to get to the bottom of what was happening. He was willing to do anything for Simon.
It took five minutes for him to come back, blinking a few times before his eyes flicked back and forth. They settled on Grace pretty quickly and the blank look melted into a small smile. He held Grace’s spare hand with his real one, running his thumb across his fingers with reverence.
“I…don’t think so,” he mumbled after a minute, “It’s more like I know what happened, but like someone else told me the details instead of actually experiencing them. It doesn’t really work for details, but no one was really asking me for details in prison, ya know?”
A sad smile appeared on Grace’s face and he lifted their hands to press a kiss to Simon’s scarred knuckles. “Thanks for telling me,” he whispered, “Are you okay with asking more questions?”
They sat like that for a while, Grace asking questions and Simon answering whichever ones he was able to. He’d zone out every once in a while, eyes going blank and hand going slack, but Grace didn’t mind waiting.
He’d wait forever if it made his Sunshine more comfortable.
Simon wasn’t really sure why Grace was worried or why he’d noticed, but part of him really wished he hadn’t. Simon himself had never noticed his “zoning out periods” as Grace called them, and thought that everyone had a memory like they were reading a mission log or watching a video instead of actually experiencing it again. Gaps in memory were never an issue in prison, maybe a small problem in the sub, but nothing he couldn’t overcome. So he’d never noticed it.
But now that he knew it was happening? He just couldn’t stop noticing.
He’d be in the middle of reading and realize he hadn’t really read the last few pages despite turning them, or halfway through a movie before blinking back and not knowing what was happening. His head would get floaty halfway through gardening and he’d wake up with a full basket of vegetables and the fields completely pruned with no knowledge of how it happened. Memories of events just a few hours prior would be gone from his grasp and he’d be struggling to figure out what he’d done that day. Even his headaches had gotten worse, little twinges behind his eyes that would distract him from what he was thinking about.
He groaned into his real hand at another one, pressing the palm to his mouth and rubbing his eyes with his thumb and pointer finger. It would dissipate soon enough, he just hated waiting for it.
“Another headache?” Grace called from the living room, looking up from choosing a movie for them. Cats again.
Simon grunted an affirmation and sat down next to his love, curling up tight and tucking himself underneath his arm. “Mmm…I’m okay, though,” he said, voice soft. He always felt smaller than normal on movie nights, despite nearly never remembering them. It made watching the films frustrating sometimes.
Fingers against his scalp had him melting further and he smiled, tucking himself closer to Grace. There hadn’t been anyone gentle with him since his mom, her careful fingers carding through his hair and braiding it back whenever she was able to get enough resources to wash it for him. She’d sing to him when she did it, though he could never quite remember what the song was or how she sounded when she sang it. Actually, now that he thought about it, how much of his mom did he actually remember…?
He blinked back to reality when he felt a soft tap against his chin, focusing back on the laptop to see the weird human cat creatures dancing in what looked like a rundown bar or something. What part of the movie was this? Had he been out of it for that long that he hadn’t remembered any of what he’d been watching?
“I did it again,” he grumbled, scowling to himself. It was starting to piss him off.
Grace hummed, kissing the top of his head. “Yeah, just noticed it. What was the last thing you remember?”
Simon paused to think back, face pinching in concentration. Honestly, when he thought back to it, nothing came up, but something told him that his last full memory was when he sat down. He wasn’t really sure what happened, but that’s the first thing that came up.
“You playing with my hair, I think,” he said after a minute, letting a yawn crack his jaw, “I’d been complaining about a headache, right?”
Lips pressed to his own before Grace answered, pulling Simon closer to his chest. “You weren’t complaining exactly, just making it known. Said you were okay and everything,”
Simon just hummed, tucking his head under Grace’s chin. He didn’t remember saying he was okay, but Grace had never lied to him before. No point in starting now, anyway.
They finished the movie and eventually made their way to bed, Simon watching Grace’s breathing slow and even out over the course of an hour or so. Once he was sure that the man beside him wouldn’t wake up, he shifted out of bed and walked towards the living room, where they’d abandoned the laptop after their movie.
“Are we sure about this?” He thought to himself as he opened it, biting at the inside of his mouth, “It might make us worse,”
“Yeah, I’d rather know and suffer than be ignorant. The headaches aren’t gonna stop either way,” he went through each of the many tabs and finally located the one he’d found Grace reading earlier.
“Dissociative disorders are mental health conditions that involve experiencing a loss of connection between thoughts, memories, feelings, surroundings, behavior and identity,” he read, blinking back the headache and floaty feeling in the back of his head. It felt like he was being gently dragged away from the front of his brain, but he scrunched his eyes shut and focused all his effort into staying present.
He read more and more over the course of the hour he felt comfortable being away from Grace, though he had to reread bits and pieces, and often found himself missing chunks of a few minutes. It was pretty informative, even if he forgot most of it as soon as he read it, but he got the general idea of it. It sounded pretty accurate to what was happening to him and how his brain worked, at least.
Grace had said that, as normalized as his childhood had been, it was still pretty traumatizing to go through all of the constant fighting that he did. Hell, his childhood had been considered pretty good since he had already been eight in Earth years when he’d lost his mom, much older than most, but it was still pretty scary for a child’s brain. Splitting off bits of himself to process it all instead of doing it all in one head made sense to him; it was more efficient to spread the work between multiple people in any other task, why would it be different for the human brain?
He wasn’t really sure which of the ones he read about fit him, but he was too tired to really think about it too hard. Instead, he found himself crawling back into bed and tucking himself back into Grace’s arms, smiling into the sheets as exhaustion took hold of him and dragged him back into his brain for some rest.