Chapter Text
Mindy gave Mark the address to her favorite pub. It was in her neighborhood, and familiar, and as Mark stepped out of his rental car he looked around the street like it was Disneyland.
They ordered at the bar—a few patrons and the bartenders all asked for selfies—then they brought their beers to a high top table in the front corner of the room. Mark let Mindy pick a seat first, then moved opposite her.
“I just bought an apartment near here,” he said, sliding into his chair. “Once I’ve eaten at every restaurant in the city, I’m definitely coming back here.”
Mindy grinned at his enthusiasm. “This place is great. They started delivering last year. I can order as I’m leaving SatCon and meet Charlie in the parking lot of my building.”
“Do you live near here too?”
Mindy nodded. A curly-haired man in the pub’s trademarked t-shirt arrived with a basket of onion rings, another of cheese curds, and a couple salad plates.
Mindy lined up the baskets with the condiment bottles between them.
“Okay, this is important. All their condiments are made in-house.” She pushed the ketchup to the left. “Ketchup goes with the cheese curds.” She picked up the mustard and the mayo. “Try these with the onion rings. Separately. Not together.” Upending each bottle, she squirted three distinct piles on each of the plates and passed one to Mark.
Mark popped his first cheese curd into his mouth sans ketchup and groaned. “Fried cheese. God, I missed fried food. The first chance I get, I’m going to one of those big national fairs and I’m eating everything. Elephant ears, funnel cake, candied apples, fried Oreos—" he lifted his brows suggestively, “fried butter.” Mindy tried not to snort out her first sip of beer.
“And after you throw up?” she asked.
“Then I’m going to eat it all again,” he said.
Swirling a cheese curd into a heap of ketchup, Mark took a slow, leisurely bite, hunching in his chair. His moan was practically erotic, and Mindy took a long swig to make sure her red cheeks could be attributed to the alcohol.
“I ran out of ketchup on Sol 203,” Mark said, gravel back in his voice. “I’m not ashamed to say I cried.”
Mindy laughed. “I’ll buy you a bottle of this to take home if it’s that good.”
Mark shook his head. “I’ll circle back eventually, but first I want to try every kind of ketchup humans have created. There needs to be a World of Ketchup where I can taste them all in the same afternoon."
“I think you’d be the only one in there, but if the great Mark Watney wants it, the world might just open one.”
The light dimmed, and his dimples drooped.
“Sorry,” said Mark, wiping his fingers on the napkin by his bottle. “I know I said no Mars talk.”
Mindy shrugged. “I don’t mind.”
Mark picked up an onion ring. “Still. I promised. I don’t want you to think that’s all I can talk about.”
Not that it mattered what she thought, of course, Mindy clarified in her head. Mark didn't feel the need, or maybe the heat creeping up his collar meant he just decided not to.
Shrugging, she said, “It’s probably hard not to talk about. It was a big thing. It took years of your life.”
And it was a big thing, in more ways than one. But as the minutes stretched, and Mark continued to look at his hands as he ate cheese curd after cheese curd, she wondered if she’d somehow gotten things a little too right. Too perceptive. Read him too well. Before she could figure out how to put him at ease again, he spoke.
“I’m still processing,” said Mark. “It’s probably weird to other people, sorry.”
Taking a swig, Mindy leaned back in her chair.
Trying not to think too hard, she said, “Can I ask you something that’s none of my business? About Mars?”
Watney took a long draw of his beer. “Go ahead, Park.”
She smiled. Like a kid with a crush. God.
Schooling her expression, she asked, “Do you ever miss it?”
“No,” said Watney immediately. Then, more grudgingly, “Mostly no. I loved being an astronaut. I loved all I got to see. I miss being an astronaut; I’ll never get to do that again.” He looked up, “Not that spending three years as one wasn’t more than enough.” Mindy nodded. “I worked toward that goal for most of my life. Even after I got picked for the crew, I assumed that I’d be eligible for other missions after Ares 3. But the moment that antennae hit me, Ares 3 became my last mission. Even if it did also turn out to be the longest.”
Mindy gestured to the last cheese curd, offering it to Watney. When he shook his head no, she fished it out of the basket, dipped it in ketchup, and popped it into her mouth. When she finished chewing, she said, “It’s gotta be hard to find a new career after being the most famous astronaut-slash-Martian in history.”
Watney nodded, his smile and shoulders dropping. “I’ve had some offers. Books deals. Professorships. Research fellowships. Congressional lobbyist. Daytime TV host." He winked up at her, "Late night TV host.”
Mindy tried not to react to any of these, and especially not to the wink. She couldn’t see Mark Watney doing any of them. But as she reminded herself, she didn’t know him. She knew some pixels on a computer screen. This was a real person, and he was looking at her carefully.
He said, “I think astronaut training makes the most sense.”
Mindy nodded. “So you’ll be in Houston.”
“Yeah. Thus the apartment and everything. My folks are a little sad I won’t be staying with them longer, but a man can only sleep in his childhood bedroom so long before almost dying on Mars is the least of his problems.”
Mindy grinned and watched Mark take a long sip from his beer.
“Obviously, it wasn’t as weird for me as it was for you,” she said, “but it was weird. I stared at those images for so long. Analyzed all kinds of disasters you were undergoing, or might be undergoing." She sat forward, feigning concern: "Is something about those pixels on the water reclaimer off? What if it breached? Did all the water boil off? What's wrong with that 3rd solar cell? That looks different from this morning. Better compare. Oh, wait, it's literally exactly the same." Rolling her eyes at herself, Mindy dredged an onion ring through her pile of mayonnaise. "I checked the weather in Acidalia Planitia obsessively. There was a hurricane headed for Houston, and I didn't know until the day evacuations started but I knew exactly how many dust devils had kicked up within 50 km of the Hab the day before."
Mark was grinning at her, and it was making Mindy feel hot. She stuffed the onion ring in her mouth. After she finished chewing—which always takes longer when you're waiting for it—Mark was still just looking at her.
Slumping in her seat, she said, "I dreamed about disasters too. I dreamed I got a call that the Hab popped and I was halfway to work at 3am Martian time before I realized it hadn't been real. Once I even dreamed I was on Mars and you were the one analyzing the imagery. But you had still been there before. You were looking at the data and got on AOL to IM me through what I needed to do to survive. The Hab was my grandmother’s living room and her week-old lemon bars on a plate on the coffee table was the only food I’d have for the next year.”
The corner of Mark's eyes softened. “I wouldn’t wish that on anyone. Especially the AOL part.”
Mindy nodded to acknowledge the joke and continued, “I wasn’t worried in the dream. Or scared. I knew you were sitting at my desk, looking at those images, and you knew exactly what I should do.” She selected a small onion ring and was dragging it through her mustard when Mark spoke.
“I still dream that I’m there. Something’s fucked up and I’m trying to fix it. And I know if I fail I’ll die.”
This wasn't the ticker tape hero. This wasn't the Cubs fan at the home opener. Mindy shifted in her seat, drawing his gaze.
“After working so hard to get yourself off that asshole of a planet, I’m not surprised your brain still works on it. It’s hard to put down problems that big.”
Nodding, Mark dipped his onion ring in his pile of mustard. “I thought it’d get better once I got back on Earth. But when I sleep, my brain isn’t sure I’m really here. So it’s working on all these possible problems, just in case. For the first few minutes after I wake up, I’m still doing the math to try to make sure I have enough calories to survive, or I’m trying to hack the rover or something.”
He dipped a second onion ring and ate them both at the same time.
“Did you ever watch Survivor?” Mindy asked.
Mark sat straighter at the change in topic and grunted in the negative.
“The contestants all had a kind of PTSD after. Like, all of them. Every season. The show must’ve had some pretty iron-clad wavers. They’d wake up in their hotel room after being voted off, and they’d be crouched on the floor trying to light a fire with their sneakers and stuff. The show had a full team of psychologists and therapists working with them but it still took months, sometimes, for that kind of stuff to stop happening. And they were only on the island or wherever for a couple weeks. You were alone on another planet for over a year. You—” she broke off, hesitated, but Mark’s open expression and frozen posture, his thumb worrying the back of his spoon, made her take a breath and say, “Your brain may never totally put down that puzzle.”
Mark looked down at the cutlery. “I’m gonna get another beer. You want one?”
Mindy straightened. “Uh, sure. One more.”
He ate an onion ring in one go and left the table.
Shit, shit, shit. Mindy picked up her own spoon and tapped its bowl against her temple.
When Mark returned, Mindy took her beer from his hands and set it gingerly on the table. When her tablemate had settled back into his chair, she said, “I’m sorry, Watney. I shouldn’t speculate. I don’t know how any of this is effecting you. Or will. Or anything.” She waved her hand in the air. “I don’t know anything.”
Mark leaned back in his chair. “You're right though.”
A wave of shame returned. Mindy lowered her eyes but Mark must have seen more than a little of it.
“What? What’s wrong?”
Mindy drank, drank again, and slumped further in her seat. “I work for NASA so I should have a better word than ‘icky,’ but I feel icky. I'm still not sure what to do about it. We can’t send me to Mercury or something so you can watch me by satellite for a year and a half.”
Mark cocked his head to one side.
“Are you fucking with me?”
“What?” said Mindy, sitting up. “No.”
“I think my bullshit detector is still intact, but it’s as rusty with other people as the rest of me, so I wasn’t sure.”
“No,” Mindy said again. “I’m not fucking with you.”
“Then why are you still on this voyeur shit?” At her confused, half-stricken expression, he elaborated. “Venkat and Mitch told me about your complaints when you weren’t at the reception. I figured you must have been pissed to have been taken off orbital rotation to read one morse code message from me a day, and maybe see if I’d died. And I respect that. You decided to stay at your station and do your job today instead of going to the party with the bigwigs who demoted you for almost 2 years. It was a shitty deal and those bigwig parties suck, anyway. But your wishing we could send you to Mercury to make up for doing your job doesn't track.”
Mindy blinked, processing around the constricting in her chest. “You didn’t know," she said. "You couldn’t know, but I had access to all this stuff about you. I was watching you constantly for 500 sols. And you couldn’t see me, and didn’t know my name even. I heard you about the loss of privacy, but I could never get why it was just me. Why they wouldn’t put someone else on it, with me or instead of me.”
Mark leaned against the table. “Park, I wanted someone to see me. I wanted NASA, the ESA, a secret North Korean probe, anyone on planet Earth to see me. I didn’t care how. I didn’t care who. I told you, I’m glad it ended up being you. And I'm glad you got a good promotion out of it, in the end. Now you and I get to have a beer on Earth and talk about it.”
Mindy considered saying more, about the interviews on the Ares, and him climbing out of the capsule, but said instead, “I get that it was necessary. I get that you wanted NASA to know you were alive. But the fact is that I was watching, closer than anyone, as you were starved and traumatized by that asshole planet, and nearly killed a half-dozen times in other ways. It’s not fair that some random stranger saw you go through all that.”
Mark wasn’t looking at her, thank God. He was staring at the bar, the handful of people milling and seated around it. There was a baseball game on, and she thought he was watching when he spoke again.
“Martinez and his wife Marissa have this thing. When they get pissed at each other, they say ‘We’ll get past it.’ Both of them say it, like a pact. After the crew came back for me, whenever I got freaked out, or snapped at someone, he’d make us say it. ‘We’ll get past it.’ Or ‘We’ll get past Mars.’”
He finally slid his eyes back to her, and Mindy tried not to look as small as she felt. He was being vulnerable, on purpose, and to her. She couldn’t cower. She couldn’t hide. That wouldn’t be fair.
“I didn’t get a say when I got left on Mars,” Watney continued. “Like you said, I’ll probably be working through those 549 sols for the rest of my life. I didn’t get a say about who was watching. But it’s over now. I'm not going to say that everything you did for me was worth it—I'm still just one person." He took a deep breath. "But this isn't a one-sided thing anymore. You and I aren’t on different planets anymore. Satellite telemetry isn’t the only thing linking us. We can be friends.” He shrugged, his neck reddening slightly. “Or not. I'm going to be in Houston. We’re both gonna be working for NASA. We could be drinking buddies. Neighbors.” Mindy wasn’t imagining the heat in his eyes as he said, “Or whatever.” Then he blinked once and it was gone. “If you and NASA could help me get off Mars, you and I can get past Mars. Right?”
Mindy swallowed. “Sure, Mark,” she wanted to say.
But she didn’t. Instead, she swallowed again. “We’ll get past it.”
Watney nodded. “We’ll get past it.”
Then Mark Watney, Earthen hero and former Martian farmer, winked at her, and rose to order them more cheese curds.