Chapter Text
Good news!
Watney does actually want to play Dungeons and Dragons with me, and has in fact played considerably more than I have. I had a group in college once for a few months, but then grad school happened and everyone knows that means you just disappear off the face of the earth for a while. But Watney apparently had been playing regularly with a group for years before he was training to be an astronaut.
“You, uh, sure you don’t want to run it, then?” I had asked.
“Nah.” He shrugged. “I always liked being a player better anyway. Besides, Rocky’s playing too and you can definitely do a better job than I could of making something we both understand and enjoy.”
He was right, I do have to tailor it so it isn’t based solely on the human understanding of the world. It’ll be an interesting cultural exchange experiment to see if I can make a fictional game that both Watney and Rocky can buy into. Rocky will be thrilled to make dice for us, I bet.
I get the laptops out with their pirated copies of all the 5th edition guidebooks, do my research, and make some changes. I have to deviate a lot from the source material so Rocky won’t be totally lost with it. I set the whole thing in underground tunnels so we can meet in the middle between Watney and I’s understanding of how the world works and Rocky’s. I also alter most the basic monsters to be invertebrates and shelled creatures instead of mammalian or based on some nebulous cultural understanding of fantasy cliches. The ratio of dungeons to dragons here is very unbalanced, but I know that Rocky wouldn’t understand why dragons are cool, unfortunately. As I make these changes and nail down what the game will be like, I also write myself little notes of how to describe things in ways that aren’t purely visual. It’s actually really fun to chew over all this stuff, and as much as science is my lifeblood, it’s good to have something to occupy my brain that isn’t just math and cells.
It also makes for good idle conversation with Watney, discussing his character.
I like talking to Watney a lot. It’s not a surprise, but it wasn’t exactly a guarantee either. I have Rocky, so I wasn’t so desperate for company I would’ve been grateful to have anyone. But I’m glad we did get Watney. He’s excellent company, and hilarious. The kind of guy I can imagine working with back on Earth, laughing every time he was in the room and awed by his work. Watney has a remarkable ability to make everything sound possible, easy even. The smartest people I’ve ever known do not have his ability to say something insane, something that no one should ever be able to accomplish on their own, and make it into a joke that lands.
He’s a miracle to have in the lab, too. The potatoes are just, wow. What we wouldn’t have done to have someone like him on the Petrova Taskforce. Maybe it wouldn’t have had to be designed as a suicide mission if he was born 30 years earlier than he was. He has an ingenuity that Stratt would have snatched him up for the moment she sniffed it out.
And he’s into playing Dungeons and Dragons to pass the time on a long ride home, which doesn’t hurt, in these circumstances.
“I usually like playing artificers, but I think I’ll leave that one to Rocky.” He says, when I bring up character classes when we’re in the lab together.
I really like it when we get to work on our own things together in the lab. It’s just comfortable, the quiet proximity makes the atmosphere itself feel like someone had settled a blanket over it. Conversation is the fairy lights in our science blanket fort.
“They’re the, um, the magical mechanics, right?”
There’s a lot to remember and I’m trying, okay, sue me.
“Yeah. I think you can also specialise in potions and stuff if you want to, but it all boils down to the ‘inventor’ class. The artillerist is the best subclass though, because who doesn’t want an eldritch cannon?”
“Eldritch cannon does sound pretty sick.” I say, “And you’re right, I think Rocky probably will want to go for that. What’s your backup pick?”
“The longest I’ve ever played one character was a cleric for about a year and a half, but I don’t think it’s worth it to be a healer if it’s just me and Rocky.”
“Probably not, no. I promise not to be that cruel.” I say.
“Would be cool to be a barbarian. The simplicity of just going crazy and hitting shit sounds fun.”
“Then a barbarian you shall be.” I say.
We throw ideas back and forth for a bit after that, discussing who exactly Watney’s barbarian is and where he came from. We both agree that it would be best for him to just play as a human, instead of opening the can of worms that is fantasy races we’d have to explain to Rocky.
Which means I have the fun task of trying to make an Eridian DnD race. His intelligence and strength stat are going to have to be pretty good, what with their eidetic memories and bodies adapted to crazy gravity. Honestly I feel like I could justify boosting all of his stats, but I’ll have to find a way to balance it.
I find Rocky later to talk with him about it too, while Watney takes some time in the don’t-go-crazy room to not go crazy.
“Hey pal, what’s up?”
“Ceiling of Hail Mary.” I never should have introduced him to sarcasm.
“Ha ha, you’re a real comedian Rock.” I roll my eyes, even though it’s one of the few things he can’t sense in any way, “Anyway, you remember that Earth storytelling game I was telling you about, Dungeons and Dragons?”
“Cannot forget anything.”
“Calm it with the attitude, will you? I’m trying to have a productive conversation here.” I say, and he chitters his laugh at me. “But the point is that I got Watney on board with it, so we can run the game! I’ve been thinking of ways to alter it so it’s fun for all of us, because obviously you come from a very different world than we do, and the way we think about stories reflects that. I wanted to run some of that by you and talk about how you’d want to participate.”
“Very kind thing to do. Lot of thought.” He says, and I wave it off as I usually do.
“Ah, come off it. I mean, it’s not enjoyable for anyone if you aren’t into it. There’s only three of us. And it’s kind of a fun exercise for me, getting creative. It reminds me of one of the things I liked about being a teacher.”
“What Grace come up with, question?”
I explain to him the conceit of the campaign, the tunnels, and the monster changes, as well as what Watney’s barbarian can do and the stuff we discussed about artificers. I obviously do not spoil how the plot is coming together, or the details about Watney’s character that will only be revealed in due time.
“So!” I clap my hands together once I’m done, “Questions?”
“Yes. Have many questions. Grace describe many monsters, understand crab and spider and insect descriptions, but what is other creature, question? Also what is difference between intelligence and wisdom, why different numbers, question? Why so many different magic categories, question? Thought that word magic was for other unexplainable force.”
Oh boy. I should have known.
“I know you asked it first, but we’ll circle back to snails later, I feel like that’s going to be a longer conversation. As for the other two, well, intelligence and wisdom are generally understood as different ways of being smart, humans call it book smart and street smart. It’s the difference between knowing and understanding a lot about some things in the technical sense, like being a really intelligent scientist, and having good judgement about other people and the world around you. You can be one but not the other in both directions.”
Rocky hums. “So Grace would have very large intelligence number and very small wisdom number.”
“Why do I bother explaining anything to you, if this is the thanks I get.” I throw my hands up while Rocky snickers at me.
“No, no, keep going. Want to learn!”
I eye him warily before sighing and giving in. He knows exactly what he’s doing and it’s working, dammit. “And about magic, well, I simplified it a lot the first time we talked about it. I was mostly interested if your world had a similar concept. Magic is a very broad term for something that turns up in a lot of stories and while I’m definitely not a culture or a literature expert, if I wanted to generalise it, I would stick to what I told you about it basically being a catch-all for some kind of other force that doesn’t exist or isn’t explained in our world.” I explain, “Different stories choose to use or define what that force is in wildly varying ways, and games, like Dungeons and Dragons, tend to treat it as a kind of power that’s differently accessible for everyone. Hence why there are several kinds of magic users, you can do different things with some amount of crossover because they’re all vaguely explained as a kind of magic.”
One thing about being shot off to space and singularly tasked with everything first contact entails, is that you adapt very quickly to explaining a lot of things from first principles that you definitely are not qualified to be explaining. I think I did a decent job, considering I had to look up what the different spellcaster classes even are as a refresher before I had this conversation.
Rocky doesn’t respond immediately, no doubt interpreting what I said and trying to find an analogy in his culture to understand it through. Science, obviously, tends to translate pretty smoothly between us. We experience it in completely different ways, he’s used to 29 times the gravity that I am, but it’s still gravity and remains a pillar of our understanding of the world. Culture, and other things less universal, take a little longer for both of us to digest when we try to share them. I realise that we both tend to respond by finding things in our own experiences to see it through, like a translation prism.
The linguists and anthropologists back on Earth are just going to kidnap us and never let us go when they get wind of this, huh?
“Understand. Same source, different uses. Like materials or tools, I fix things with xenonite, another Eridian may create art with same xenonite.”
“Gold star, pal, that’s exactly it.” He gives me jazz hands.
I explain snails, after. It takes much longer, and as anticipated, includes me having to get the laptop and comb through taxonomy trees and explanations of the cambrian explosion. Rocky concludes that snails have the right idea, but their execution is still subpar. Crabs and spiders are still coming out at the top of his ‘Earth creatures that don’t sound ridiculous’ list (yes we do have a list. We have a word document of several different kinds of similar lists documenting Rocky’s opinions on Earth things).
We circle back around to Dungeons and Dragons eventually. All of our conversations are like this, it’s impossible to keep on one subject, but I do remember that I came to Rocky with the original intention of getting a character idea down.
“Watney mentioned that you’d probably want to be something called an artificer, a magical inventor, basically. Sounds like your jam, right?” I say, when we get back on topic.
“Yes yes yes! Certainly more desirable than warrior or magical scholar. Making things always best solution.”
“Awesome. A making things guy and a hitting things guy, sounds like a dynamic duo.” I say, and then I think of something. “Actually, off the back of the whole snails thing, what do Eridians have for monsters? Like, what are your culture’s scary stories you tell to the little ones? I’ll just use some of yours.”
I get some fascinating boogeymans and myths out of Rocky. Silent predators who rile a room up just so they can slip past the noise unnoticed to their victims, used to scare children into not being too loud in public. The boulders and mountains of their world, thought to be inanimate, revealing that they are alive and malicious. Classic scary story stuff, from a really interesting new perspective. And he does give me some great ideas for combat encounters.
We talk until Watney has to come and find us after he’s done in the don’t-go-crazy room. He, however, is also a nerd and enthusiastically participates, so then we keep talking until Mary has to remind Watney and I to eat. I keep finding myself smiling at him when he’s around.
It’s really nice to have two friends here.
***
The whiteboard is haunting me and it’s mostly my fault.
I’d crossed off most of my pressing questions. Not literally, I’d wiped the board clean as soon as Watney got here because it would be embarrassing for him to see, but mentally, the list remains and it has gotten smaller. The Dungeons and Dragons campaign has been confirmed and is in the development stages, with both Watney and Rocky’s character sheets created and the general bigger picture coming together well. I found out about what happened on Mars and some of the truly bat-crazy things Watney was up to while he was there (seriously, Rocky likes to make fun of me for being reckless and stupid, but I’m definitely passing the torch to Dr. Mark ‘burnt hydrazine in the Hab to make water and blew himself up’ Watney on this one). Watney not just explained but is currently growing potatoes in a corner of the lab. Rocky is making friends with him of his own accord too, which is great, and has no doubt asked his own burning questions.
There’s still one left, though, and I can’t seem to bring myself to approach it.
I know that Project Hail Mary succeeded, that Earth got the Taumoeba and my research and the sun is getting brighter again. That’s what really matters, right? That’s all that matters. It makes all of this worth it, Yao and Ilyukhina and Dubois and Shapiro, they didn’t die for nothing. However Stratt is paying for it, certain she would be scapegoated and punished once the ship launched, it’s not pointless suffering. Everything that was done to me, it was for a cause that bore fruit.
I don’t really need to know how people suffered in the meantime. I did everything I was supposed to, everything we were capable of. I’m going home anyway, I’ll find out in time.
I keep telling myself that, but it doesn’t change the fact that I put off going to bed because I know I’ll spend an hour lying there thinking about my kids. The ones I was on the project for in the first place. It’s been almost three decades on Earth since I left, even the youngest and most recent class I taught will be fully grown by now, they’ll be as old as I am. And I know they will have suffered through those decades. I can hear Stratt’s voice telling me the numbers, Earth’s population halved, and I can barely even finish the line of thought that some of my students won’t have grown up at all, before I have to shove it back into recesses of my mind so I don’t break down. That doesn’t stop me from revisiting it anyway, when it’s quiet and I’m as alone as I ever get on the ship. It’s like compulsively picking at a scab without fully ripping it off, you’re not helping yourself feel better but you can’t even commit to the catharsis of hurting yourself either.
Rocky can tell I’m avoiding the topic with Watney. He was so excited for me to get answers, to have another human aboard and know what’s been happening to my home. I feel bad. Even though it was a choice he made knowingly to come with me, I know that Rocky would kill to have news from Erid. I have someone here who lived through what I left behind, what we thought I would never see or return too, and I can’t bring myself to broach the subject. I’m spitting in the face of my best friend and I’m a coward, what’s new?
It feels worse because Rocky is so nice about it. Rocky’s not nice, not in the sense that niceness and kindness are different things. He’s the kindest creature I’ve ever known, but he’s also pushy and bossy and likes to call me stupid when he wants me to take better care of myself. Under ordinary circumstances, he would be bothering me every chance he gets, pointing out all my ridiculous human irrationalities and telling me to just ask. But I think he senses this is about the kids, and I think he’s thinking about his crew when he gently questions if I’ve talked to Watney and drops it after I tell him no, yet again. And that makes me feel rotten, because it’s not the same, not when I know that at least some of them must have grown up and are living their lives, and I still can’t face it.
I’m avoiding it because I’m afraid, not because it’ll do or change anything, and that shouldn’t surprise anybody. I do well enough at pushing all that away when it’s less quiet, though. If Watney wonders, he doesn’t say anything, and most of my conversations with Rocky remain perfectly ordinary for us.
Well, mostly ordinary, save for a new addition to his vocabulary.
I find this out when Rocky, Watney, and I are playing Minecraft.
Apparently to Watney, this is his equivalent of the very first Legend of Zelda or Super Mario, which makes me feel old. There’s only about five years of difference between the age Watney and I have experienced, but it is literally exactly the same feeling as when my middle schoolers would discuss some new trend or pop culture thing and I had no idea what they were talking about.
We’re basically the same age biologically, and there’s about 30 years of difference between the time periods of our lives. Which is only marginally less weird to me than my best friend also being an adult roughly in the middle of his life, but one who has already lived centuries.
“Rocky, no, stop building. The mobs are coming and I want to sleep.” Watney is saying.
“So sleep.”
“I know you know that in the game, we all have to sleep at the same time if we want to skip to morning.”
I’m in the house at the crafting table right now, and staying out of their argument. I’ve been on a bit of a mining kick recently, so I’m upgrading my stuff before I go back down the next in-game day.
“So stay awake during night!”
“You’re building the roof right now, but I’m on the ground and I’m definitely going to get attacked! If I have to go inside anyway, I might as well skip to no monsters.”
Rocky hums a grumbly chord that the laptops don’t translate. “Fine. Will come inside and sleep all together. Even though very dangerous with monsters.”
This might be his favourite, but Rocky still can’t get over the game’s sleeping mechanics.
“So we’re sleeping? You guys made up your mind?” I ask. I don’t know what they’re doing, but I’m feeding my wolf so I can watch the red hearts bubble up. It’s as close as I can get to petting a dog in this game.
“Yes. Because this is a multiplayer game, and some of us like to play it like that.” Watney says pointedly.
I should never introduce these two to Street Fighter, if this is how intense they get with Minecraft, of all things.
Rocky, in response, makes a long trilling sound that roughly translates to an exasperated “ohhhh my god.”
A few seconds later while I wait for the other two to find their way to a bed, there’s the telltale hissing sound, and then an explosion. Some text at the bottom screen informs me that Rocky’s character has died. After a brief moment, Watney cracks up laughing. His face splits into a wide smile as he cackles- I can’t help but pay attention. He meets my eye and I could swear that he smiles even wider.
Rocky whistles and stamps frustratedly. “Fuck you!”
The sound of the translation program swearing kind of short-circuits my brain for a second and I instinctively respond, “Hey, language,” which just makes Watney laugh harder. I wait until he catches his breath for a little before I ask, “Did you add that in?”
“Yep,” Watney replies, smiling in a way that lets me know he still thinks this is hilarious. It’s nice, a good smile, “It’s honestly ridiculous that you haven’t,”
“It didn’t feel necessary. You don’t need swearing to be able to tell someone’s upset. I mean, I don’t swear.” I say.
Watney gives me a look. It’s a weird feeling to be on the receiving end of one. “Rocky’s over one hundred years old, Grace. Let the guy say fuck.”
“Fuck is very good word. Best expletive, very expressive.”
Alright, I’m outnumbered. I know when I’ve been beaten. “Well I can’t put the cat back in the bag now, can I?”
“Nope.”
“No.” Rocky says, then to make a point, “Fuck. Fuck fuck fuck.”
Watney breaks into peels of laughter again.
I sigh. “Yeah, okay pal, I get it.”
“Shit. Bitch. Ass. Dick-”
***
Sometimes Watney and I just sit together, touching. Side-by-side with our hips and shoulders pressed into each other, or one person’s legs slung over the other’s. On a couple occasions, he’s decided to fully lie on top of me, either across my lap or with his head on my chest. We don’t really talk about it. It’s just difficult not to, I think for the both of us. It’s like a magnet pulling me in, I stand closer to him than I need to without realising, and I find myself with my hands on his shoulders more than I’ve ever done with anyone before.
Watney likes to read and I’ve managed to pick up knitting with Eridian textiles, so we have a routine for it now. One of us will settle down for quiet time and the other will join, Rocky often following not far behind. It’s not cuddling, I think we’d actually have to talk about it to cross into that kind of territory, but there’s the pressure and warmth of touch. It’s desperately, pathetically good. And it’s never enough, either. It’s a switch in my brain, not a gauge that rises and falls, and the switch only ever wants to be flipped on.
I would feel weird about it, if it wasn’t obvious Watney is in the same boat. Heck, I was weird about it, he was the one who took the fall after the airlock hug and kicked his feet over my lap unceremoniously one day. It doesn’t take a psychologist to figure that Watney and I are both unusually, extraordinarily deprived of human contact and it’s rewiring our brains a little. It’s not even about getting a hug, I wasn’t getting a ton of those back on Earth either, it’s about being in a situation the human brain simply hadn’t evolved to cope with and getting confronted with how much you used to knock shoulders with people on the street, or brush fingers without realising when the barista handed you your coffee, or shake hands with new acquaintances.
My brain is definitely a little wonky from how long it’s been since I’ve been around other humans. It’s neurological, not necessarily just emotional.
Despite that, there’s this enduring feeling of sentiment that it’s Watney, out of any person that could give my brain the human connection endorphins. Watney, who’s hilarious, and resourceful, and has never once blamed his crew for what happened to him. Who might be the most tenacious guy that has ever lived and appears to simply be a different, more impressive kind of human being than most. (Who I can only describe as charmingly good-looking, as weird as that feels to me.)
And, more relevant to the situation at hand, is completely casual about putting his head on my shoulder while he reads Lord of the Rings. I try to picture someone else in this position - Yao or Ilyukhina if they had survived, Dimitri as my friend back on Earth, Marissa even as my oldest connection before the Project threw my previous life down the drain - but I can’t imagine it feeling the same. I can imagine my neurons fizzing and my nervous system rejoicing after so long, but not the way that I always want it when I look at Watney, no matter what we’re doing.
Neither he nor I are short by white guy standards, but I have a couple of inches on him which is apparently just enough for my shoulders to be the perfect headrest height when we sit together like we are now. Watney wears his hair shorter than mine, but I can just about feel the edge of it tickle my jaw. It’s not uncomfortable or actually ticklish, but it is oddly distracting and I’ve been dropping stitches in my knitting at a rate that I haven’t since I still needed the internet tutorials.
It is a monumentally strange feeling.
Stranger still because this is nothing like befriending Rocky. Meeting Rocky was thrilling, the company and the help was a crippling relief compared to the daunting feeling of being alone in space to save my world. He was fascinating, I felt like every word I had ever spoken in my life wasn’t enough compared to how much I just wanted to talk and talk and talk to my new alien friend. I was prepared to face a death I had worked so hard to undo for him. He’s the most important thing in the galaxy.
But he was never… magnetic, like Watney is. I liked Rocky because he was interesting, and because he turned out to be sharp and thoughtful, but Watney makes me feel like there’s something out of my control pulling me into him. I don’t really know what to do about it.
I’m not stupid, I may have not had much luck in my life with it, but I have dated. It didn’t feel like this, even though I recognise that in hindsight it was probably supposed to. This feeling isn’t completely new to me, it would hit once in a blue moon back on Earth, and it always unnerved me enough that I would stay away from whoever it was attached to until it dissipated on its own, which didn’t usually take very long. But I don’t really want to do that to Watney. I like being around him, and I like that the three of us on this ship make it feel more alive. (Nevermind the fact that I physically cannot because I have nowhere to go, and my brain is too neurologically screwed up to actually let me deprive myself of the touch endorphins I have been lacking.)
Am I supposed to do anything about this? What is there to do, if we already live in a confined space and hang out constantly and share our lives (Rocky included) in a way that nobody else might ever understand? Should I be agonising over whether Watney’s on the same page or is that whole kerfuffle just something they make up for movie drama?
This is so confusing, I can’t believe they made apps just for people to go out and then try and figure out if they felt like this or not. Watney has the unique advantage of being awesome, other people do this with strangers. On purpose.
Okay, no more overthinking about this. I haven’t made any progress on my knitting in like, fifteen minutes. I have better things to do. Like making a scarf… for Watney. While he reads his book with his head on my shoulder.
Holy moly, Grace, get it together.
Eridian textiles don’t come in a variety of particularly pretty colours, but they’re remarkably soft despite being made from some pretty hardy roots that manage to grow in Erid. My stash of Eridian yarn is finite and comes from pretty much all of the cloth that was aboard the Blip-A, the threads unraveled and re-spun into strands that I can knit with. The textile is woven much looser and rougher than human fabric, probably because Eridians don’t have so many finicky cutaneous nerves to care about things being itchy to the touch or keeping them warm, but it was definitely still a labour of love for Rocky to make it all into yarn so I can learn a new hobby. I have a decent stash, but I unravel my older projects as I make new ones just to be sure that I won’t run out.
If Rocky isn’t going to probe me about it, I am also choosing not to interrogate myself on how willing I am to give up my finite materials for a kind of mediocre scarf that Watney didn’t actually ask for.
It’s a muddy kind of green-brown colour, as is everything I have knitted. You could call it camo, if you wanted to be generous. It’s not actually lumpy, not because I’m particularly talented but mostly because I have done so much knitting aboard the Hail Mary on our way home that I have since conquered the learning curve. Rest assured though that there has been a lot of lumpy knitting that remained flawed and kind of crappy for quite a while.
Watney moves his head and I can feel it against my shoulder. “Hey, that’s actually pretty good. What is it gonna be?”
“Ouch, don’t sound so surprised. But it’s just a scarf, nothing fancy.” I don’t tell him that I think I’m making it for him, because that is somehow embarrassing to admit. “How’s the book?”
“Good. It’s technically a reread, my dad used to read it to me as a bedtime story but, you know, I was seven. The finer points didn’t stick with me.”
“Your dad has good taste.” I say. “Got you onto the classics early.”
“Got me onto the nerd shit early.” Watney corrects.
We lapse back into silence for a bit and I get another row done before I say, “I assume you had personal belongings or data you got to bring with you on your mission, you mentioned your commander’s apparently terrible taste in music. You bring any books of your own?”
“Eh, it was mostly sitcoms actually. Figured I’d get more mileage out of them than a book or two.” He says. “I ended up watching, listening, and reading pretty much everything they sent up with the crew multiple times. Apart from Vogel’s German novels, because I don’t know German. I don’t know who let Johannsen in space with so many horror movies. I mean I watched all of them, but that shouldn’t have been allowed.”
It occurs to me that I don’t know what kinds of things Yao and Ilyukhina liked to read and watch. Or maybe I did, but I forgot.
I don’t mean to say it, but the words slip out of my mouth before I can stop it. “Do you miss them?”
“The crew?”
“Yeah.”
“Like a fucking limb.” Watney seems to take himself aback with his answer, so I guess we’re even now.
“Do you miss yours?”
I have walked myself into Honesty Time by accident, and I don’t think I can walk myself back out. I would like out please. I look to Rocky, settled in his exosuit resting against my thigh like a cat, but he’s in ‘let the humans have quiet human time together’ mode and has completely checked out of our conversation. Or maybe he’s just refusing to enable my avoidance.
“I… I mourn them, but I don’t know if I miss them.” I say. “When I woke up they were already gone. They were my friends when we were working on the Project, but I never really got to miss them as much as just the idea of not being alone.”
Okay maybe that’s a little too much honesty. My stomach turns and I kind of wish I could ctrl-z what I just said.
“Shit, I get it. I’m sorry, man.”
“What can you do? Besides, I wasn’t alone for very long, really.” I put my hand on Rocky’s carapace through his suit and he trills absently. He’s probably listening to the conversation now but it’s Rocky, so it’s fine.
“Do you feel that way about Earth, too?” Watney asks.
What a question. I feel, insultingly, like he just drilled a little hole through to my heart and is now using it like a peephole. No more Honesty Time, thank you.
“Well, I’ve got Rocky and I’m going home.” I try to shrug, before I remember that Watney’s head is on my shoulder and abort the action mid-motion. “You miss Earth, I bet.”
Watney takes my unsubtle redirection without comment, even though Rocky bumps my hip in quiet reproach. “Yeah. I miss my parents. The book’s good, but it’s making me think about them now. Must’ve been a fucking horrorshow for them to keep up with what was happening with me.”
“What are they like?” I ask, taking the opportunity to push the conversation in a different direction.
“Well, Dad’s a goddamn nerd, passed it down to me early. He likes to tell people that he always knew I would be an astronaut, that ever since he showed me Interstellar as a kid he could tell I was going to get myself into space one day.” Watney laughs, “Bet he’s regretting manifesting that now.
“He’s also the slowest driver of all time. Like, the rover goes fifteen kilometres an hour and it was reminding me of my dad in the driver’s seat when we road-tripped to see family interstate. And you can’t even fucking complain about it because does the whole ‘back in my day’ thing about how the roads didn’t used to be so icy and the driving’s gotten worse ‘cus of it, yada yada yada.”
I don’t mean to flinch. I wish I didn’t, I don’t feel good about ruining a fun story, but I reacted before I could stop myself. He definitely notices.
“... you good?” He asks.
The roads are icier, the world is cooler. What other changes are normal to him?
“Yeah, yeah I’m all good. Keep talking.”
“Grace is lying.” Rocky says, too quiet for the translator to snitch to Watney, but loud enough for me to know he’s calling me on my bull. I ignore it.
Ordinarily I could listen to Watney talk for hours. We do talk for hours, that is a thing that happens frequently. And I try to pay attention to what he’s telling me about his mom’s favourite movie that he watches with her every Mother’s Day, I really do, but it’s like my brain is putting a stopper between what my ears are hearing Watney saying and what my auditory cortex will process. It refuses to let me hear any of the little details about Earth, the implications I could spiral over. Which is ineffective, because I’m definitely spiralling a little anyway.
Everything gets cloudy for a while. I don’t remember moving my hands but I realise at some point that there’s another row completed on my scarf.
“-seriously, man, are you okay?” I only notice Watney is trying to get my attention because the pressure on the side of my body disappears as he leans away and looks at me. Despite the situation I’ve gotten myself into, something pleasant still sparks in my brain at the sight of his face. “I just made a killer joke and you didn’t even react.”
“Sorry, sorry. You can say the joke again, I’ll laugh this time.”
“It was a great pun, but that’s not the point. The point is that something is definitely up with you.”
“Yes.” Rocky chimes in agreement.
I take back all that soppy stuff I said about friendship, not if those two are going to gang up on me.
“No it’s- I just zoned out for a bit.”
“That’s bullshit.” Watney calls it like it is, “Do you want me to stop talking about my family? I know that it’s been a long time since you’ve… uh, known how yours are doing.”
“Oh, no, my parents are long gone, they passed years before we even discovered the Petrova Line.” I say, and then realise I have just given up an easy out offered to me. I’m terrible at being honest, and just as bad at lying about it too apparently.
“Not about parents. About Earth.” Rocky snitches on me. Or puts me out of my misery, depending on how you look at it.
I don’t look at Watney’s face, but I can tell when he realises. “Oh.”
“Yeah.”
“I guess I’ve been wondering why you haven’t asked about home yet.”
I know I could draw a hard line here and say that I’m not talking about it. They’d back off. Watney and Rocky aren’t pushing me into this corner, I’m doing it to myself. But I think I just have to reap what I’ve sown now.
“I… I heard the numbers when I was still working on Project Hail Mary on Earth. The death toll and crisis predictions. I guess they aren’t- well, the apocalypse didn’t happen, because you’re here, which is good.” I sound pathetic and I feel, as always, like a coward. “I just couldn’t help but think about my students. Statistically, not all of them…” I can’t say it.
Watney leans back into me again, accompanied this time with an arm around my shoulders. “I forgot you used to be a teacher.” He says quietly.
Used to be a teacher. The words hit hard and settle uncomfortably. Used to be, in past tense. It’s been so many years since I’ve been in the classroom, but in my brain I’ve never stopped being a teacher. If not to middleschoolers, than to astronauts I had to impart Astrophage knowledge onto, and the alien I explained human culture to.
“I did it for them. The whole project, I was on it for my kids.” I say.
“Do you want to know how Earth’s holding up?”
“I don’t really think it matters. I can’t change it, and I’ll have to confront it when we get there anyway.”
“…You were right. The apocalypse didn’t happen.” Watney says, and despite what I just said I feel the vice grip on all of my insides loosen. “It was hard and it got bad, a lot of people did die. But we hung on. Project Hail Mary was far from the only thing we did about the problem.”
To no one’s surprise, there are tears pooling in the corners of my eyes. “That’s- that’s good.”
“Real meat and fish is hard to come by these days, it’s mostly imitation stuff that my dad says used to be a vegan fad before Astrophage. Pretty much everything is grown indoors now, in massive green-warehouses, and most of it is genetically modified withstand colder temperatures. There were wars, and a lot of starvation. The governments didn’t hold hands or share nicely. But people did what they always did, they got together and they said ‘fuck you’ to all of that and they tried to make the world a better place anyway.”
I had a student once, her name was Victoria, and I tried very hard to make it clear to her parents that she needed help with anxiety. She threw up before every test and dreaded lab pracs out of fear that she would break the equipment. The first time I taught a lesson to her class on climate science and global warming, I ended up helping Victoria through an anxiety attack about the world ending in the hallway afterwards. I remember saying to her ‘We have no reason to believe we won’t get through this. There’s no precedent for it.’
Of all of the many years of human existence, and just as much suffering and hopelessness, there’s never been a period of history we didn’t endure. World Wars, chattel slavery, the fall of Rome, genocides and humanitarian crises, the Black Death. They weren’t pretty, they weren’t fair, but we came out the other side. People cared enough to keep believing in tomorrow and keep trying to make things better.
They cared enough to build a spaceship and send it 12 light years away for a solution. They cared enough to genetically modify food so the world could keep eating.
They cared enough to send Watney into space and try so damn hard to bring him home again.
I press my palms into my face and weep.
Watney shifts a little, so I’m tucked into his side now instead of leaning the other way, and he pulls me in closer with the arm around my shoulders. It’s really nice. Rocky trills something wordless and comforting, tip-tapping his claws on my thigh like he does now when he’s trying to make me feel better.
“Did say that it would be worthwhile conversation.” He says, which is the nicest way he could possibly be telling me ‘I told you so’.