Chapter Text
Rose first met Dave Strider off the ice, one night at a New Zealand hotel bar. Christchurch was a long way from home—but Kiwis still knew about sauvignon blanc, so she might have well been anywhere in the world.
She spotted the blonde man while she took her first sip, watching him order with faint curiosity. The kind of studious gaze one might reserve for an exotic animal. With every blink she captured him in profile, her eyes becoming her telephoto lens of choice.
From the fragments of speech she picked up, he sounded southern, with respect to the US dialect. American explained a lot: like the sunglasses, and the 8pm drinking.
Her curiosity got the better of her, and she got up from her seat. He didn't look up from his drink as she swayed over to sit by him, glass of white wine in hand.
"I take it as given that you’re not from New Zealand." She said, propping herself on the stool next to him, facing parallel to the bar. Body open to him, inviting him to face her.
"No shit? What gave it away." He said, and didn't look up. He had a very dry manner to his speaking, but a tiny smirk let her know he didn't begrudge the company either.
"It might have been the accent. Texas?"
"Yeah. East coast?"
"New York," She said. "The state, that is. The city is overrated—I've been there for New Years. I suppose you must be freezing your ass off down here?"
"If you'd just had the summer we had, you’d wanna freeze your ass off. Try 120 degrees, sidewalk baking you through your chucks, mirage on the horizon all summer. Finding an AC repair guy ain't trivial. I was pretty much walking around the house like the sweaty, panting, second-place runner-up of an all-male wet t-shirt contest."
"A delightful mental image," She chuckled. "And the shades?"
"Corrective lenses. And I'd forget them otherwise. Forget my own nose if it wasn't stapled on. It's look like a fucking tool in a bar for one night or go snow-blind. I mean, who even wears shades at night? Poker guys, except not good ones, so it's guys who wish they were poker guys. And pick-up artists, which are kind of the same boat of performative masculinity gleaned from the silver screen. You're not Tom Cruise, buddy, so take your aviators and-"
"You said snow-blindness?" She stopped him, touching her chin curiously. "You're going to the pole, then."
"Tomorrow, yeah," He said, and looked at her, perturbed by her cold-read skills. "I gotta get my big dorky red parka in the morning. It's fine, I can live with a hangover."
"You can't. Have you ever been in a Hercules? You'll have a migraine for the whole thing. Bring water." Her smile returned. Coy. Proud to be the veteran for once.
"So what are you doing drinking? You talk like you're gonna be on my flight. Maybe we'll share a row, and everyone can watch us take turns puking in a bag.
"I can live with a hangover. Good thing, as well, because they don't give you a bag for the vomit." She returned, glancing at the glass of dark spirit he was nursing. "What are you doing down there? You don't look like a scientist."
"Why? Cus I'm in great shape?"
"Because you're an asshole and you don't have a beard. Everyone is in good shape. It's not Lapland. It's the seventh continent. It's killed people." If looks could kill, she'd just fixed him under her hemlock stare.
"I'll have you know I look great with stubble," he chuckled. "I'm a director. Not that I have anyone to direct, so call me a filmmaker instead. I'm doing a solo thing. Documentary on you weirdos down there in your solitary community.”
“You know they're studying you guys for when they set up on Mars? Figure the red planet is gonna do the same things to people's brains. I'm gonna look at you guys and interpolate, " he said it one phoneme at a time, like he thought she was dumb. "Already got footage of those prototype communities of space-larpers in Utah and shit. It's gonna be a Netflix original. Maybe I'll let you star in it."
"Should I know who you are?" She asked, more than a little bemused.
"Probably not. I'm not huge yet. Dave Strider. I made SBaHJ," She must have smirked at the way he said it—like some unwieldy compound word rather than an initialism—because he quickly added, "That's Sweet Bro and Hella Jeff. I've been doing documentaries for a couple years while I sit on the script for the sequel."
"As if. That animated thing?" He looked at her for a moment, before fishing out his wallet and showing her his driver's license.
"That's me. The genuine article."
"I saw your Hillary mockumentary. It made me want to gouge my eyes out." She remarked, and watched him smile too, throwing back a glug of his whisky.
"It's supposed to. Nobody wanted to fund it so I paid for everything myself. Figured I might as well turn low-budget into the aesthetic. Plus it kinda gives it an edge it wouldn't have if the whole production felt super corporate."
"I can assure you it certainly didn't feel corporate. I doubt NBC signed off on that bit about women's genitalia. Utterly ghastly. You must be a virgin," She said, and smiled. Her ultimate weapon against manhood, and therefore the ultimate diagnostic tool in sizing a gentleman up.
"No, it's parody, that's-" Dave gave a frustrated groan and she chuckled.
"It gave me a laugh, I suppose. Is this project going to contain as many gag-inducing similes and hamfisted metaphors? It seems a little, I don't know, sophisticated? Sincere? I don't know if I can picture your style meshing with the science." She said, looking him over like she might have ascertained his artistic merits from his ruffled grey suit.
"Look, you're right, but listen. I can jive with 'the science', ma'am. I can walk the walk. I minored in paleontology. That's one of the sciences of all time. NSF digs me."
"I'm waiting for the punchline." She rolled her eyes at him, impression worsening by the second.
"Well, the punchline’s on you. As in, all of you down there. I'm mostly trying to catch, y'know. Weirdness. Idiosyncrasies. The way you guys go nuts with some kinda cabin fever,” He said, and paused thoughtfully. “Maybe I'll go nuts. I gotta admit that would make for great cinema. You got any tips on how to go nuts?"
"You don't need tips." Dave laughed for a moment, sipping his drink. She matched him, thinking it only fair.
Rose didn't know if he thought she was into him. In a way, she suspected cocky auteur types like him always thought the woman was into them. Broadly speaking.
"What are you doing down there, then?" He asked her eventually, and she shrugged dismissively.
"I'm a psychologist. Your movie's premise? That's what I'm studying, from a much more experimentally rigorous perspective. You're right about the Mars stuff. NASA is very interested in the way people respond to isolation. Or in the ways they don't ."
"I'm not the first or greatest to have investigated this, of course." She said, and shrugged politely, like deferring to some other expert, "My interest observing what happens to the human mind when subjected to bleak, everlasting darkness in the coldest place on Earth. I did a study last summer, overseeing workers under contract to see how they responded. A good case study on how camaraderie and booze can keep a crew functioning. Though I doubt they'll send up a crate of Coors Light with the Ares missions."
"Okay, that's why someone has to be down there. What are you down here for?" He asked, and she blinked, unsure how to feel about this intrusive stranger. After a moment she decided: well, what's the harm in it? She was tipsy, he was shitfaced—and she'd never had a chance to speak with levity on the matter.
"When I graduated I began looking into research. Why would I take this? It's an adventure, certainly, and one with quite a queer cast of characters. Everyone from the Raytheon guys to the scientists are nuts-"
"-and not the garden-variety nuts they sell by the pound at CostCo-"
"Yes, all of them crazy, verifiably. But most of all, I took it because it meant undertaking research as far from home as possible."
"Don't like home?" He asked, and all of a sudden he was the interviewer, even though she had come to him.
"I don't like my mother. At least down here I don't have to worry about answering her calls."