Chapter Text
"Dr. Mann, there's a fifty-fifty chance you'll kill yourself!"
Mann barely pauses to consider Cooper's desperate words. "Those are the best odds I've had in years."
A solid hit, and glass shatters inward across his face.
The cold feels like fire. It comes in a veritable wall as his oxygen surrenders, two years of this planet's pent-up desire to kill him. Mann thought he was ready to die.
He panics.
An emergency breather is forced against his face and he clings to it like it will be taken away. His hands are surely blistered and bleeding, red against the endless white of this place.
A handful of words is handed down to him when he is calm enough to listen again.
"You won't kill me."
It's merely a statement. Cooper's grim expression is half-hidden by his visor and Mann suddenly hates this planet, rage so intense that it feels like it's tearing him apart. He can't reply. The ammonia burns his eyes.
For all that, he had thought his situation couldn't get any worse.
When Mann's helmet smashes open across the ice, Cooper has to make a split-second decision. No one can blame him for hesitating, although many voices protest as he drags the doctor from the Ranger into the pod's airlock. Let them, he thinks grimly, Brand to his right, Romilly to his left, Mann weak and gasping under his astronaut gloves.
"Why did you bring him back?" Brand yells. Cooper takes his helmet off as Mann takes greedy sips from an emergency oxygen supply. "He's dangerous!"
Cooper walks off to remove his space suit. He's too exhausted to answer, not that she'd like his answer anyway.
"Maybe I know what it's like to be dangerous and sick in the head because you miss someone, alright, Amelia?"
It's not good enough. When Cooper returns, they're interrogation-ready, Mann unconscious but alive, slumped against the wall next to a pile of junk. Just lying there.
"What happened?" Brand asks, but Cooper shakes his head.
"TARS, chart a course for Edmunds'."
Saying those words aloud feels like dying.
He has to dig deep into his well of discipline to crouch next to Mann and not slap him awake. He settles for shaking him by his shoulder.
"Edmunds?" Romilly echoes faintly.
The doctor stirs, then startles awake. Cooper draws his hand back.
Look what you've done, he wants to say.
"Is there anything here for us?" he asks instead.
Mann looks up at him blearily. He opens his mouth to speak, and nothing comes out. Ammonia damage. Or maybe cowardice. He shakes his head, and Cooper wishes he'd left him to die.
As if he'd heard the thought, Mann grabs hold of Cooper's wrist, his eyes wide. "You can't —" he whispers, his voice coarse, "you can't leave me here. Please. Don't leave me."
Cooper shakes him off, disgusted. He stands and leaves for the hab pod and maybe Mann and Brand and Romilly call after him but he doesn't hear them. All he can see is his kids and it may as well be killing him.
That moment on the surface of the ice plays over and over and over again in the back of his mind, the glass endlessly shattering, spilling across the permafrost. Out of the corner of his eye, the long-range communicator tumbles into an abyss. He wants to do the right thing; wants to fix the ship and his crew and his family until there's nothing left to be broken, but his kids grew up believing he left them to die. There's nothing he can do about that.
Brand and Romilly and Mann talk.
They're on the move before reconciliation can occur. It's an odd turn-around, a little like tripping up the stairs and hoping to land on your feet. Cooper pulls off the docking and no one tries to sabotage him. It's nice. He spends that first day on the Endurance locked away, isolating himself in the quarantine module because he's sick in the head from missing someone and thinks he would rather fistfight Mann again than face his crew. Then he's back to work.
Brand has some kind of tough conversation with Mann, details unspecified, and suddenly he's part of the crew too.
"I don't trust him," she warns after explaining. Dark circles line her eyes.
Romilly laughs nervously. "We're with you there."
Cooper more than distrusts him, but he has a suspicion that this is not the time to say that aloud. He nods. "Two months to Edmunds'. He's got plenty of time to pull himself together."
Brand looks at him with something horribly like pity. "I'm so sorry about your kids, Cooper."
He wants to tell her it's not her fault, but those words are a long way off. Even if they're true.
Mann doesn't say much of anything. No one encourages him to, either. It's a silver lining to the void of horror yawning before them.
Mann may have unlimited time to pull himself together, but that means Cooper has all the time in the world to snap. He knows psychology vicariously through Erin, and he's afraid of what they might do to each other. Of what he might do to Mann. Humans in forced proximity get angry and fight and kill each other — in the end, they're just animals that happened to achieve space travel. It's a matter of time before something gives.
It won't be Cooper. He has to make it, has to start this colony, even if he hates it and it will drain his life and soul. He owes his kids everything that he is. This is the absolute least he can do.
Mann and Romilly get chatty about a week into their voyage. They have the common ground, Cooper knows, but it sets him on edge to hear the two of them speaking in tones he can't make out. Mann looks different without his helmet, obviously, but Cooper still has a very visceral reaction to seeing the traitor who tried to kill him. Hearing Romilly's voice only gives him a pang of grief. Sometimes it is so intense that he makes excuses to avoid him.
Avoidance is a difficult thing in an 8-pod spaceship.
They act civil in the sense that they don't talk to each other.
TARS, ever the therapist, expresses his opinion on the subject unwarranted. "You have to acknowledge him, Cooper."
"Why?" Cooper's tone is tired rather than challenging.
"Because, if everything goes according to plan, you're going to be fostering a new humanity with him."
"There's still some time before it comes to that."
"Cooper, you're pretending that none of this happened."
"Shut up, TARS."
"You're going to —"
"I said shut up."
Mann seems takes extra care to tiptoe around him after the conversation he wasn't supposed to hear. Nothing is very private on an 8-pod spaceship.
Brand tentatively suggests cryo-sleep after one and a half weeks in the sky.
Romilly seems ready, but Cooper can't sleep so soon. He's still wrapping his head around the enormity of the disaster, the way he's stuck with Plan B.
Mann's eyes go wide at the notion and he shakes his head like it's going to save his life. "I'm sorry, I — I can't do that again."
Brand kneads her forehead. "I get that, but we can't leave you alone."
"I'll stay," Romilly offers.
"Hey, no," Cooper protests, "we're not putting all this on hold. We only have so many supplies."
"We're not going to run out anytime soon," Brand counters.
"Do you really know that? When was the last time —"
"It's true, we have another crew member now," Romilly points out. "And, sorry, Mann, but he was starving himself toward the end there."
Cooper turns back to Brand. "And that's going to throw all our calculations off. I don't want to sleep either, but Mann cannot stay here until we reach Edmunds'."
"I know, I'm trying to think."
"There's an easy solution here."
"I just need a week," Mann interrupts, "then I'll work through it and —"
"If he goes down now, then we keep enough oxygen in supply for the preliminary backup tests."
Mann has gone pale. "It's one week," he says faintly. “It’s not like it would hurt for us to spend a week --”
“What do you want us to do?” Cooper asks in a rare burst of anger. He directs every ounce of it at the doctor. “Do you want me to stay up and babysit you? Because …” He trails off. It really would be the most reasonable conclusion, even if he’d rather spend a week in a space suit, stuck to the Endurance’s outer wall with duct tape.
“Cooper,” TARS warns.
Cooper rubs a hand over his mouth.
“Cooper?” Brand asks.
Cooper rests his head in his hand. “Neither of us want to go into cryo.”
“I’m not sure this is a good idea,” Romilly starts, alarmed.
Neither is Cooper. He glances over at Mann, who’s gone quiet, his face drawn.
“It could be a lot worse,” he reasons. He’s not entirely sure that’s true. “TARS can wake you up if we try to kill each other.”
Brand looks equally worried. “Cooper, that’s not funny.”
He shrugs. “It wasn’t a joke.”
Maybe he needs a cue light.
"We're not staying up forever," Cooper warns as the lid of a cryo-bed slides shut.
Mann nods. "Yeah — thanks for — yeah."
Cooper checks Brand's vitals. Green and steady. Mann gets this look on his face like he wants to apologize, but Cooper can't imagine anything worse, so he gives the doctor a gentle shove to his shoulder to signal the end of the conversation and leaves before another one can begin.
Mann flinches at his touch and then stays on the cryo-deck for a long time.