Chapter Text
Watney groaned. Shivering slightly, he shifted around on the… Rec sofa? Throwing the blanket off onto the floor.
He pondered this development with eyes that were unwilling to open up again. Why was he sleeping on the Rec sofa?
He’d slept three hours, felt pasty and confused, and tired from just moving around for a second, yet he felt like he’d probably not be able to sleep again.
The sofa creaked on its own accord, and the blanket returned. Watney sat there, shivering as he noticed that he’d sweated through his clothes… Johanssen’s clothes he’d had to borrow…, for a few more minutes until something beeped in the distance and the sound broke through his half-asleep, half-awake state of fuzzy uncaring.
“Sorry” a voice said, “I have to take your temperature”
“I feel like shit” Watney responded, as reality started imposing its harshness back on him. He remembered; he’d caught a cold somehow? And on the eighth day of doing “absolutely fuck all” and lying around in his bunk, he attempted to come to the Rec to talk to the others. And apparently took a nap in the middle of the “attempting to talk to others”.
A mere three weeks off of Mars and I meet my worst enemy, Watney thought. Colds are the shit for starvation victims.
“Yep, they are” the dislocated voice got allocated a body, no longer a potential hallucination. Johanssen’s arms felt warm and the contact felt worth it for waking up, until she poked a cold thermometer into Watney’s right ear.
“Fuck, I’m cold” he said.
“Temperature is all the way back down to 100 without any meds” Johanssen said. Watney noticed a split second later that she’d been holding down the button on a tiny earpiece. No doubt reporting to Beck.
“Where’s Beck?” Watney asked.
Johanssen froze for a split second that would have been obvious had Watney not been fully alert yet, before deciding to play it cool and try to defuse the situation. “Beck had some work to do,” she said vaguely.
“He gets to actually do stuff?” Watney grouched, the words in his brain not fully translating to his mouth, “I’m bored. Give me something to do too! What’s he doing?”
Johanssen decided a minor lie might be necessary. “You think I really want to ask about gross medical stuff?”
“Depends on if you plan to sleep with him or not” he deadpanned.
She blushed for a minute, looking away. Desired effect achieved, he thought. A mini-doctor’s mask snapped on a half-minute later - Beck’s influence! his mind tacked on - as a crackling from the com in her ear was audible.
“Beck says that you should take a shower and change,” she said.
“Don’t… want to,” Watney said, his messed up knees and bones unhappy with the concept of walking the short distance to the shower located at the end of the module of the gravity ring, which was just past the gym.
“Come on” Johanssen said, “Got a surprise for you, -”
“A photo of you and Beck kissi-” Watney interjected mischievously.
“- courtesy of someone who's definitely not Andy Weir” she said the last part with a tiny amount of sarcasm intentionally inflected into the words, “No photos of me and Beck”
Well, that seemed to work. Watney perked up, Project Hail Mary still fresh on his mind; he immediately decided that it could be Weir due to how Johanssen had phrased it. “What, he’s sent up a coma system to the Hermes when I wasn’t looking so I could sleep the rest of the trip?”
Johanssen looked slightly pained at the thought that Watney would want to sleep and not wake up until he was done with space. He used to love space, she thought, remembering a Watney that would be enthusiastic for every new mission day after a short period of time of traditional bitching with Lewis over waking up; all 124 of them and 5 sols on Mars before the moment when everything changed… and they left who Watney was behind.
“Anyway, I really shouldn’t bother you with… whatever you’re doing” Watney tried to sneak a peak at her laptop that she’d unceremoniously plonked on the sofa, to her left. A word document? Probably mission reports.
She snapped the laptop shut, then gave Watney the lightest of pushes. Just enough to convey a point. “Fine, I’m going!” he said, slightly angry at yet again making someone upset by simply having Mars “happen” to him, wet clothes he’d had to borrow from her clinging to his skin.
“I left clothes in the shower” she said, pre-emptively answering his next question. Satisfied, Watney trudged his way off. She could swear she heard his bones creaking.
Why did you do this to Watney, she thought mournfully to the red planet, receding from view behind the Hermes. Also visible: two astronauts on EVA, attached by tethers to Airlock One: The one behind the gravity ring; allowing for EVAs for engine maintenance without having to spin down the gravity ring.
She blew a kiss through the window, and one of them paused re-installing a hull maintenance panel to mirror her action.
She smiled.
<~~~>
Watney ignored the ten minute showering rule yet again; nobody particularly wanted to enforce it against the man who had gone without showers for 500 or so sols.
Although admittedly it was getting harder to avoid zoning out in showers, he thought. Too easy to start thinking about something, and then come back into reality only when the water stopped. He’d then have to hit the button again to re-start a ten minute shower, stealing shower time from the rest of the crew, simply because he hadn’t gotten to use shampoo yet.
And then more often than not the cycle would start again.
So far he hadn’t had a Martian flashback in the shower yet; it would be embarrassing to have to be hauled out. Wait, don’t think about Mars don’t think about Mars don’t think about Mars…
The ants of loneliness started marching on his skin yet again. He resolutely stopped the shower, feeling bad for a moment for having to yet again steal more of Johanssen’s clothes.
He did not look into the window to see how even her clothes sagged around him. His own clothes would be worse. Far worse.
<~~~>
He came back, shivering and sneezing into the Rec. How come the Hermes felt this cold?
Johanssen looked up a split second before he unceremoniously plonked himself on the sofa. More of an only-somewhat controlled descent.
“Fuck my fucking ribs” he said, after a cough, making grabby hands in the general direction of the blanket. She handed it over, alongside a glass of water - the luxuries of being on a ship with a gravity ring, water would stay in the glass instead of floating off - which he drank greedily.
And an eBook reader. Johanssen’s name was engraved on the back of it.
“What’s this?” Watney asked.
“The surprise” she answered mysteriously, “You know about AO3, right? I think I mentioned it once or twice”
“Yeah” Watneys said, “Only every other waking moment” he exaggerated.
“Anyway” she said simply, “I downloaded a fic written by NotAndyWeir that I think you might like”
“Cool” Watney said, turning on the ebook before promptly using Johanssen’s shoulder as a human pillow. A grin slowly formed on his face before “Are there any fics about him going to Erid, question? The book never really gave any details on that trip”
“When did you start saying question at the end of questions, question?” Johanssen replied, taking a short break from typing with her right shoulder locked in a slightly awkward position by Watney’s head as he inspected the opening comments, “And yep” she said, popping the p out of habit, “There are a lot of fics written about that, but when I read them I found a lot of them were depressing or would likely be triggering as all hell to you, so I ended up going for the one which would remind you of Mars the least”
“Right” Watney thought, a flashback-inducing fic about Project Hail Mary might make him hate everything PHM related for a while and he’d hate that because PHM felt like the only thing that kept him sane on the rover journey. Before that, it had been a bit easier with Pathfinder until it broke and the baths with the RTG and the-
Johanssen’s shoulder stopped being a warm comfortable pillow as she swiveled around to look him in the eye. “You took a bath with a fucking RTG!?” she said, “What the fuck is wrong with you, Watney!?”
“Hey” he replied, as the shivers crept into him once again, “Your shoulder was warm. And how the fuck do you not know? I mentioned it to Vogel and Beck and I’d have thought they’d have told all of you by now. Also I thought I was fucking done with fucking saying my thoughts out loud”
She sat there in a moment of tense silence. “Beck, did he mention an RTG bath?” she asked through her earpiece.
Apparently the result satisfied her, because she relaxed. Watney plonked himself on his shoulder again, and began to read.
A minute later, when he’d nearly finished the first chapter, mentally making a note to ask Beck to guesstimate the caloric value of Taumobea and a few scientific inaccuracies, when Johanssen spoke up again. “Barring how risky it was, you’ve made me jealous,” she said.
The fuck she was going on about???
“The RTG bath” she tacked on. Oops. Apparently I spoke my thoughts out again, Watney thought, hand moving to his lips to make sure they weren’t moving. Fuck. They were.
“Alright” he said, resigned, “How long have I been speaking by inner thoughts for?”
“Since you started reading” she answered, as he noticed that she’d wrapped her right hand around his back. When did that happen?
“When you got to the bit where he used the airlock”
Airlock. The word was enough to make Watney freeze up a second again, almost drifting out of reality and into the horrible flashback-land. Mars, the NASA Hab airlock, he was practically there, but not quite.
Good enough reasoning, he decided, as reality faded back in. Good enough reason for many things, like Johanssen picking the fic he’d read instead of letting him find something worse.
He smiled, realising that for once his lips had remained sealed shut.
“Also, the writer didn’t have a beta,” she added, before going back to awkwardly typing with just her left hand on her laptop.
“The fuck is a beta?” Watney asked.
“A person who reads someone’s fics before posting” Johanssen said, “Usually to find errors or bugs - I mean, plot holes, typos, mistakes, et cetera”
Watney sniggered, “You're always going to be a coding super-nerd at heart” he said. After Mars, any excuse for jokes was welcome.
Johanssen smiled, “I was a beta once” she said, “Probably not the best one, but I did work with a few people to help them with the odd oneshot fic here and there. Stopped doing that when I was picked to go to space.”
He went back to reading. “Woo!” He cheered, “He sent off Paul!”
Paul, the ‘beetle’ spacecraft that would carry Taumoeba to Erid.
<~~~>
Watney took a quick break from reading to use the toilet, time in which Johanssen furiously typed some more on a word document, given that she had the use of her right arm back.
It was barely a minute later when a choked laughter emanated from him.
She raised an eyebrow at him.
“The fuck?” he questioned with a grin that seemed to be having minor existential thoughts about whether it should stay a smile or turn into a frown, highlighting something on the eBook.
( Screw you, Mark Watney, and your potatoes. )
“Oh” Johanssen said, “I’d forgotten about that”
Well, as long as Watney was taking it this well…
“That was written sometime after you had Pathfinder” she remarked, opening up the document on her laptop that she had perched on her knees the entire time as Watney started reading again. A few quick searches allowed her to find that it was the only reference to Mark Watney in the text itself; she’d removed all the chapter notes as some of them referenced Watney while he was still on Mars.
Aliens are a whole lot more resistant to isolation than humans, Watney thought. If I’d have been on Mars for 40 years, I’d have been mad at the end of it.
“Don’t compare yourself to a fictional alien,” she warned. Fuck, my lips… weren’t shut, again, Watney immediately thought, frustration building slightly within himself again.
“I did do a lot of that on Mars” he admitted, “There was dick-all else to do on the rover drive”
<~~~>
There were odd bursts of occasional laughter - usually followed by a cough or a sneeze - coming in from the Rec. Martinez eventually went to investigate - partially because he hadn’t heard Watney’s laugh in weeks, and partly because despite being on-duty he had the excuse that he really needed to use a one-G toilet. He descended down the ladder from the ship’s hub module that connected the rotating gravity ring with the front and back non-rotating sections.
“What’s up?” he asked Watney. Johanssen saw him, and immediately took the opportunity to get off the sofa for a moment while they talked, doing a few stretches. A slight popping noise emanated in the process; the position she’d been working in wasn’t exactly doing wonders to her back.
Watney had a grin on his face. “Only Grace joking with Rocky that broken pinky promises means that you can break the other person’s finger”
Martinez scratched his head, wondering if Watney had lost it. “Man - are you uh… high or something, or is that really in the book?”
Johanssen re-emerged from the Rec kitchenette with two NASA rations, “I let him loose on some Project Hail Mary fan fiction” she said as a word of explanation, before climbing back on the sofa, effortlessly, and then added on, “You should really read the original book, though.”
“You haven’t read the book?” Watney was surprised.
“I may have been kind of busy doing half of your engineering duties, and then training on MAV remote launches until now” he admitted sheepishly.
“Read the book already”
“Says who?”
“Says the King of Mars. I hereby decree anyone who doesn’t read it sleeps in the airlock” Watney said.
“I did-” Martinez wanted to say ‘sleep in the airlock’. Back when there was a bunk heating issue, he had in fact slept in Airlock 3, the one attached to the gravity ring.
“Martinez” Johanssen cautioned. He thought through it for a few seconds more.
Watney ended the awkward pause - at this point, if one of the crew would stop someone else saying something, he trusted that usually it meant that that thing could be flashback-triggering - by going back to the old, classic, pre-Mars burn: “Also, you don’t do anything as a pilot, which means you were actually only on half-duty”
“I was and still am busy flying the ship!” he said, gesturing at the ‘ceiling’ of the gravity ring.
“Says the man who pointed at Uranus on Ares Live” Watney smirked, “And who's flying the ship now?”
“Laws of physics, which Vogel confirmed to be working 99.95% of the time” he said, “Y’know, Newton’s laws? The old ones you probably forgot because of that plant obsession you had - have.”
“I’ll have you know that my plant obsession saved my life” Watney said, smoothly, tight-lipped. He did not want to be reminded about potatoes and Mars, “What happens 0.05% of the time?”
Martinez put on a great show of being deep in thought, putting his hand up to his chin. “Well, a certain period of time after we stopped by Mars for some reason I can’t remember, the acceleration we had was lower. Force equals mass times acceleration. We certainly didn’t decrease the force, so that means the mass increased. Almost as if we have a stowaway”
Watney’s eyes crinkled at that. He was about to smile, when a cough won the race to his face.
“We should really try find this stowaway and kick them off the ship” he said, with a near-perfect mask of seriousness, “Before they make us five arrive later on Earth or they eat too much of our food”
“Or we could feed the pilot Taumoeaba goop” Watney retorted.
“Okay, Martinez, go do whatever you used as an excuse to get here then go back to work” Johanssen said with the authority of a person who could hack the ship well enough that NASA still didn’t know how she did it - the NSA classified her methods.
<~~~>
Martinez entered the 1-G control room in a different gravity ring module.
“How’s Watney doing?” Lewis asked, not looking from the camera feeds of Beck’s and Vogel’s suit cameras as they opened up a different access panel to get at the reactor cooling systems.
“Better than I expected,” Martinez replied, “He still doesn’t know we had to do an emergency EVA with one of the two reactors turned off.”
“Well, he might raise hell about it later” Lewis said, “But we can leave it this way for now. Better for the guy to have a panic attack when there’s evidence that the ship’s working perfectly”
“Yes ma’am” Martinez replied, sitting down and starting to monitor Beck and Vogel.
Privately, Lewis hated the cold logic behind not fully informing Watney of what was happening; but the NASA psych department had said it should be done, and Lewis wasn’t one to do something against NASA’s wishes more than once if possible.
<~~~>
“Is that for me?” Watney gestured to the two food packets Johanssen had seemingly forgotten about.
“No, I planned to eat them both” she joked, “I forgot about them for a moment”, she then admitted, “You can have one if you want”
“What’s in them?” Watney squinted at the label, his eyes not succeeding in focusing on the small text a few meters away on the little table on the left side of the sofa.
“Strawberry yogurt” she replied, “It’s part of your meal plan for some reason as a snack, and I wouldn’t argue against that because it tastes almost like the real thing if you give it a few minutes after you add a small amount of water. It’s from the resupply"
“Fine” Watney said, “So… about the rehydrating machine that is pretty fucking far away for me?”
“Sure” Johanssen said, “As long as you don’t become a couch potato by lazing around while we bring you everything”
FUCKING. POTATOES. He glared at her, but didn’t have the heart to make that much of a fuss. He went back to reading.
<~~~>
“That was immensely satisfying,” he said. He’d registered a minor anomaly in that Johanssen had already spent hours with him and he’d only seen Martinez, not Beck, but let it slide in favour of focusing on reading the fan fic.
“What?” she asked, still serving as a human pillow as the King of Mars had wordlessly decreed.
“Grace making a videolog to yell at Stratt” he said.
“Seriously? Everything else out of that chapter, all these other space projects, and that’s the one thing you’re interested in?”
“I don’t think me and space have a future together, we’re getting divorced the second I can”
Johanssen shook her head. Watney went back to reading some more, and thirty seconds later into the next chapter he mentioned, “I should’ve thought of trying to make soap”
“You wouldn’t have had the stuff to make the base in sufficient quantities” Johanssen replied, “NASA had at least five or so scientists trying for about a week to see if you could make soap in the Hab, but there was nothing there in sufficient quantity”
“Still” he said, “I could have at least tried. I could have had something to do instead of just lazing around for a few hundred sols”
Minutes later, he stiffened yet again. Ammonia leak. A leak. In between Rocky’s atmosphere and Grace’s.
In between the Hermes reactor coolant systems and the cabin?
In between the Hermes reactor coolant systems and the cabin!?
Something he was trained to fix.
The Hermes used some toxic ammonia in its coolant system. What if it leaked into the habitable sections? He hadn’t checked any systems in nearly a week. What if there was a leak that nobody could catch?
Suddenly, in front of him, there was a laptop with sensor readings from all over the ship. All green.
“See? No ammonia. And if there was a leak, an alarm would go off” a voice said in the distance, once again seemingly disembodied.
“But I turned off the alarms in the Hab,” Watney replied, confused. Where the fuck was he?
“You’re on the Hermes,” Johanssen reminded him, speaking calmly, “We’re fine”
Reality snapped back. Phew. Faster than normal.
“The fuck was that mini-flashback” Watney said, the bear-grip Johanssen held him in inexplicably helping him breathe, “I… flashbacked to a dream I had where you guys died and I was alone on the Hermes? The fuck? How is that even possible?” he rambled on, “It’s like my body said, flashback time, and there were no appropriate flashbacks to go to, so it made up some new shit. This is weird”
“Maybe talk about it with Dr. Irene” she remarked, pulling back, yet Watney clung on until his heart calmed down, “And I’m probably a shitty person for giving you something that might have triggers in it”
“Maybe I should” Watney said, mind on the repeated requests for him to undergo therapy. The problem was, they were so far from home; the distance great enough to make light take ten minutes to travel in between Earth and Hermes. Thus, he thought it out, to keep his mind off of whatever-the-fuck-was-that-flashback, it would be minimum twenty minutes for a message to be sent from him, get to Earth, and then come back. More if the person on the receiving end wanted time to plan and write their reply.
And messages felt cold. Like the messages sent on Pathfinder. The ones which they kept strictly about science for so long; far too long.
“If you don’t want to talk it with Irene, it’s fine” Johanssen said, as Watney stopped speaking his thoughts, “You can always speak it with one of us, and we’ll do our best”
“You’re not a shitty person though” he tacked on a minute later, “Everything from now on will probably have triggers hidden away”
“Don’t you have to get Beck to… uh… poke me with some medical stuff or something after this?” Watney asked, yet another long, dragged out minute later. Johanssen shrugged, “He said that since you recovered fast, it’s probably fine”
Watney grabbed the eBook, wanting to finish the chapter.
“I’d say we should do something else though” she mentioned.
“Nah” he disregarded, “Can’t have a flashback right after having a flashback. I think. And if I don’t read them fixing this, I’m going to have some weird as shit dreams about unrepaired problems on the Hermes”
Unrepaired problems… his bunk room. A coolant issue. Watney momentarily wondered why it didn’t show up on Johanssen’s computer…
“Do you really have to ask Beck about everything?” he burst out suddenly, seeing Johanssen once again asking Beck about the situation.
She depressed the transmit button; “Only when the patient is arguing that they should be allowed to read something that causes them suffering”
“Oh come on” Watney whined, “I read Project Hail Mary in the rover. While on Mars. I didn’t have any problems then! And based on how everyone’s treating me like glass, I expect the rest of this” he gestured at the ebook, “to not be nowhere near as triggering as the book”
A few more crackling noises from her comm. “Beck’s given you the OK to keep reading”
“I can make my own decisions, you guys know? It worked for a year on Mars” Watney said, irritated at the way he was being babied by everyone else.
He read on through how the leak was fixed. Far simpler than fixing the Hermes cooling systems; Rocky did the equivalent of duct taping the wall. Very similar to the one time he had duct taped the airlo… Nevermind.
The reason for the atmosphere leak was stupid. Like how his stupid decision of not rotating airlocks had cost him. Some interesting parallels there.
...I want vodka.
“You want vodka?” Johanssen questioned him, “You’d be throwing up all over the Hermes most likely”
“Yeah, but I haven’t been drunk in a while. Only high. It’s not the same thing” Watney remarked, before going back to his thoughts and reading, until Johanssen poked him what felt like a few minutes later. Watney sighed, he had just finished his mental designs for the alie-
“Hey” she broke into his thoughts, “It’s been two hours, and it’s lunch time”
“It’s been that long?” Watney asked. Time is fucked for me for sure, he thought.
“Yep” she popped the p, getting up, “And you can’t couch potato your way out of this one. Get up”
“Fiiiiine” Watney groaned. His back creaked in interesting ways. He wondered what an Eridian would make of those sounds.
“Johanssen” he mentioned, as he slowly stretched upright, “Do you think an Eridian would be better than Beck at figuring out what’s wrong with my back?”
She shrugged, “Depends on if said Eridian would have learnt all possible back problems. And given that they use sound as their primary sense, it might not be possible to teach them with a computer or a book. Or it might be possible. I don’t know, Eridians are really good at figuring out new things”
“I bet that one of them would be better at you than coding” Watney decided it was time to invent new jokes.
“Nah” she said, “Everyone knows I’m the best at that”
“Really” Watney decided that he didn’t mind that the conversation was covering up how long it took him to walk to the Rec table before collapsing into a chair, breathing heavier than normal. He accepted being poked in the ears by a thermometer yet again, before complaining, “Why doesn’t Beck have one of these thermometer sensors that measure my temperature continuously?”
“I think there was a certain person who ripped it off a day ago,” Johanssen said, “Beck noticed some minor skin irritation afterwards, so he and NASA decided that since you were getting better it wasn’t important to check you every five seconds. What do you want to eat?”
“Whatever” Watney said.
“Potato salad?” she grinned, seeing a few packets stored at the back of the cupboard.
“Fuck you” he said, but without that much heat put into the words.
“Fried potatoes?”
“Fuck no!” he said, with a shudder, before letting out two coughs, “I tried on Mars and it completely fucked by digestive system for the three days after. Made some really crappy quality fertiliser that truly stank”
“What did you use as oil?” Johanssen asked, surprised.
“A lubricant that should have been non-toxic and almost edible after a few rounds of filtering it” Watney said, “Look, I was in a bad place when that happened. And if I didn’t try something new, there was a decent chance I would kill myself the next day. Everything had seemed a bit hopeless”
“When was that?” Johanssen asked, momentarily shaken by yet another casual reference about wanting to die.
“The Iris one RUD” he said, with a shudder as he relived the moment. Rapid Unplanned Disassembly, he’d used to love the pure snark of those words until his only chance at surviving had blown up. The moment he had thought he was fucked. The moment when he thought…
“Okay” Johanssen interrupted, searching deeper into a cupboard as she remembered something, “That’s depressing”
Watney was quiet. His mind elsewhere, staring at his body from the outside of him. Although it was worse; he was staring at himself in the Hermes from the surface of Mars, from inside a rover, where he’d just gotten a message. Dissociation, but more fucked up. It did prevent a full blown flashback from happening, for which he was thankful.
“Aha. Do you still like pizza?”
…where the actual fuck did they get pizza from?
Apparently the question had been written clearly enough on his facial expression to warrant an answer. Johanssen put two meal packets into the microwave, saying something.
Watney focused, and managed to stop. In a matter of seconds his mind had teleported back, and accelerated by several kilometers per second to match his body’s velocity.
He began to distinguish words again “...risk of depression. So at some point, to, well, help reduce that risk, they began working on ways to make our space food taste a bit more like normal food and less like rehydrated mush. And it almost worked”
“Why do you say almost?” Watney said. His voice… still not quite his own. He was working the problem, trying to stop the floaty sensation. Perhaps if he could just focus on the Hermes hard enough, he’d be back. And somehow, nobody… well, there was just Johanssen here… noticed that he’d been gone.
She shrugged, “Mass limits still meant that there were some sacrifices. But we have pizza. By the way, if a packet says 1G on it, it means don’t even think about taking it anywhere out of a section of the Hermes with gravity or Lewis and NASA will have your head. Martinez too, because someone will have to clean everything up”
She slid a plate in front of him with two slices of pepperoni pizza. “It’s not Chicago-style deep dish pizza” he remarked, yet his mouth was already full the second he finished that. Hungrier than he thought. He was halfway done, trying his best to savour it yet at the same time satisfy the hunger that he’d apparently had that his pesky cold had hidden from him, before venturing to say another word.
“I was trying to think of what hypothetical Mars aliens could look like,” Watney said unexpectedly.
It took a few seconds for Johanssen to realise he might have referenced the time when he zoned out for 1h52min (she was that precise, it was practically in her DNA to be so precise) after finishing the chapter of her the fan fic.
“And?” she said.
“Well, I tried to think of something that would work on Mars in its current state” Watney said, “Which meant that there’d have to be something to survive in the Martian atmosphere with practically no water. I came up with this fucked up idea for a photosynthesizing lichen that has a symbiotic relationship with tiny Eridian-looking things that would work in swarms like ants.
“It wasn’t that great of a thinking session” he added a minute later after chewing through another mouthful.
Johanssen didn’t say anything; Biology had been a subject forced upon her by her school which she had considered useless and dropped as soon as possible.
<~~~>
Drugs. Yep. I’ve been there. Well, I’ve been there but worse? This guy just wants the heroin on the ship (also, why did Illy pick heroin? Most likely it would have been a really shitty way to die), and I almost understand him. Substitute heroin with vicodin and it’s a near 1:1 representation of how I feel about Vicodin. On one hand I kind of still need it, but on the other hand I had a really shitty experience to warrant taking it and it reminds me of that. Nevermind!
Johanssen’s shoulder makes a good pillow yet again, can’t argue against what works, and I’m now deep into Chapter 5 of this fic she’s dropped on me. Although I am kind of starting to wonder why Johansson was set to watch me for so long? I understand NASA wants me under constant supervision (and after all the shit I’ve had to go through alone, and knowing that the crew will still be there for me if I go and have another flashback, panic attack, or dissociation episode, I don’t mind anymore) but usually they rotate the rest of the crew. I’m going to ask.
But later! Right now my accomplishment is thinking through micrometeoroid impacts, and not fucking spiraling into another weird as ass made-up-flashback-thingy. No but seriously, I’m half convinced to ask Dr. Shields about them just to find out what the fuck they’re called. Because I’m not flashbacking to Mars, it’s just the feeling like I’m on Mars + some Hermes related training exercise or scenario. Still! Progress! I talked myself out of a flashback. Don’t see that every mission day.
The same applies to the CO2 (carbon dioxide) scrubber. Uh…? Given that the Hail Mary must be a closed loop system… ahhh. I remember now: It’s atmosphere is 100% oxygen? Isn’t that horrifically dangerous? Wait, it isn’t at low pressures.
…oh that explains why nitrogen cleansings had to be done. The atmosphere had no nitrogen.
…hmm so they don’t have a full blown atmospheric regulator like we do, since it’s just adding O2 (oxygen) and removing CO2. Also before I think I should go annoy the heck out of Weir, I’m just going to remind myself that at low pressures, a 100% oxygen atmosphere is safe and won’t set you on fire - assuming you’re not an Eridian! On the Hermes though we use a N2/O2 mixture, same goes for the Hab and our spacesuits. I’ve forgotten why to be honest.
Hello! My thoughts are coherent for some reason! Perhaps reading has the targeted effect of stopping me from staring at Mars and dissociating! It’s working!
Quote unquote, ““So yeah. Now I’m left with a headache, crippling nausea, chest pain, and vertigo, from CO2 poisoning, and a lingering cough from inhaling the coolant. How’s your week been?”” Well, Dr. Grace, it depends on if you ask me about my week on the Hermes (pretty shitty from a cold while being a starvation victim but not that bad), or a random week on Mars. Want to know about my week after Iris 1 failed? After Pathfinder broke? After the airlock breached? Oh god those were really fucking shitty weeks.
…ahh this guy ran out of vodka. That explains a lot of shit.
Hey I don’t have vodka! …I did have Vicodin though.
In other news, I did run into touch starvation back on Mars. My hallucinations were pretty annoying at that because they refused to do anything about that, but the issue is hereby solved now. As I said, having some other crewmate’s shoulder as a pillow while you’re reading and thinking is great. Issue solved. But… if this guy was real, I’d be yelling at him to not give up. Getting to the Hermes (after an initial shitty week when nobody really knew if I’d survive, except me, because I refused to die after winning against Mars) was 100% worth it. There’s five other people for me to annoy up here! And Lewis can’t really threaten me with the airlock because they spent a few billion dollars on rescuing me; it would be counterproductive to kick me off the ship now.
…I’m not going to think through the bit where they made plans on what to do if Grace died. I may have skipped that part of Chapter 5.
Also, fucking NEPTUNE!!! I’d wish I’d get to see another planet except Mars up close “by accident”
“We did” Johanssen said, “We did a Venus gravity assist as part of our Rich Purnell maneuver. It looks just as dull as Mars, except you can’t see the surface, and the windows weren’t really designed for being so close to the sun so anyone who opened the blackout window covers had to wear some really strong glasses”
Fuck, my lips weren’t shut.
Next chapter! This is pure luxury. I can just go on to the next chapter and not worry about rationing it.
Holy fuck. What would I not give to do an EVA to see a planet like Neptune with my own eyes. Just pop out of the Hermes airlock, and see a planet nobody has ever seen before - although admittedly it's a gas giant. Then again it would mean going back to space again… do I want to do that? I’ll figure it out after a few years on Earth. I guess I’ll miss zero-G. zero-G, which I can experience anytime by heading up into the central module of the Hermes.
I have the luxury of screwing around right now to be honest. I put the eBook down.
“Johanssen, do you want to mess around in zero-G for a bit?” I asked.
“Sure” she plonked the laptop back down, “Anything you want me to grab?”
“Surprise me” I said, starting the long climb up the ladder. That’s my daily cardio for me: four times up or down the long Hermes ladders in-between the gravity ring and the zero-G central module.
She thought for all of a few seconds, then went ahead down into the crew module and came back up with everyone’s spare socks. The fuck is she planning?
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