Chapter Text
The thing about working for NASA, Vincent Kapoor thought distantly to himself, was that for all they prepared for scenarios that were statistically unlikely to happen, usually things went as planned. The Mark-Watney-Not-Being-Dead thing aside, the only things going wrong were things they had known could go wrong. Things were bad, really bad, but not bad in a way that was surprising.
That is, until Mindy Park called him with yet another emergency.
By the time he had made his way down to capcom, moving as quickly as he could without sprinting at full speed and alarming the cleaning staff, the only other people still in the halls at this hour of the night, he had more or less convinced himself that Mark was dead. He was already picturing the press conference with growing horror. Bad enough he was going to have to tell everyone the probe launch failed, that Mark had made a journey across Mars alone, only to be told all hope was gone when he got there. JPL was working on a solution, but Vincent knew it wasn’t even a long shot, it was a nonstarter. At this point, it might even be kinder for Mark to die before he reached the MAV, but Vincent didn’t think he could bear it regardless. He burst in to the room, and the first words out of his mouth were “is he dead?!”
Mindy was sheet-white, and her hands were shaking, but she shook her head. “Mark’s fine, as far as I can tell. Still making his way to the Ares 4 site.”
Vincent dropped in to a chair heavily, relief and dread conspiring to take his legs out from under him. “Then what,” he demanded, “is the emergency?”
She looked at him, then back at her screens. Visibly steeling herself, she took a deep breath, and flipped a switch. A voice, hauntingly familiar to anyone on earth even remotely related to space travel, drifted out of the speakers.
“This is Dr Ryland Grace of the Hail Mary. We are now back in range for radio transmissions. Do you read me?”
Vincent stared at Mindy. Mindy stared back at Vincent. Vincent wished for a moment that he hadn’t taken the seat when he had; sitting now would have felt more appropriate.
Wordlessly, he pulled out his phone, and dialled Teddy's number. This was, for once, above his paygrade.
**
Two hours later, the usual crowd had assembled, and Annie was breathing in to a paper bag while Mindy rubbed her back and looked like she wanted to be anywhere else.
“How,” Annie was saying, in between gasps, “how the fuck has this happened again?! We have two astronauts that we told everyone were dead, and now they’re not dead. I can’t be known in the history books as the woman who kept crying dead astronaut.”
“I’m more interested in how he’s alive at all, not how we missed it. There wasn’t enough astrophage on the Hail Mary for a trip back to Earth, and he’s been gone for more than twenty years. From what I remember, there wasn’t enough food on that ship to last more than a year.” Teddy said in what one might mistake for a mild tone, if you’d never met him. Vincent and Mitch exchanged glances; they had met him, and there was going to be an explosion sooner rather than later. He did, volatility aside, make a good point. They had received the probes Dr Grace had sent several years ago; while the sun was shining again, that they’d received the probes at all meant everyone onboard the Hail Mary had to be dead. They’d all assumed, given that only Dr Grace’s credentials had been embedded in the data they’d received, that he had been the only crew member to survive the journey; with no astrophage, the presumption was that he’d died alone in space.
“We could just ask him?” Mindy piped up. “No one’s responded, he’s probably worried no one got the message.” A beat of silence.
Teddy looked like he hadn’t even considered the possibility of just asking. In fairness, they were still trying to wrap their heads around the fact more astronauts had turned up alive when they shouldn’t be. Mindy was probably just more used to it, given the fact she was the one who kept finding them.
Seeming to come to a decision, Teddy made an affirmative motion. Vincent, sensing this was somehow his job, took the microphone at Mindy’s desk.
**
Thousands of miles away from NASA’s collective crisis, Ryland Grace was having an argument with an alien.
“Earth space people send Grace to die, statement. Why Rocky no fight, question.”
Grace took his glasses off to rub at his eyes tiredly. He’d been having this argument on and off since he told Rocky about his Stratt-induced amnesia. “It’s different space people Rock, NASA isn’t something you can fight. They didn't send me anywhere.”
Rocky is unmoved. “Earth space people bad at space science, not save Grace. Rocky save Grace, Rocky fight science people.”
Grace was trying to decide if it was worth escalating the same argument they’d been having for months again, when the radio crackled. He jumped, then immediately teared up when the first new human sound he’d heard in years comes through, staticky but real.
“This is Vincent Kapoor at NASA Actual. We read you, Dr Grace. Status?”
Rocky looked from the radio, then back to Grace, who had started blubbering away. He made a discontented, but resigned hum, that Grace took to mean Rocky reserve judgment on science humans, but decided that he would take the wins where he could get them at this point. He reached over and spoke into the radio, hoping the fact that he was a crying mess wouldn’t somehow make it into the history books.
“NASA Actual, this is Dr Ryland Grace and Rocky. We’re currently around three months from Earth, based on remaining fuel. Confirm probes were received?”
**
Teddy looked dumbstruck. “Remaining fuel? How in the hell has he managed to get back?”
Mindy, proving herself once again a valuable addition to the Save Abandoned Astronauts club, was rapidly typing something. She stopped and zoomed in on the radar, and furrowed her brow. “He’s out by Neptune, by the looks of it. He’s going to be here in three months? He must have a hell of a lot of fuel left.” She looked back at them all as if expecting an answer, but they all looked just as perplexed as her.
Annie put down the paper bag. “Screw how he’s getting here,” she said, a vein visible throbbing in her temple. “What the fuck is a Rocky.”
“Ms Park,” Teddy said, using his director of NASA voice, and Mindy snapped to attention. This was, Vincent reflected, probably the reason she was Teddy’s favourite member of team Save One Dead Astronaut, Get One Free! That was fine, since Mindy was everyone else’s favourite too. “You will be the first point of contact for Dr Grace. You will have all the information you need about the Hail Mary mission by tomorrow morning, and I need you to find out how he got here, how he survived, what happened to the rest of the crew. And,” he said, holding a hand up to prevent Annie’s incoming shriek, “find out what the fuck is a Rocky.”
**
It takes a couple of days of back and forth to communicate everything to NASA. It’s honestly not very helpful that most of their responses are to the tune of “are you kidding?”, but Grace thinks he’s doing a pretty good job all things considered. He’s mostly talking to a woman called Mindy, who seems to be taking everything in stride as well as can be expected. After the initial communication, Mindy had taken over completely once Grace had clarified who Rocky was when they asked (unbeknownst to Grace, this was because the idea they now had intelligent alien life to deal with on top of everything else had been the thing that finally sent Annie over the edge- it had taken the combined efforts of Teddy, Mitch, and Vincent to calm her down enough that she didn’t resign on the spot). She had given him the good news that not only had the Beatles been received, but that the information had been effectively acted upon; the sun was back to normal.
She had also asked, very strangely, if he had enough food and fuel to make a quick detour.
“Why the heck would I go to Mars?” Grace asked Rocky, truly baffled. Rocky shook his carapace back at him, equally as confused.
“Mars near Earth, question?”
“Near-ish,” Grace said thoughtfully, “but out of our way. We’d need to make a course adjustment- could we do it?”
Rocky thought for a moment. “Set us back few weeks. But yes, in theory.”
Grace relayed the information, and added “but uh, why would I need to go to Mars?”
The message he got back had filled him with horror. Mindy told him about Mark Watney, an astronaut who had been left on Mars, presumed dead, until a few months ago.
Rocky was predictably irate learning this. “Human space scientists abandon Grace, abandon Mark Watney. Not good at space science.” So far, his friend was distinctly unimpressed with NASA, no matter how many times Grace told him they’d had little to do with his own mission.
“We need to go get him,” Grace told Rocky, the knowledge that someone else was out there alone in space sitting like a stone in his throat.
“Grace Rocky get Mark Watney,” Rocky said firmly, cementing his place as Grace’s best friend even more securely in his heart. “Take Mark Watney and Grace back to Erid, since space humans no look after.” And there it was.
Grace laughed, watery and weak. “Let’s see how Mark feels about that first, bud.”
Rocky just tilted his carapace at him, as if to say who wouldn’t want to come back to Erid, we don't kill our astronauts, and, yeah. Grace can’t really argue with that.
**
Mindy is rapidly realising that the first intelligent extraterrestrial to make contact with the human race thinks they’re fucking stupid. She’s pretty sure that Dr Grace isn’t accurately translating half the things Rocky is saying, but most of what he is telling her is that Rocky has a better way of doing what NASA wants them to do, and honestly, it seems like Rocky is mostly right. She probably doesn’t want to know what the other half of what Grace’s new alien friend is saying, if the things that are making it through what she’s calling the “middle school teacher filter” are “why would you do something the dumb way when you could do it the right way”.
She’s also having to come to terms with the fact that Ryland Grace has met a space crab made of rocks on a suicide mission twelve light years away and immediately pack-bonded with it. Like, initially she thought it was in a sort of zany buddy-cop movie kind of way, but the longer she’s in communication with Grace, the clearer it’s becoming that him and his alien are a total package deal.
Mindy was a little worried to begin with that Grace had maybe Stockholm-syndromed Rocky in to coming back to Earth with him- it’s not like white guys exploring new frontiers have a great track record when it comes to like, colonisation, or leaving other people alone in general. The reality is both weirder and more reassuring. She’s fairly sure that they respect each other on a professional level; every other word out of Grace’s mouth is “Rocky made this”, or “Rocky figured it out”, and considering Grace had been the world’s leading astrophage expert, she’s certain he was a big part of figuring out the Tauomeba situation, for all that his crippling modesty (read: chronic self-esteem issues) seems to prevent him from actually acknowledging that.
She can’t understand Rocky without his voice modulator, but his little trills when he and Grace really get going talking about their space adventure would suggest that he likes his new coworker on a personal basis too. Grace, for his part, would clearly die for Rocky, and has apparently made the attempt on enough occasions that Mindy calls her pharmacist out of hours to get her Lexapro dosage doubled. The recounting of the planet Adrien incident led to a permanent supply of paper bags being set up near the comms station for hyperventilation purposes.
Under literally any other circumstance, Mindy would think the whole dynamic was sweet. She still kind of thinks it’s cute, if you ignore the whole lost-in-space angle, that these two dorky science guys have somehow managed to enter into the first interstellar bromance. She really tries not to think about the fact that if they’d hated each other, two planetary systems would probably be dead right now. Reading the 700 page Hail Mary mission brief Mindy had received from Mitch, which he dropped on her desk after stealing two of her Lexapro with the intention of crushing them up and putting them in Teddy’s coffee, she can understand why Eva Stratt was so concerned about crew dynamics. The last thing you want to happen in space is a fist fight when the future of the whole planet is at stake. So a lot of the entertainment set up for the crew was designed to be as low impact and chill as possible, so they’d all be nice and relaxed about fixing the sun before they had to kill themselves or starve to death.
Unfortunately, Grace and Rocky weren’t the kind of people who enjoyed things that were low impact or chill. They liked their work and each other and not much else honestly, so most of the vast collection of entertainment media available on the Mary had them bored after the first six months. So they spent the not insignificant amount of time between all the science, as far as Mindy could tell, just shooting the shit. They’d learnt everything about each other, on their long journey back to Erid, and again on the return trip to Earth. That was kind of where the issue lay.
Nowhere, in the entire 700 page brief Mindy had been given, or in any of the information she tracked down through both legal and illegal means, had anyone ever mentioned that Dr Ryland Grace had been press ganged into space travel. But that’s exactly what had happened.
He had told her on their third day of communication. He very clearly hadn’t wanted to, that was evident from the tremor in his voice, the way it kept breaking, but it didn’t seem like he’d had much choice. Because Rocky knew, Grace had told him everything on that long trip to Erid, and Rocky wanted NASA to know exactly what had been done to Grace, and it was very, very clear that there was very little Ryland Grace wouldn’t do for Rocky.
So he’d told her, haltingly, reluctantly, about Eva Stratt, and the coma, and the amnesia, Christ, the amnesia. Mindy didn’t think she would ever get a full night’s sleep again, thinking of Dr Grace, up on a ship in the stars, not even remembering his own name. And the worst part of it was, he was genuinely ashamed of the whole thing, thought that he was a coward. As if not wanting to die on a suicide mission was some kind of character flaw. She’d had to call the whole crew down, once she’d finished crying, and explain it to them when Ryland couldn’t get the words out again. Teddy had gone very white, then so red he was purple, then marched out of the room shouting at someone to get Eva Stratt on the phone now. But in the end, it didn’t actually matter what they thought of it. It had happened. The end result for NASA was the same.
They had two scientists who had saved two stars, who would both have unprecedented amounts of influence over their respective planets, and they did not trust Earth one bit.
Grace thought, maybe understandably given his last experience on Earth, that he and Rocky were going to become living lab specimens as soon as they touched down. No degree of reassurance from Mindy, or Vincent, or anyone else, up to and including the President (and wasn’t that a trip- the goddamn president of the United States, stood at her desk where she ate lunch every day, talking to the man who saved the planet and the alien who helped him do it), could convince Ryland Grace that an attempt wouldn’t be made to dissect his best friend. He’d told her shakily that the Eridians would come and get Rocky by force if needed, if they tried to keep him, and no amount of assurance from anyone would make him believe them when they said no one would attempt to hold them. Given the whole abducted and sent to another solar system thing, he had fairly valid concerns.
Rocky, for his part, was much angrier on Grace’s behalf than Grace himself was. From what little she was able to understand of him, from the things Grace would translate and the little language program she was putting together on the fly (since Grace would resolutely not share his), Rocky was unhappy with the concept of a suicide mission, given that his planet had actually elected to try and bring their crew home. He was worried that his new friend would be damaged again in some way, would not be treated kindly or gently. He refused to listen to any reassurances from NASA, or from Grace himself, when he protested that he was not fragile. Mindy privately agreed with Rocky anyway- the only thing Ryland Grace needed when he got to Earth was a quiet room and a hot cup of something soothing. She’d put this in her new communications log under the heading “Action Required”, since she was now apparently the world’s leading expert on Dead-Then-Not-Dead astronauts.
As far as Mindy could tell, the only reason either of them had come back at all was because the food situation for Grace on Erid was becoming untenable, and they were coming back to Earth to try and propagate something that could grow on Rocky’s planet, that Grace could digest without effort. If they had their way, they’d stay on the Mary in orbit until NASA had put together a probe with some seeds, fertiliser, and enough astrophage to get them the hell out of dodge as fast as possible.
Bizarrely, NASA’s saving grace (no pun intended) appeared to be Mark Watney. Mindy had barely had chance to ask the question before she saw on the radar they’d made a course adjustment, straight to Mars. Grace wasn’t willing to leave another person in NASA’s hands, and Rocky had said, in what Mindy assumed was a much ruder way than Grace had translated, that he had a better track record of saving stranded astronauts than anyone on Earth had. Mindy couldn’t exactly argue with that.
“They’re breaking my heart,” Mindy moaned to Vincent, when he stopped by to bring her coffee, a bagel, and a new access badge with her job title of “SATCOM” replaced with “Astronaut Whisperer”. Mindy loved it immediately. “They’re both so codependent it hurts, and it’s so clear they just want to be in a lab doing science, but they keep getting in life-or-death situations. Grace cried three times on comms today, and kept apologising for it, and I don’t know if they have bubble wrap on Erid but Rocky is one sniffle away from wrapping him in the nearest equivalent.”
“What’s your recommendation?” Vincent asked, because while he was now a dear friend, he was still, at his core, a C-Suite kind of guy.
Mindy sighed, rubbed the side of her face. “My recommendation is a hug, Vincent. A hug, and some hot cocoa, and maybe one of those rain machines people use to get babies to sleep.”
“Mindy, be serious- “Vincent started, but she cut him off.
“I’m being so serious Vincent, you have no idea.” She enlarged her spreadsheet so he could see it clearly on her screen. Vincent squinted at it for a few long moments, then sat back.
“That’s very thorough,” he said thoughtfully. “Did Teddy ask you to do this?”
“No, it just sort of…” she struggled to find the words. “Seemed the thing to do?”
Vincent hummed, tapping at her keyboard. She heard the little swoop noise that meant an email had been sent, and a corresponding ping from his phone that made her heart drop in to her ass.
“Did you send it to yourself?” She asked incredulously.
Vincent hummed again, standing to leave. “I think Teddy will be interested in your thoughts.”
A year ago, the idea of the Director of NASA being “interested in her thoughts” would have filled her with joy. These days, it just filled her with a sense of dull resignation that her career was about to be upended again.
Two days later, she’s called in to Teddy’s office and made the official Head of Interstellar Liaisons, a new department created especially for her to run.
“Congratulations Ms Park,” Teddy told her smugly, while Mindy thought very hard about killing him with hereto undiscovered psychic abilities. He handed over a file, “your new contract. Your new renumeration is on page 6, line 70, and your signature is required on the bottom of each page.”
Mindy flipped to page six. Stared at the number there for a second, looked up at Teddy, then back down at the numbers. She thought faintly that at least she didn’t need to worry about her student loans this month. Or any month, for that matter. She wanted to kill Teddy with her mind marginally less, and signed her name on every page in total silence.
Later, on a whim, she mentioned it to Grace and Rocky, that she was now the official astronaut whisperer (she’d told them about Vincent’s badge) and, before she could stop herself, made a joke that maybe they should be on the payroll, since they’ve got a longer track record with interstellar communications. “Well,” she’d said, babbling the way she did when she couldn’t get her stupid mouth to shut up, “who on Earth knows you, Grace, better than Rocky?”
She had waited an agonising 15 minutes (the delays were getting shorter the closer the Mary got to Mars, thank god), before she heard how her stupid comment landed. She was hoping for laughter, but was prepared for anything from anger to offence, or, knowing Grace, some complicated emotion involving heaps of unnecessary guilt. She was not prepared to hear Rocky’s voice, through the language program Grace used, tell her solemnly that she was “very sensible human to ask Rocky help Grace. Not stupid like other science humans. Rocky accept.” Grace was in the background, sniffling.
The thought that Rocky approved of her as an ally in Taking-Care-Of-Grace was enough to warm her heart. Once her sniffles had passed, she got to enjoy her next heart-warming task. She strolled back to Teddy’s office, where he was having some kind of media strategy meeting with Vincent and Annie, and cheerfully told them she’d hired her first assistant. Vincent, now aware which of her facial expressions meant Trouble, said nothing. Annie, who'd missed the alarmed look on Teddy’s face at Mindy’s cheer, made the mistake of asking who she’d hired.
She would remember the look on their faces when she’d told them she’d hired Earth’s first alien as a consultant on her astronaut babysitting squad for the rest of her days, she thought, whistling as the screaming from Teddy’s office faded behind her.