Archive of Our Own

Mark thinks he probably ought to be embarrassed by the downright obscene noise that escapes his throat when that first drop of water hits his skin. Then he gingerly steps fully into the tiny shower cabin and finds he could not possibly care less about anything but staying in the stream – forever, if possible.

He’s relatively certain Beck might have something to say about that plan, though. He glances over, squinting through the billowing steam, but the other man is nothing but a fuzzy silhouette on the other side of the plexiglass. His face is turned respectfully away, but even with no detail, Mark can tell he’s frowning.

He’s been frowning for the past two hours, the joyous reunion quickly soured by the crew taking in Mark’s cachectic form. He’s still offended by that, actually – Mark Watney, Buzzkill is not the title he has keg-standed (keg-stood? He’ll workshop that one) himself into, and yet everyone looks like they’ve just witnessed a tragedy instead of, objectively, the most impressive thing mankind has ever done in space. He flew like Iron Man, for Christ’s sake!

But it’s not like he doesn’t get it. Truth be told, if not for the Vicodin Beck pressed into his hand, Mark doubts he’d even be upright right now. He shouldn’t be – but he’d insisted. Beck can say all the right doctor-y things, Mark knows he reeks and he’d categorically refused any further medical assessment before he had a chance to actually wash – which, he might add, Beck actually told him to do! Before whatever numbers he saw, that told him Mark was in a, frankly, shit medical state and changed his mind. Too bad! No takebacks in space.

God, whoever invented showers is Mark’s new hero. Actually, scratch that. Whoever invented showers in space is getting a love letter, the second they’re back on Earth. He'll even use a fancy wax seal, for effect.

He tips his head forward, letting the hot water hit the back of his neck as his forehead meets the wall. Maybe not a wax seal. Maybe he’ll get their name tattooed on his chest.

“Watney?”

He shuts his eyes, letting the cool plastic of the wall soothe the edges of a headache behind his temples. “No.”

There’s a pause from the other side of the plexi. “I didn’t say anything yet.”

“Ehh, you had a tone.”

“A tone? I’m making sure you’re still conscious.”

“I promise, you’ll be the first to know if I’m not,” Mark says, tilting his head back and letting the water stream down his face. If he pretends hard enough, it almost feels like rain.

Man, he fucking misses rain.

“A tone? Seriously?” Beck continues, his voice taking on an indignant edge. “A tone.”

Mark snorts, then regrets it immediately, ribs protesting loudly enough to pierce through the opiate haze. He ignores it as best he can. He’ll be damned if something as pedestrian as basic biology interrupts his enjoyment of this marvel of human engineering.

The shower is less a high-pressure luxury and more of an ambitious drizzle, but right now, it feels better than sex. NASA has probably spent billions of dollars and countless man-hours on figuring out the most efficient, water-saving way to make a human damp in low-spin gravity and fuck him if they haven’t knocked it out of the park. The water beads and runs strangely in the 40% gravity, clinging to the hollows of his collarbones and sliding over skin that looks, when he’s stupid enough to look down, like someone’s stretched him over a wire frame. He’s vaguely reminded of a particular Doctor Who plotline and he shudders, looking away.

“So,” he says instead, because the silence has gone on too long, and because he’s gotten too used to the sound of his own voice, “on a scale of one to ‘HR wants a word’, how bad is the smell?”

Beck does not answer quickly enough.

“Wow, okay, thanks for your honesty.”

“No, I – “

“Uh-uh. That hesitation had mass, it had a gravitational field, man.”

“You were in a rover for months.” Beck’s voice is steady and completely unreadable. It’s wigging Mark the fuck out, actually.

“Was I?” Mark says, gingerly raising his arm to reach for the washcloth hanging from the wall. “I’d forgotten, thank you, Doctor Beck. I thought maybe I’d just developed the musk of a real man.”

A huff. “I’ve smelled worse.”

“No, you have not.” Mark swallows down a hiss of pain, slowly bending his elbow inward, fabric clenched in his fist.

“I have.”

“Bullshit.”

“Watney, I did residency.”

“Yeah, with actual plumbing. And fresh air ventilation.” The fuzzy silhouette shifts. Beck’s shoulders move in a way Mark cannot quite interpret through the fogged plexi. He has always been annoyingly readable in the wrong ways. Back on the Ares III pre-mission rotation, Mark could tell exactly when Beck thought someone was about to do something medically inadvisable. The eyebrow would go first. Then the mouth. Then the careful, professional inhale that meant he was about to ruin someone’s fun.

Okay, usually Mark’s fun.

He’s never been able to tell when Beck’s actually upset. That seems like an oversight now. He should say something. Probably. There are several appropriate human responses available. Thanks for coming back. Sorry about the international trauma event. Hey, man, how’ve you been since you declared me dead, then found out I was alive, then possibly soon-to-be-dead again and then had to spend months pretending to be normal about it?

Unfortunately, all of those sound like the sort of thing a person would say while making eye contact, and Mark is naked, medicated, and currently attempting to remove Mars from behind his ears.

So instead, he says, “You know, this is my first proper shower since I blew up the Hab.”

Beck is quiet.

Mark winces, tries to convince himself it’s the scrape of fabric on dirt-soaked skin. “And that is, in retrospect, a bad fun fact.”

“Yeah.”

“Really killed the vibe.”

“A little.”

“Should’ve gone with the wax seal thing.”

Beck pauses. “What wax seal thing?”

“Private shower thoughts. You’re not invited.”

“I’m devastated.”

“You should be.”

Beck huffs out what could pass as a laugh, if you really squint. Mark smiles, despite himself. For a few seconds, things feel normal, like the past year and a half was nothing but the figment of a sadistic science fiction writer’s imagination.

Then his knees buckle. Not dramatically, but apparently his sense of balance is fucked, because his hand slips against the wet wall as he tries to brace. His shoulder catches first, then his elbow, and he bites back a sound that would definitely result in Beck having a Tone.

Unfortunately, Beck hears enough. The silhouette on the other side shifts, straightens, then stands. “Are you dizzy?”

“Uh… no,” Mark manages through clenched teeth.

“Watney.”

“Define ‘dizzy’.”

The shower door slides open before he can protest which, wow, rude – on several levels, but mostly because Mark is standing there naked and pathetic, dripping Martian mud. Beck's face appears through the gap; eyes fixed on Mark's. He doesn’t so much as glance down, and Mark can’t tell if he’s grateful or disappointed.

Look, a man has a lot of time to think when stranded on a desolate planet, okay? Some of those thoughts are about oxygen recycling. Some of them are about ration calculations. Some of them are about your crewmate’s perfect Cupid’s bow and the smattering of freckles on his hands. Some of them are about those hands performing a decidedly un-Hippocratic medical exam.

So, sue him. He’s not the only one who thinks Beck should’ve gone into modelling instead of medicine, he’s seen the way Johanssen looks at him. Plus, Mark’s had five hundred and forty-something sols to develop strong opinions on the subject, and if NASA has a problem with that, they shouldn’t have stranded him alone with only his brain for company.

“You’ve gone gray,” Beck says, and Mark’s vision refocuses. He realizes he’s been staring into the middle distance, somewhere beyond Beck’s left ear. “This was a bad idea, your blood pressure – “

“No!” Mark snaps, too loudly, when Beck’s hand reaches for the shower control panel. He clears his throat, tries again. “Please. I’m okay, I just need – “

“You need to lie down,” Beck insists, his frown impossibly deeper. “Your BP was already low, and I am certain it’s just dropped again.” He pauses. “I’m not trying to be cruel, Mark.”

Mark. They don’t – they don’t do that, not really.

It’s always Watney, or Beck, or Doctor, or sometimes Doctor Bossy Beck if Mark is being deliberately annoying and wants to see if he can make the tips of Beck’s ears go pink in a room full of people. Mark is for forms. Mark is for his mother.

Mark is not for the face Beck is making right now. Not for when he is barely upright, barely conscious, naked and starved half to death.

It’s annoying. Mark has spent the better part of the last year and a half being filmed, photographed, discussed, theorized about, pitied, celebrated and probably memed in ways he is not emotionally prepared to verify. He has recorded video logs while wearing a duct-taped EVA suit and done surgery on himself with a webcam running. He has literally launched himself off Mars in a vehicle with the aerodynamic dignity of a grain silo.

Yet somehow, Beck saying his first name is what makes him feel exposed.

Water keeps hammering the back of his neck, breaking over his shoulders in a way that was once completely unremarkable to pre-Mars Mark. Pre-Mars Mark complained about hotel water pressure, owned conditioner and used it inconsistently. Pre-Mars Mark wasted water without once thinking about how utterly fucking valuable it really was.

Well, fuck pre-Mars Mark. Pre-Mars Mark is dead.

He blinks against the water spraying into his eyes, hand flat against the wall. Even that part of him looks wrong – pale, yellowed, Martian regolith ground deep into the fissures of his dehydrated skin. He looks away, which is a mistake, because it means his eyes meet Beck’s.

“Sit down,” He commands, hand moving from control panel to the, frankly, tiny foldout chair on the right-hand-side wall. Mark had noticed it the second he stepped into the cabin, the reasonable side of his brain damn near crying out for it. Unfortunately for him, that part was never great at standing up for itself. The chair folds out with a snick, water drumming on the plastic surface. “Mark.”

“Chris.” The reaction is immediate. Beck’s mouth thins into a line, eyes darkening further. A muscle in his jaw ticks. Mark feels smug – not so fucking fun, is it? – but the schadenfreude is short-lived, and when it fizzles out, it just leaves Mark feeling like a goddamn asshole.

He sits, by way of apology. The plastic is colder than he expects, and for whatever god forsaken reason, that makes the backs of his eyes sting. He breathes as deeply as his ribs will allow, staring at the spotlight in the ceiling instead. Something in his back twinges, a sharp, snapping ache, followed by a persistent, infuriating tingle in his leg. He wonders what anatomical horrors await him when NASA inevitably shoves him into an MRI. Some disc herniation, certainly. Maybe some sort of mega-cancer, never seen before, from trying to fix that disc herniation with a plutonium-heated bath.

He can’t wait to see Beck’s face when he reads about those on the memory card he’d shoved into his helmet, in between layers of foam that probably shouldn’t have had their structure compromised. He hadn’t anticipated that he would be the one to take it off, in all honesty. He was fully prepared to burn, or asphyxiate, or hemorrhage, or die in any number of thrilling ways long before reaching the crew. Still. He went to all the trouble of bringing a copy of all his logs, he may as well let the crew see them. NASA will certainly want a copy, pronto. Johanssen’s gonna have her work cut out for her, compressing all those files into something that can be transmitted from damn near 55 million kilometers away.

“Watney?” Beck’s voice cuts through his thoughts and their eyes meet again. “You good?”

“Uh, yeah? As good as I can be, given –” he gestures broadly, “– the general circumstances.”

“You made a face.”

“I always make faces. I have a very expressive face.”

“A pain face, Watney. Is it your ribs?”

Oh. “No. I mean, yeah, but no, I, uh, tweaked my back, on Sol whatever-the-fuck. It’s in the log, somewhere.” He pauses, then, watching Beck’s eyebrows knit together. “I didn’t have our esteemed doctor-slash-EVA specialist-slash-masseuse at the Hab, so… It probably didn’t heal right.”

“Physical therapist,” Beck corrects, almost automatically, then pauses. “Any numbness?”

Mark really, really wants to be a dick about this and make another shitty quip. He does, honestly. But Beck’s mouth is doing something so pinched and downright sad that he can’t bring himself to do it. “Yeah, sometimes. Left leg. More pins and needles than completely dead.”

“Any bladder or bowel problems?”

“Wow, take a guy to dinner first,” Mark says, before he can even think about it, then grimaces. “No. No saddle numbness, either, before you ask.” He briefly considers mentioning no erectile dysfunction, either, but somehow, he doubts that’d go over the way he would want it to. Besides, he wouldn’t actually know. Malnutrition and starvation tend to give a guy different priorities. His hands and feet have been perpetually cold since he set out for Schiaparelli, and he’s been lightheaded for at least that long. He certainly hopes everything works as it should, but he hasn’t had the time or resources to test it.

“I’ll need to do a neuro exam when we’re done in here,” Beck muses, more to himself than to Mark. “You get five more minutes. You’re still pale.”

“I’m Midwestern. I’m always pale.”

Beck’s exhale is far longer than it should be. His mouth opens, then closes, eyes fixed on a point somewhere in the middle distance. Mark watches it happen. The thought forming, getting strangled, being shoved back down somewhere private. Beck does that sometimes, takes whole sentences and euthanizes them before they can inconvenience anybody.

Mark looks away. Stares at the textured floor between his feet instead, where the water is carrying thin brown-red trails toward the drain. Some of it is dirt. Some of it is dead skin. Some of it is probably blood.

Beck’s hand moves into his field of vision – slow, deliberate, palm turned outward like Mark is a skittish, injured animal. Which isn’t entirely inaccurate. He lifts his gaze again.

“I’m going to help you wash your hair.”

Mark blinks, once, twice. The statement takes a second to land properly, and when it does, it settles low in his stomach.

“That seems excessive,” he says instead of focusing on it. Now is not the time to find out if his starvation theory is correct. He’s never had much time for dignity, but a man needs at least a shred of it left to function, surely.

“You might recall that I didn’t ask for your opinion.”

“Way to honor your Hippocratic Oath. Isn’t consent a huge thing in medical ethics?”

“You gonna lodge a complaint?” Beck asks. He’s rolled his sleeves up to his elbows, the short dark hair there collecting tiny droplets like morning dew. Then Mark frowns, because what the fuck kinda teenage girl fluffy pink diary thought was that?

“I will, in fact. Lewis will hear about this blatant abuse of power.” He says, because it’s either that or thinking about Beck’s fucking forearms. What the fuck is wrong with him?

Beck snorts at that. Actually, hand-on-heart, snorts. “Yeah, good luck with that.”

Mark’s own laugh comes out thin. Watery, even. He clears his throat and Beck, angel of medicine that he is, doesn’t comment. Instead, he reaches somewhere outside the shower cabin and comes back with a small, silvery pouch. Shampoo. Actual shampoo. God, he hasn’t used shampoo in over a year.

Then Beck tears into the pouch with his teeth, and Mark entirely forgets what he was thinking about. It crinkles in Beck’s hand as he works it open, the sound small and sharp. He watches slim fingers squeeze, watches a freckled hand cupping beneath the opening to catch the faintly herbal smelling product. Watches pale, chapped lips close around a sliver of plastic. He decides, quite quickly, that watching Beck’s mouth do anything is a bad idea right now.

He looks at the wall. The wall is safe. The wall has never been called handsome by a man delirious from pulling twelve gs and not having seen another human being for the better part of two years. The wall doesn’t have the most infuriatingly perfect cupid’s bow in the entire history of humanity.

And yet, he feels like the wall is judging him. God, he’s dizzy.

Then Beck’s hands are in his hair. Tentative, gentle, the pressure just barely there. He closes his eyes and bites down hard on his tongue. Copper blooms across his tastebuds, smothering the noise in the back of his throat.

Fuck.

Beck’s hands still. Only for a split second, but long enough for Mark to feel the loss of contact like a jolt to his spine. He’s been touched plenty in the last couple of hours. He’s been crushed in an impressively tight hug by Johanssen, had his shoulders clapped by Martinez, his hand shaken firmly by Vogel, his face cradled by a sobbing Lewis, and he’s been examined top to bottom by Beck once his flight suit was unceremoniously cut off and dumped into the disposal chute. So why does this make him want to wail?

Beck starts moving again, slower this time. More intentionally. Fingertips press through the mess of Martian dust and dried sweat. Mark keeps his jaw clenched until his teeth creak. His eyes are stinging and he presses his tongue to the roof of his mouth, focuses on the sharp sting, the taste of blood, the smell of shampoo and recirculated air and Beck.

There’s something under his breastbone. He swallows it down, throat clicking as he does so.

Beck’s thumb brushes over the side of his head, fingernail lightly scraping the helix of his right ear. Mark stares at the floor, where the water is carrying Mars away in thin, rusty lines. There’s a lot of it. It should be satisfying, watching it catch the metal rim of the drain before being drawn away by the suction system. It should be, and yet he can’t get his breathing to sound normal. Beck keeps working the shampoo in, careful and quiet, fingers circling lather around his hairline.

Something acrid climbs up Mark’s throat.

He bends forward, pretending to help. The position pulls at his ribs, folds around the hollow ache in his stomach. He grips the front edge of the plastic seat. Beck gently tilts Mark’s head forward, cupping one hand around his forehead while scooping water over the foam with the other. A rivulet catches Beck’s wrist bone, curls around it, snakes its way down to his elbow, soaks into the bunched heather gray fabric of his shirt sleeve.

Mark shuts his eyes again. It doesn’t help. In fact, it makes it worse because there’s nothing to look at now except the inside of his own head, which is a shitty place on a good day, let alone a day like this one. It should be a good day, he’s alive and on Hermes and Johanssen hasn’t had to eat the rest of the crew but, fuck, he can’t wait for today to be over. He opens his eyes again.

His breath catches. One small, ugly hitch that he tries his best to hide by ducking his head even further forward. His fingers tighten on the seat until his nails skid against wet plastic. The chair flexes beneath him. He thinks, absurdly, that if he breaks it, NASA will bill him. But they probably won’t. They’ve already spent several billion dollars rescuing his stupid ass, one shower chair is probably within budget. Hermes is halfway through her lifespan; they’ll have plenty of other things to fix anyway, starting with whatever the fuck the VAL explosion destroyed.

Another breath catches under his ribs. Fuck. Absolutely not. He is not doing this. He is not gonna start crying in the shower while Chris Beck washes Mars out of his hair. That is just not fucking happening.

“Christ, Watney.” Beck murmurs, as he lathers up another dose of shampoo. “Thank God you went into botany, and not barbering. This haircut is terrible.” Mark can almost hear the crinkle of Beck’s eyes. His chest does the thing again.

He breathes in through his nose, slow, steady, the way Beck drilled the whole crew to do it, during centrifuge training. Back when the worst thing that had happened to Mark was puking in his helmet and being mocked by Martinez for a week. In for four. Hold for four. Out for four. Hold for four. It’s not complicated. He has a degree. He has two.

He doesn’t make it to the second round. The breath snags on the way out, hitches back into his chest. He tries to turn it into a cough, which pulls at his ribs, which pulls at his eyes, which – okay, he’s fine. He tries again. It hitches just the same.

Beck’s hands have stilled.

“Don’t,” Mark manages to say to the floor. “Keep – I’m filthy. There’s a whole geological survey up there, man.”

A pause, a beat, and then Beck’s fingers move again, slower, and that’s so much worse because slow means careful and careful means Beck knows he’s full of shit. He holds the next breath, like that’ll fix it. Past six, past eight, past ten. His chest is screaming. The working theory: if he never breathes again then it can’t sound like that. Foolproof, really. Two degrees, remember?

It comes out anyway. Loud, wet and trembling. Shampoo runs down his temple, into the corner of his eye. He latches onto the sting like a gift, because stinging is a reason, stinging is allowable. Eyes water when you get soap in them. Basic biochemistry. Everyone knows that.

The next breath doesn’t snag so much as collapse. It folds in on itself somewhere behind his sternum and comes back out as a sound he has never made before and would very much like to never make again. Beck’s own breath catches, and Mark knows he’s fucked, knows he’s caught. He lies anyway.

“Soap,” he chokes out. “In my eye.”

“Sorry,” Beck says, adjusting the hand on Mark’s forehead, using his thumb to gently sweep the suds from the side of his head.

Mark’s face does something he has no control over, but he feels it go, feels the sideways pull of his mouth, feels the tremble of his chin. He ducks lower still, chasing the floor, the drain, the rusty water, anything. His shoulders are shaking. He can’t make them stop.

He’s crying in a spaceship shower, and he can’t make it stop and the worst part is it feels good which makes him feel even worse, somehow, and he just can’t –

The sound that tears out of his chest when Beck rests his hand on the nape of his neck is a keening whine more than a sob, and he jams his fist against his mouth, but it’s too little, too late. The first one is the worst. After that, the sobs come easier. He keeps his fist where it is. It does very little to muffle the noises, but he can’t think of what else to do.

Beck doesn’t speak. The hand on his neck stays where it is; warm, broad, solid.

“Sorry,” Mark tries. “This is – I don’t even –”

“Don’t,” Beck interrupts, voice thick, and it damn near startles Mark into silence. He’s heard Beck’s voice go tight with barely restrained anger. He’s heard the way it shudders when he’s laughing, heard his steady, warm yet detached doctor cadence. He’s never heard this. He lifts his head, which is a bad idea because the room jitters as he does so, ceiling light smearing sideways.

Beck’s at his level now, crouching, knees and arm in the spray. His shirt has gone translucent, stuck to his chest over the right pectoral. Mark slides his gaze higher, trying and failing to blink away the tears to see him more clearly. His eyes are rimmed red, blue irises watery. His jaw is clenched tight, muscles standing out beneath his earlobes.

“You’re getting wet,” Mark hiccups out, which is the stupidest available statement, and he hears just how fucking dumb it is before it’s even fully out of his mouth. Beck doesn’t laugh, not properly. He exhales through his nose, once, and it sounds like a laugh that died before it even existed.

“Yeah. Funny how that works,” His voice has gone wrong somewhere in the middle of the sentence. Mark hears, then wishes he hadn’t.

The hand on his neck stays exactly where it is. The other one comes up slow, palm-out, giving Mark every chance to pull back. Then it curves around the base of his skull and presses, just slightly. Mark goes. He doesn’t have anything left in him not to obey. His forehead lands on Beck’s shoulder, on the soaked fabric there, and with his ear pressed to Beck’s neck, Mark can hear the thundering of his pulse.

He cries into Beck’s collarbone like he’s six years old. Cries harder than he did when Pathfinder woke up, and that’s saying something. There’s snot involved. Some distant, semi-functional part of his brain logs that for future insomnia humiliation, and then, blissfully, goes quiet.

Beck’s chest hitches beneath Mark’s cheek. Then again. The third time, his breath drags on the way in, audible and ugly. His fingers tighten in Mark’s hair, not quite pulling, just holding on and Mark feels something hot land on his neck that the showerhead can’t account for. Not at that angle.

Great. Now they’re both blubbering. Two men, four advanced degrees between them, falling apart in a box the size of a shitty festival porta-john at forty percent gravity. Mark can already imagine Dr. Shields’ face when she reads about this. Maybe they just… won’t mention it to her. Mark thinks all this, and somehow says none of it, which may be a personal first. He turns his face a little further into the warm, wet crook of Beck’s neck and lets it keep happening. He doesn’t know how long for. He knows that at some point, Beck shuts the shower off and drapes a scratchy, navy, NASA-issue towel over Mark’s shoulders. It smells of ozone and recycled air. He grabs a fistful of it, wraps it tighter around himself. His face is still pressed into the side of Beck’s neck, and neither of them has said anything about the shower going quiet. The steam extractor is still going, humming gently in the background. Water drips from the chair to the floor. The suction system clicks, gurgles and hisses as it reclaims the remaining moisture.

Beck doesn’t move for a while, long enough that the beads of water on Mark’s back go cold. Then the hand on his neck slides off, like he thinks Mark might tip over without it there. “Okay,” he says to nobody. He clears his throat, tries again. “Okay. Up. Slowly.”

Mark wipes his face with the heel of his hand, which is entirely useless. He grabs the towel. It’s like sandpaper on his skin, like glass over swollen eyelids. He loves it. “That’s gonna be a negative, doc.” He says, because his legs simply refuse to cooperate.

“Yeah, that figures.” Beck slides an arm under his, and there's nothing romantic about it, it's all grip and leverage and Beck's elbow digging into his ribs in a way that makes Mark hiss. They both freeze. “Sorry. Ribs.”

“S'fine.”

“It's not fine, it’s –” Beck stops. Euthanizes it. Just hauls instead, and Mark comes up off the chair in a graceless lurch, knees buckling, and Beck catches the buckle before it becomes a thing. They stand there in the cabin doorway, dripping, breathing. Mark's got the towel and not much dignity and Beck's shirt is see-through and stuck to him and his eyes are still bloodshot.

“You're really not gonna mention the –” Mark gestures vaguely at his own blotchy face.

“No.”

“Okay. Good. Great. Cool. Just checking the –”

“Watney.”

“– the policy. On that.”

Beck doesn't answer. He's looking somewhere over Mark's shoulder, jaw working, and Mark recognizes it, the sentence getting strangled, and for once he doesn't want to watch it die. He looks at the floor. There's a bundle there that he could swear wasn't there before. Sweatpants and a long-sleeve and thick socks, folded by someone with more patience than Mark's ever had. 

“Those Martinez's?”

“Mine.”

“Oh.” Mark's brain does something stupid with that, and he files it for later, much later, never. “It’s gonna look like I'm wearing a tent.” He doesn’t ask why his own clothes wouldn’t do.

“You'll look like a person, which is the goal.” Beck crouches to grab the bundle and Mark watches the back of his neck and the way his shoulders are still going up and down a half-beat too fast. Coping, probably. Mark knows coping. Mark is a national fucking ambassador for coping. Barely, but still. He survived, didn’t he?

Getting dressed takes longer than it has any right to. Mark's arms don't want to do overhead. The shirt goes on inside out and Beck doesn't say anything, just turns it and pulls it down over Mark's head like he's three, and Mark lets him, because the alternative is doing it himself and the alternative is, currently, beyond him.

“You promised me a neuro exam,” Mark says. “Earlier. In the heat of the moment.”

“You remember that?”

“I remember everything. It's a curse.” He doesn't remember most of the last hour and they both probably know it.

The exam happens on the edge of a med-bay bunk, the air heavy with the smell of antiseptic. He’s got a blanket draped over his shoulders, and he breathes in as deeply as he can, taking in the relative normalcy. After nothing but shit, dirt and his own sweat for months on end, the smell of chlorhexidine is a welcome reprieve. Beck's got a penlight and his hands have mostly stopped shaking. Mostly. The light wobbles a little when he checks Mark's pupils, and Mark says nothing.

“Squeeze my fingers. Both hands. Good. Push against me – no, with the foot. Yeah.”

“Am I dying?” Mark asks, then immediately regrets it. Probably too soon for that joke.

“You're malnourished, hypotensive, and you've got radiculopathy from an untreated slipped disc, but no, the neuro's grossly intact.” Beck sits back, tucks the penlight into his med kit.

“God, I love it when you talk dirty. Radiculopathy. What a sexy word.”

Beck’s ears go pink. “Stop speaking.”

He wants to retort, but his eyes are getting heavy. The bunk is soft in a way nothing has been soft in over five hundred sols, and his body has clocked it and is shutting down whether he likes it or not. “I'm gonna –” He gestures at the pillows behind him.  “I might just –”

“Lie down.”

“I'm not even tired.”

“Lie down, Watney.”

He's asleep before he can argue.

He surfaces in the dark, or what passes for dark on Hermes, the low amber strip lighting along the floor and the constant hum of the ship’s systems. His mouth tastes like blood and shampoo and cotton. He should’ve brushed his teeth before his body decided that leaving snot on his best friend and crewmate’s shirt was the activity of the hour. His back is a slab of complaint. For a second he doesn't know where he is and his chest goes tight, eyes scanning for Hab canvas and then he sees the whiteboard on the wall and remembers.

Beck's in the chair by the bunk. He's changed shirts – this one a dark forest green. He's got a tablet in his lap and he's not looking at it. He's looking into the middle distance with his elbow on the armrest and his thumb pressed hard under his own eye and his lip between his teeth, and he hasn't noticed Mark's awake yet, and Mark watches him not-cry for about four seconds before he can't stand it.

“You're supposed to sleep too,” Mark says. His voice comes out wrecked. He’s thirsty. And really, really fucking hungry, but that can wait.

Beck's thumb drops. He doesn't startle, exactly, but it's a near thing. “I’m fine.”

“You’re a shit liar.” It comes out flatter than Mark intended. He doesn’t have the energy to correct it.

Beck’s mouth opens. Mark waits for the inhale, the careful clipping of his tone, the non-committal deflection. It doesn’t come. Beck just looks at him, with his hand still near his face, like he’s forgotten it was ever there.

“I know. Johanssen says so, too.” Okay, that wasn’t the answer Mark expected. He holds Beck’s gaze for a beat longer, then pushes up onto an elbow. His back protests in three separate places and promptly gets ignored. There’s a cannula taped to the back of his hand, a time scribbled onto the tape in Beck’s familiar scrawl. He follows the line to the IV hook and his eyes land on a fluorescent yellow bag. “Banana bag.” Beck says, reading him. “You can’t just – eat. Not yet. We go slow, or your electrolytes do something I’d – we’d – rather they didn’t.”

“So, no cheeseburger. Great.”

“Not only no cheeseburger, RUTFs for the next couple days.”

Mark frowns. “Did you just cast a hex?”

Beck’s mouth twitches. He doesn’t smile, but he doesn’t not smile, either, and Mark will take that as a win. “Ready to use therapeutic food. It’s disgusting. You’re gonna bitch about it.”

“I’ll have you know, I bitch about everything.” His throat is a dry scrape every time he swallows, and he must do something with his face, because Beck’s already moving, already reaching for a pouch on the side table, already closing Mark’s fingers around the nozzle when they don’t quite close on their own.

“Small sips. I mean it. You’ll throw it up.”

The water is room-temperature and tastes vaguely of plastic and it is, without a doubt, one of the best things Mark’s ever had in his mouth. He takes a sip, and then a bigger one, and Beck’s cool hand is on his when he goes for a third, stopping the pouch’s trajectory.

“I said small. Do you ever do as you’re told?”

Mark hums as he swallows, feeling the ache in his throat recede. “Only when Dr Bossy Beck gives me the puppy dog eyes.”

“I do not do that.”

“Keep telling yourself that.”

Beck huffs, but there’s no heat in it. He picks up the cap and screws it back onto the water pouch, sets it on the side table just out of Mark’s reach. Mark is certain it’s on purpose.

“How long was I out?”

Beck blinks, checks his wristwatch. Mark doesn’t stare at the way his fingers curl when his wrist rotates. “Four hours, give or take.”

“Did you sit there that whole time?”

Beck shrugs one shoulder, glancing at the IV drip. “Beck, man, you’ve gotta sleep. And eat.”

“I’m not the one who weighs forty-nine kilos.”

The number goes in cold and stays there. He'd known it was bad, but the Hab didn’t have a scale. He hadn't had a number. “Forty-nine.”

“Forty-nine three, to be exact.”

“Fuck,” Mark exhales. “When can I have that hex-food? I haven’t weighed forty-nine since I was, like, fifteen. Shit.”

“Not until you’ve had another banana bag.”

Mark groans, letting his head hit the pillow behind him. He’s not on the verge of passing out anymore, which he supposes is a good thing.

“Sorry. Being strict on this one.”

“You don’t sound sorry.”

“I’m not,” Beck agrees. “I was being polite.”

Mark hums, watches the contents of the bag drip into the chamber, slow and rhythmic. For a while neither of them says anything, which Mark would normally find unbearable, but his eyelids are heavy and his ribs hurt and Beck's just there, knee almost touching the edge of the bunk, and that turns out to be enough to keep the silence from getting teeth. He thinks, briefly, about asking. About Johanssen, about whatever the two of them have or haven't got going on. It would be easy. He'd be allowed. They’re friends.

He doesn't want the answer, is the thing. It was a whole lot easier to root for it from a hundred million kilometers away, back when the math said he wouldn't have to watch.

He chooses a safer topic. “Where is everyone?”

“Sleep cycle.” Beck inclines his head towards the corridor. “You’ll have plenty of visitors in the morning.”

“I missed them. All of you,” Mark blurts, but doesn’t take it back. He missed them like crazy. Beck exhales, opens his mouth, closes it again. Clears his throat. The drip clicks. Somewhere aft, something in the air recycler changes pitch and changes back.

“We went to your funeral,” Beck says, voice flat.

Mark’s hand goes still on the blanket.

“Not – I mean, obviously not in person. NASA organized it. A memorial, really, since… well. We watched the feed in the rec room. There was a –” His jaw works. “There was a montage.”

“A montage.”

“Of you. All of us, really, but yeah, mostly you.”

“God. What was the music?”

“Mark.”

“No, seriously, this matters. If they played fucking Coldplay over my smiling official portrait, I need to know, I have to lodge a –”

“I had to certify it.” Beck’s voice doesn’t rise. “The death. There’s a form. I’m the flight surgeon, so it’s my signature. Cause of death, time of death. I put down decompression and hypoxia, because that was the most likely –” He stops. Starts again. “I sat in the airlock for three hours first. Vogel found me. We never talked about it.”

Mark looks at the IV bag. The fluorescent yellow of it. He doesn’t have a joke. There’s usually a joke and there isn’t one, and the absence of it sits in his mouth like a rotten tooth.

“It was a good guess,” he says finally. “Decompression. It should’ve been.”

Beck makes a sound that isn’t a laugh. His thumb is pressing into the side of the tablet, the skin around the nail going white. For the first time, Mark notices that he’s bitten it to the quick. It bled, at some point, the distal groove red and inflamed.

“The antenna got me. Went through the bio-monitor, that’s why my vitals flatlined. Through some of me, too, but mostly the monitor.” Mark hears himself say it like a report; sol and incident, the way he said everything to the camera for a year and a half. “The blood sealed the breach. Hurt like hell, but it missed anything important.” He shrugs. The motion pulls his ribs and he lets it show, because it’s easier than letting the other thing show.

“I would argue that your peritoneum is pretty important.” Beck’s got a Tone again, but Mark can’t quite tell which kind of Tone it is.

“You know what I meant.” Mark flaps his hand dismissively.

“How do you know, anyway? There’s no imaging on the Hab.”

“I didn’t die of peritonitis, or bleed to death, or get sepsis, so…” He shrugs. “I took antibiotics, anyway, just to be safe. It stopped hurting within two weeks. Left a fuck-ugly scar, though.”

Beck’s eyes drop to Mark’s midsection, like he can see through the blanket and the borrowed shirt, and his face shifts. Doctor-brain activation, probably.

“Did you irrigate it?”

“Of course I irrigated it. It was full of Mars and blood.” Beck’s lips purse. Mark sighs. “I irrigated it, removed the remnants of the antenna, stapled it shut. Which, by the way, I think the local we left in the Hab was expired, ‘cause it hurt like a motherfucker. There’s video, if you want to torture yourself. On the memory card.”

“I’m gonna have to look at it.” Beck murmurs, thumb already on its way back to his mouth. “The site, I mean.”

“It’s healed, man, it’s been healed for over a year,” Mark points out, then reaches with his free hand and wraps his fingers around Beck’s wrist. He can feel the pulse fluttering beneath his thumb and he squeezes once. Beck’s eyes sweep up and meet his. They’re still tired and swollen. There’s five o’clock shadow on his jaw, over the perpetually clenched muscles there. “Tomorrow, okay? You can poke, prod and scan whatever you like.”

Beck looks down at the hand on his wrist like he’s only just registered it’s there. He doesn’t pull away. “Tomorrow,” he repeats.

“Yeah. Promise. Or, technically later today, depending on how you feel about ship time. Either way, not now.”

“Fine.”

“Fine?” Mark lets go of his wrist. He doesn’t want to, exactly, but his back is screaming and the cannula keeps pulling. “Wow, that was easy. Who are you, and what have you done with Doctor Beck?”

“You’re on a drip and can barely walk. I can afford to wait.”

“Never mind. That was too sinister to be anyone but you.”

“Mm.” Beck settles back into the chair after dragging it over with his foot. His thumb migrates to his mouth again, teeth finding the ruined nail, and Mark can stand it for about two seconds.

“Stop that.”

Beck freezes, mid-bite. “What?”

“The –” Mark gestures at his own thumb. “You’ve gone full beaver on that thing. It’s bleeding, man.”

Beck looks at his thumb blankly. There’s a pause where Mark watches him decide whether to deny it. Then he just folds his hand into his lap, fingers tucked under, and says nothing, which is worse.

“When did that start?” Mark asks, before he can think better of it.

“Doesn’t matter.”

“Right, no, sure. Patient confidentiality. Wouldn’t want to violate your own.”

“Watney.”

“I’m just saying, you didn’t do that before. On the flight out, you didn’t do that. You used to give Martinez shit for cracking his knuckles. You had a whole thing about it. Habit loops, you said, you gave us the lecture –”

“Sol six,” Beck interrupts.

Mark’s mouth is still open. He closes it with a click of teeth.

“Give or take,” Beck adds, to the floor. “Johanssen pointed it out a week later. I told her I’d stop.” He turns his hand over, looks at the thumb. “Anyway.”

The drip clicks. Mark counts three drops. He thinks about Sol six. He’d spent Sol six taking inventory of the medical supplies, and doing abdominal surgery, and talking himself down from about six separate panic attacks, and somewhere overhead and accelerating away, Beck had been signing a form and eating his own hands.

“I’m sorry.” Mark says.

Beck’s head lifts, a fraction. “For what?”

“I don’t know. Pick something.”

“It’s not –” Beck stops. His hand comes up again, but he catches it, presses it flat against his thigh instead. “Nobody’s asking you to apologize.”

“Okay, but like, I feel like somebody should. There was a montage, Chris. With music.” He doesn’t mean to use Beck’s name. It slips out, and somehow, this time, Beck doesn’t flinch. He just breathes out through his nose, low and slow, for four solid seconds. He keeps his eyes fixed on the IV line where it loops down to Mark’s hand.

“It was David Bowie,” he says, eventually. Mark blinks. “The montage. ‘Heroes’. NASA’s media office picked it.”

“That –” Mark stares at him. “That’s actually a great choice. That pisses me off.”

“Martinez laughed. During the feed. This… this horrible bark, right in the middle of it, right when Teddy was speaking, and then he couldn’t stop, and Lewis didn’t say anything, and then Johanssen started, and –” Beck’s mouth pulls at one corner, not quite making it anywhere. When he speaks again, he’s barely audible. “It was a bad room.”

“For what it’s worth,” Mark says, “I think Martinez had the right idea. If I’d been at my own funeral, I’d have laughed too.”

“You weren’t there.”

“Yeah, that’s sort of the whole problem.”

It’s the wrong thing to say. He knows it’s the wrong thing to say even while he’s saying it, can feel the sentence going wrong in his mouth the way you feel a step that isn’t there, but it’s out now. Beck doesn’t react, not visibly, which from Beck is a reaction. He sits very still and looks at the IV line and his jaw does its thing.

“Sorry,” Mark says. “That was –”

“It’s fine.”

“It isn’t. I do this. There’s a – a thing in my head that turns everything into bits, and it doesn’t have an off switch, and Mars sure as hell didn’t install one.” Mark exhales and it comes out wet. He flat-out refuses to have a part two. Some performances do not need an encore. He forces his gaze up to the ceiling, counts the fins in the ventilation grate over and over until the burn eases off. “I’m sorry. That you had to go through that. ‘s all.”

“Yeah,” Beck says, in a gust of held breath. “Me too.”

“You should sleep,” Mark says instead of continuing that particular conversational thread, because the back of his throat is doing that god-awful tightening thing it did in the shower. “What time is it, even?”

“Oh-four-hundred.”

“Jesus. You’ve been up for, what, twenty-two hours?”

“I’ve done longer.”

“Go to bed, man. I’ll sic Lewis on you.”

Beck doesn’t move. He looks at the IV bag, which is doing exactly what IV bags do, which is precisely nothing, and then at the tablet in his lap, which is asleep, screen dark. He turns it over in his hands.

“I’m fine here.”

Mark looks at him. Really looks, which he’s been avoiding, because people’s faces after a year and a half of webcam turn out to be a lot, emotionally. Looking at Beck? Well. That’s always been a whole thing, emotionally, though the valence is usually a little less ‘about to burst into tears’ and more ‘about to spontaneously combust’. He’s been normal about it. Mostly.

Beck’s got new lines at the corners of his eyes. The shadow under them isn’t a tonight thing. He’s sitting with his whole body aimed at the bunk like the bunk might do something. Hmm.

“What happens,” Mark says slowly, “if you go to your bunk right now?”

Beck’s jaw works. “Nothing.”

“Beck.”

“Seriously. Nothing happens. I lie there.” A beat. “I’ve gotten very good at lying there.”

“Sounds restful.”

“It’s been months of practice, so.” He shrugs the one-shoulder shrug, the one that’s supposed to close the subject. “Johanssen sleeps fine now. Took her a while. Martinez was okay after about a month. Vogel, I don’t know, Vogel’s a vault. Lewis –” He stops himself. “Everyone found their thing.”

“And your thing is sitting in med-bay watching my electrolytes drip.”

“My thing,” Beck says, “as of about seven hours ago, is that when I leave this room, some part of my brain is going to decide you’re dead again. It’s not rational. I know where you are. I have your telemetry on the tablet. It doesn’t matter.” He says it in the flat voice, the certifying-the-form voice, and his hand is back at his mouth and he doesn’t even seem to know. “So, I’d rather just sit here.” The words come out around the thumb. “If that’s all the same to you.”

Mark watches a bead of blood form at the tip of Beck’s thumb and makes an executive decision. “Right. C’mere.”

Beck blinks. “What?”

“There’s a whole bunk here,” Mark says, patting the mattress beside him with his free hand. “Well. Most of a bunk. Sixty percent of a bunk. Scoot.”

Beck stares at him. “Absolutely not.”

“Why not?”

“Why –” Beck’s voice does something strangled. “I’m your doctor. I can’t even begin to list the reasons why this is incredibly inappropriate.”

“Try me,” Mark says. “I’ve got literally nothing else on my schedule.”

“For a start, you’re my patient. You’re on an active drip. You weigh forty-nine kilos, you have two rib fractures, and the bunk is rated for one person.”

“Rated.” Mark snorts. “It’s a mattress, not a cargo pallet.”

“There are ethical considerations –”

“Name one.”

Beck opens his mouth. Closes it. Opens it again.

“You washed my hair five hours ago. You got in the shower with me, while I was naked, might I add, and we both got snot on each other. How is this more of a violation?” Mark says, and then because Beck downright flinches, adds: “Which that wasn’t, by the way. I gave my consent then; I’m giving it now.”

Beck falters, gestures at the IV pole, the bunk, the general concept of Mark. His hand sort of dies mid-air and drops back to his thigh. “This is different.”

“How?”

It’s a genuine question, which is the problem. Mark hears it come out genuine and can’t reel it back into a joke. Beck looks at him, and for a second something moves behind his eyes that Mark is too tired to analyze, and then it gets euthanized like everything else.

“I’m supposed to be objective,” Beck says, eventually. Quietly. “About you. Medically. And I’m –” His thumb starts toward his mouth. He catches it. “I’m not doing a great job of that as it is.”

Mark lets that sit for a second. “Okay,” he says, carefully, drawing out the last vowel. “So, your options are sit in that chair until your spine fuses, eat the rest of your thumb or lie down on a flat surface like a normal human being. Since we’ve established you won’t go to your own quarters, this is the next best thing. As your patient, since apparently that matters, I’m telling you: you’re stressing me out. Stress is bad for recovery, isn’t it? Probably.”

“Watney, I can’t – it would be an incredible breach of boundaries –”

“You can.” Mark shifts over. His ribs scream out, the nerve in his leg fires, and the cannula tugs – he doesn’t manage to keep it all off his face, and once again, Beck is half out of the chair before Mark can get a hand up. “I’m fine. It’s fine. I’m making room.”

“You shouldn’t be making room; you should be taking up the whole –”

“Chris.” Mark says, and he means it this time. “Get in the damn bunk.”

Beck stands there. He's got the tablet in one hand, hanging at his side, and he's looking at the strip of mattress like it's an unsecured airlock. His jaw is doing the thing. Mark waits him out, because he's learned, recently, that he can wait out just about anything.

Slowly, Beck toes his shoes off. Mark resists a celebratory smirk. He sets the tablet face-down on the side table, lines his shoes up carefully, perpendicular to the bottom of the bunk. Hesitates. “If you so much as wince –”

“That’s an unfair condition to set. I’m a delicate flower, I’ll definitely wince.”

Beck pulls a face.

“Chris.” It comes out softer than Mark intended. The word feels increasingly natural on his tongue, and he simultaneously regrets saying it and wants to say it again. He doesn’t.

Beck gets in. It’s not graceful, couldn’t possibly be, not on a bunk this size. He folds himself down along the outer edge, on his back, arms crammed in tight to his own chest like he’s trying to take up as little space as physically possible. He’s a solid fifteen centimeters away from Mark’s shoulder. Beck holds himself there like the mattress is hot and Mark can feel the heat coming off him anyway. Bodies do that. Thermodynamics.

He looks at the ceiling grate. Counts fins. Loses count almost immediately.

“You can lie down properly,” Mark says. “You're hovering.”

“I'm not hovering.”

“You are absolutely hovering.”

A breath that's supposed to be a sigh. The mattress takes maybe ten percent more of Beck's weight and then refuses the rest. He's still got his arms folded in tight, hands tucked, like he's been laid out for viewing, which, given the montage, given the form with his signature on it, is possibly the worst available comparison and Mark elects not to share it.

Here's the thing: Mark has had five hundred and forty-nine sols to work out which of his wants are real and which ones the brain just manufactures to fill the silence. He knows which column this one's in. He's known since he caught himself rationing out the memory of Beck laughing at something dumb he’d said in a pre-flight briefing, parceling it like a protein bar, one bite a day. It’s still useless: Beck’s got whatever Beck’s got. Johanssen, probably. He closes his eyes. He really doesn’t want to know.

Mark doesn't move toward him. Beck doesn't move toward Mark. But the mattress is a shallow valley and they're both heavier than air, and after a while the fifteen centimeters are gone and Beck's shoulder is along his arm, and nobody mentions it.

The Hermes hums. The air recycler does its pitch-change thing and comes back. Mark catalogs the contact points the way he used to count water reserves, because his brain has to be doing something or it'll do something worse: Beck's shoulder along his upper arm, warm through two shirts. The side of Beck's knee where it's slid into the valley and ended up against his. And near his wrist, the back of Beck's hand, not holding, just there, the knuckles maybe a centimeter off his own.

He doesn't say a word. He keeps his eyes shut tight because pointing it out means Beck taking his hand back and putting fifteen centimeters of dead air between them and going clipped, and Mark would rather lose a finger. He's nearly lost worse for less.

Beck shifts. Not toward, not away, just a small redistribution, his weight settling another fraction into the dip, and the back of his hand goes flush against Mark's. Whole length of it, knuckle to wrist. Warm. Mark's breath does something stupid and he covers it with a sniff, which his sinuses, post-shower-cry, can sell as a legitimate medical event. Beck's thumb moves.

Just the thumb, a slow drag along the back of Mark's hand, first knuckle and back, and every nerve from the wrist up fires. His eyes fly open. He doesn't breathe for a second, which is a tell, so he makes himself, but even he hears how shaky it is.

Nothing. It's nothing. Beck's half asleep. Hypnic jerk.

The thumb goes again. Same path. Slower.

So. Not a jerk, then. Mark sure feels like one, though.

His hand's in the wrong place for a pulse, and Mark knows it, knows where the radial sits, he’s taken his own countless times. He tells himself Beck's just falling asleep, hand idling where it landed. He could turn his over. That's the thing he keeps arriving at. Palm up. Two centimeters of rotation and he'd find out which world he's living in. Except then he'd have to live in it.

He keeps it palm down.

Beck's breathing has slowed and deepened. His lips are parted; Mark can hear it more than he can see it. He's not stiff anymore, either – he's relaxed into the mattress, and with each exhale, a strand of hair on his forehead slips further down. Mark watches it fall. It's a safe place to put his eyes. Strand of hair, forehead, the small twitch of an eyelid. Safer than the hand.

He's not staring, he tells himself. The lie isn't convincing. There's a freckle he's never noticed before, just above the left lash line. The eyelashes. His eyes slide down, following the slope of Beck's nose, the bow of his lips, the tiny crease at the corner of his mouth. There's a graze on the angle of his jaw, a spot of dried blood in the stubble, just beneath his ear. He must have nicked himself while shaving. His fingertips itch with the utterly deranged urge to smooth out the remnants of Beck's perpetual frown.

He should stop. He knows he should. Not only because staring at people while they sleep is serial killer behavior, but because if he's caught, there's no joke on Earth or Mars or the Hermes that'll get him out of it.

He keeps looking anyway. He's seen Beck asleep before, dozens of times. Never like this. Never this close, never at this angle. He'd never expected to.

There's a scar through his left eyebrow he's never clocked, thin and old and silvered. Childhood, probably. Bike accident, or a sibling with a toy and bad aim. He doesn't know. He realizes, with a small, sinking feeling, that he's doing the rationing thing again, portioning the view out like he's going to need it later. Old habits. He files the scar away with the freckle and the crease and tells himself that's the last one, final entry, census closed –

“You’re staring,” Beck murmurs, eyes still closed.

Mark’s whole body jolts and the bunk bangs the wall. His elbow meets the frame and sends fizzing static all the way down to his fingers. “Ow – fuck – Jesus Christ, Beck! Shit.”

“Shh.” Beck doesn’t open his eyes. One hand comes up, finds the IV line by feel, traces it down to the cannula on the back of Mark’s hand and checks the tape with two fingers, forearm draped over Mark’s abdomen. “You’ll pull it.”

“You were asleep!” Mark hisses.

“Mm,” Beck murmurs. “Not quite.”

“Not quite? Not quite. So, what, the breathing, the – you were faking being asleep?”

“I was falling asleep.” Beck’s hand, having finished its inspection of the tape, withdraws. Beck shifts, rolling onto his side, facing Mark. It takes some negotiating, the bunk creaks and his knee ends up hooked over Mark’s. He finds Mark’s free hand again, deliberately, and he slots his fingers into the gaps between Mark’s, like they’ve done it a hundred times before. They have not. He would remember. He stares at their hands, at the way Beck’s knee rests over his. Then he glances up at Beck, and is met with half-lidded, bloodshot eyes. They’re clear, and blue, and entirely awake.

“Okay,” he says, voice coming out a half-octave wrong. He clears his throat, tries again. “Okay, so. This is. Hm.”

“Watney.”    

“No, I’m – give me a second, I’m rebooting.”                                                                                     

“Take your time.” Beck’s thumb moves over the back of Mark’s hand, the same slow, purposeful drag as before. The nerve signal travels up his arm, through his chest, settling behind his sternum. He blinks, twice, clenching his jaw against the prickle behind his eyes.

“You’re holding my hand.”

“Yes.”

“On purpose.”

“Mm.” Beck’s eyes slide shut again. He’s exhausted, Mark knows, he should let him sleep, but he – they – they can’t just –

“Beck. Chris. Not to – I mean, far be it from me to look a gift horse in the mouth, but you were just listing ethical violations about sharing a mattress. This feels –”

“Yeah.” Beck exhales. It stirs the air between them. “I've reviewed my position.”

“You've reviewed your position.” Mark almost laughs. He doesn’t know what else to do.

“Look.” Beck’s eyes are open again. “You were right. The line… the line is fucked, frankly. An ethics committee would have my license in a heartbeat. I’m not objective, I can’t be. I haven’t been since Sol six, and I can never be again. So, yes. I’m holding your hand, deliberately, consciously. Pretending otherwise would be an insult to both our intelligence.” He shuffles, readjusts, pulls the blanket slightly higher over Mark’s chest. Mark opens his mouth, but nothing comes out. “I’m tired, Mark. I am so, so tired.” It’s quiet, rough at the edges, and it lodges itself in Mark’s throat. “I don’t have it in me to do this conversation properly, not right now.”

“Chris…”

“So.” Beck’s thumb stops, rests there, warm over Mark’s knuckle. “Here’s what’s gonna happen. We’re going to sleep. And… if you wake up, and you still want to have this conversation, we’ll have it.” His eyes close. His brow furrows. “If you don’t, this never happened. Hypnic jerk. Whatever you were telling yourself ten minutes ago.”

Mark’s stomach flips. “You heard that?”

“You mutter.”

“I do not. Do I?” Does he? Shit. What the hell else has he said out loud today?

“Five hundred sols alone, Watney. You mutter.” There’s no bite in it, no reproach. Beck’s words are starting to run together at the ends, consonants blurring. “’s fine. Useful data.”

Mark waits for more. There isn't any. Beck's breathing evens out for real this time – Mark can tell the difference now, apparently – and within a couple of minutes the hand in his goes heavy. He should sleep. He’s exhausted, the kind of tired he thinks will be a close companion for the foreseeable future. He’s warm, because apparently Beck is a space heater, and he’s on a soft mattress and it would be so easy to just… close his eyes.

Instead, his brain is wide awake.

If you wake up and still want to have this conversation, we’ll have it.

Like there’s a version of Mark that wakes up and doesn’t. Like there’s a version of him, in any timeline, in any universe, that opens his eyes, next to Chris Beck and their interlaced hands, and goes, y’know what, never mind, pass the hex-food. It’s almost funny, except it’s really, really not. Beck offered him the way out like he genuinely thought Mark might take it. Which means Mark has, apparently, been normal about it, at least to some extent, and that is both a relief and a fucking problem.

He looks at Beck's face again. The strand of hair has completed its descent and is now lying across his forehead at an angle that would drive awake-Beck insane. The graze on his jaw. The bitten thumb, tucked somewhere against Mark's wrist, pulse going slow and even under the skin. The parted lips, the soft, warm exhales against Mark’s shoulder. The air recycler changes pitch again. Around them, the Hermes hauls them home at a speed his brain refuses to comprehend. He turns his head, just slightly. His nose ends up an inch from Beck’s hairline.

Shampoo, antiseptic, warm skin. Human.

God.

“Thank you,” he whispers into the hair of a man who can no longer hear him, “for coming back.”