Chapter Text
“I am going to freaking kill him!”
“Hello Grace. It’s nice to see you again, Grace.”
“Hello, Rocky! I am going to freaking kill him!”
Grace swings his backpack down onto the floor dramatically, then faceplants onto his bed dramatically.
“Outside clothing on bed? Gross. Ew. Gross.”
Grace rolls off his bed and slumps to the floor. Dramatically.
“Face touch floor. Gross.”
“I literally vacuumed this morning!” Grace shoots back. “Ugh, whatever, the point is, I’m going to kill him.”
Rocky, perched on his desk chair like a gargoyle, rolls his eyes and pointedly stabs at his tablet’s screen while giving Grace a flat, unimpressed look. “Who question? Rocky couldn’t possibly imagine who Grace is mad at, hmmmmmmmmmmm-”
Grace shakes a fist at his roommate from the floor, still facedown on the carpet that is totally clean, it’s literally not even October yet, how could it be dirty. Speaking over the monotone hum of Rocky’s voice, still going mmmmm, he says “Okay, number one, shut up, and number two, when you start using contractions it means you’re interested enough to type them out, so I win and you want to hear about what Mark did today.” He pauses. “Oh my god, how many m’s did you write?”
Rocky smiles beatifically as his voice continues to mmm for at least ten full seconds. Finally, it stops.
“That many,” he adds, because he thinks he’s hilarious. (He is.) “What terrible things Mark do today?”
“I was walking to class with Eva, and she was talking about how she forgot a hair tie and her clip was broken, and I was just about to grab one from my bag because I keep them there for Olesya, and then freaking Mark Watney appears out of nowhere and hands her one and is all ‘oooh, here you go, Eva, don’t worry about giving it back,’ and smiles his… slimy little smile at me!”
“Wow, total asshole,” Rocky says.
“And he had to have heard me say ‘oh, I have one’ and go for my bag, because he was apparently two inches from us the entire time, so he was absolutely doing it so that he could upstage me, because apparently he saw me at the bio major orientation and decided that he was going to make my life… H-E-double-hockey-sticks!”
“Please just say fuck. Request.”
If looks could kill, Grace decided, the one he was shooting Rocky would… well, not kill him, but it would give him a deep feeling of unease.
Rocky was a great roommate. He was funny, smart, generally tidy (even if his engineering projects tended to spill over onto Grace’s side of the room) and easy to hang out with. He was also incredibly open about his opinions, which Grace appreciated. High school had been a never-ending parade of awkward “oh, was that a joke?” moments and Colt knocking him on the head, saying she was flirting with you, dumbass. When Rocky was being sarcastic, he made it very clear, and then usually just said the thing he was actually thinking immediately afterward. He also kept the same hours as Grace did (read: no consistent hours at all) and was always down to talk about nanotechnology or Seven of Nine’s character arc at two a.m.
Basically, they were both huge nerds, and it was great. That had been Grace’s experience with most people at the University of Chicago, actually.
High school hadn’t been the greatest period of his life, per se. He hadn’t been getting shoved in lockers or anything, but it had just been sort of lonely. There were people he had been friendly with, but no real friends. He hadn’t gone to any parties (actually, he had gone to one, but the less said about what happened in Tyler Porter’s house the better,) hadn’t gone on a senior week trip, had never stayed after school for practice or rehearsal or club meetings. He hung out with Colt’s friends often enough- played Street Fighter with Dan and watched his twin brother moon over Jody Moreno for literal years on end- but he always felt like the odd one out. Because he was. He was the younger brother, if only by five minutes, who was only around because people felt sorry for him.
College had seemed like it was destined to be a worse version of high school: not only were the consequences for screwing up much more serious, but he was going to lose the safety net he had been relying on since he was ten years old. Holly, and Uncle Holland, and Jackson, and most of all Colt, the people he could always count on to be there for him, would be thirty hours away by car and five hours and $200 away by plane. He could text or call whenever, but he couldn’t stand at the counter eating ravioli out of the can with his cousin when she was visiting or get a bear hug from Jackson or have his hair mussed up by his uncle. And he couldn’t shuffle over to Colt’s room in the middle of the night to just make sure that he was okay, that he was snoring a little and draped over his bed in some outlandish position like he always was.
He couldn’t do any of that, because he was in Chicago, because they had given him scholarships and he was on the path toward revolutionizing the field of molecular extremophile research, and Colt was in Los Angeles, doing gymnastics and boxing and working backstage at random concerts and plays and events because he was trying to “break into the industry.” They were both chasing their dreams, and it just so happened that chasing their dreams meant they were halfway across the country from each other.
For all Grace’s worrying (which he did a lot of) UChicago had been wonderful so far. His classes were challenging in a good way, in the way that he suddenly found himself not having time to do the extra credit but wanting to do it anyway out of pure fascination with the material. His professors were passionate and skilled and legendary in their fields- seriously, he had been literally jumping up and down when he learned that the author of Cyclomorphotic abnormalities in a novel population of Halobiotus crispae was teaching his molecular bio of the cell class. His fellow students, as a whole, were exactly his kind of people: deeply weird by the standards of society at large, slightly awkward, and very given to talk at length about their niche interests.
He knew a lot about Foucault now. Or, rather, thanks to Eva’s rants he knew which opinions about Foucault were “irredeemably idiotic and frankly morally bankrupt.”
Honestly, everyone he had met had been great.
Everyone, that is, except for Mark Watney.
Grace had met Mark at an orientation event for students interested in a biology major. He had been milling around, stress-eating cubes of cheese, when a guy in a polo shirt meandered up to him.
“Lame party,” polo shirt guy said.
Grace did a double take. “Um, I guess? I mean, at least there’s… cheese?” He was going to walk into the ocean. And never return.
Shockingly, polo shirt guy did not immediately turn and leave. “Amen to that,” he said, smoothly. “Mark Watney.”
Mark Watney was sticking out a hand for Grace to shake. This presented a problem. Both of Grace’s hands were occupied, one with a tiny plate of cheese cubes and the other with keeping his place in his extremely battered copy of Asimov’s Extraterrestrial Civilizations, which was something of a comfort object for him, even though it was probably around 30% scotch tape and highlighter ink by weight at this point.
For unknown reasons, the solution Grace’s mind put forward for this problem was to place the edge of the plate between his teeth to free up a hand.
This created two new problems: one, he now couldn’t intelligibly reply with his own name without losing the plate and dropping cheese cubes all over the floor. Two, the plate had been in his left hand. This meant that the original problem of not being able to shake Mark’s hand was still in play. A third problem (fourth? No, third. Grace decided that “unable to shake hand of new person” would be designated Problem 2 and “left hand free, right hand occupied” would be designated Problem 2a. List coherence and organization was very important to him.) was that he looked like a complete idiot, but that would likely be an ongoing issue and therefore was shelved for the moment. Grace’s brain, satisfied with the creation of a well-organized list, promptly checked out, leaving Grace himself staring blankly at Mark’s hand unsure of what to do.
Mark, whose brain was apparently still functional, switched so his left hand was extended, thus allowing the handshake to be completed, and problems 2 and 2a were solved, which was a real relief.
“Sorry, should’ve known you wouldn’t want to lose your place in… woah, Asimov, cool,” Mark said.
Grace hurriedly removed the plate from his mouth, which handily solved problem 1 and allowed him to excitedly respond with “Ryland Grace, but I go by my last name. Do you like Asimov?”
Mark see-sawed his hand back and forth. “Eh? I mean, his sci-fi is legendary, don’t get me wrong, like, The Martian Way is one of my favorite pieces of writing ever, even if it really shows his ass in terms of misogyny, but Extraterrestrial Civilizations is kind of… out there.”
Grace had gone from thinking hey, another space nerd, awesome! to screw this guy in two seconds flat.
Misinterpreting his expression, Mark continued. “I mean, it’s not all bad! Like, he makes some good inferences, the whole “Earth-like world” thing is obviously smart, I just don’t think he takes it far enough and then people throw what, 600,000 possible planets around and say oh, why havent the aliens come yet-”
“Are you serious?” Grace exclaimed, cutting Mark off. “First of all, Asimov lands on around 530,000 possible planets in our galaxy, okay, and second of all the focus on “Earth-like worlds” has set SETI back so much-”
Mark had the audacity to laugh. “Uh, no? Organic life is going to be made out of organic compounds, and organic compounds need an Earth-analogue environment! Gravity, water-”
“There are so many assumptions there it’s not even funny! There are so many ways that inorganic life could emerge, or, or a different type of organic life could survive in an environment too hot for water, for example-”
“Even if that was possible, which, not even going to touch that, we’re talking about intelligent life-”
“And? And? Who’s to say inorganic intelligent or microscopic intelligent life couldn’t exist?”
Mark grinned. “Ryland Grace, if inorganic intelligent life is discovered in my lifetime, I will wear a shirt that says I Was Wrong in bold letters every day for the rest of my days. Seriously, it’ll be bright pink, with, like, sequins-”
At that, Mark was cut off again, though this time by a short girl across the room yelling, “Hey, Mark, stop flirting and come here a sec!”
Mark waved at her, then turned back to Grace, who was frozen in place as soon as he heard the word flirting, and somehow grinned even wider. “Sorry, gotta go. Beth gets loud when you ignore her. But, hey,” he patted at his pockets until he pulled out a pen and a crumpled piece of paper, then leaned it on a nearby wall and scribbled something down. He clicked the pen shut, folded the paper into a tiny square, then reached out and tucked it in the pocket of Grace’s hoodie.
“Nice to meet you, Grace,” he said, still smiling, and turned to hustle over toward the girl who had called him.
Grace, for his part, was still frozen, filled with an incandescent rage and a strong desire to throw something. Which he couldn’t do, because he was still holding his book in one hand and the cheese cubes in the other.
(He had forgotten about the paper until that night, when it had fallen out of his hoodie pocket as he was changing into pajamas. Opening it revealed that it was actually a receipt from the day before for the purchase of caffeine pills, Pringles, and a USB drive from Walmart. On the back, in Mark’s hasty handwriting, it said Let’s get lunch sometime. You’ll hate my thoughts on the Fermi Paradox :) 840-9622. Grace very firmly did not put the number into his phone, and instead crumpled it up, tossed it in the back of a desk drawer, and thought uncharitable thoughts about Mark Watney for several minutes.)