Chapter Text
The apartment had three locks on the door, and Ryland checked all of them twice before he could sit down and relax in his living-room.
It was a small mercy that no one had asked him to explain why he needed it. The government had given him the apartment because it was outside Houston, close enough to Johnson Space Center for the medical appointments, evaluations, and debriefings that filled his calendar with the same relentless precision they'd used to plan the Hail Mary. Close enough for whatever work they eventually decided he could tolerate. Along with the apartment came the furniture, the muted gray walls that came pre-decorated with abstract art no one would ever love, and they had given him, above all, a vast and terrible silence about what came next. Nobody trains you for the part after the mission, not that Ryland had received the other training either. There were protocols for launch, for reentry, for decontamination and debriefing and the careful choreography of press releases that scrubbed his "sacrifice" into something palatable. In the end, though, there was no protocol for the afternoons in grocery stores, for the particular horror of standing in a produce aisle surrounded by people and noise, the overwhelming feeling of the fluorescent lights that buzzed directly into his skull until his knees buckled and a stranger had to help him to a bench by the pharmacy.
Ryland had been back on Earth for four months. It felt like both four minutes and four hundred years. Sleep had become a rarity, something that happened to other people who didn't feel like if they slept they would awake back on the Hail Mary, drifting aimlessly. Ryland would lie in bed and close his eyes and immediately his body would remember the coffin-like stillness of the coma, the particular quality of recycled air, the sound (or absence of sound) that came from being the only heartbeat on a ship built for three. His mind would spiral, gently at first and then all at once, into the math of his own survival. Then to the two crewmates who had been dead long before he woke. To being 11.9 light-years from a home that had decided his death was more useful than his potential to help on it. Then to a planet he no longer quite recognized. An alien species that he had saved and that, in turn, had saved him.
He had done the thing. He had saved the sun. He had saved Earth and saved Erid, in the roundabout, miraculous, faintly absurd way that only made sense inside a physics equation. And still he lay awake at three in the morning with his heart hammering like it was trying to escape his ribs, certain on some primal, unreasoning level that he had failed everyone he had ever loved.
The insomnia was only part of it. The rest showed up in smaller, stranger ways. He flinched at unexpected touches. He could not stand having his back to a door. He wept, without warning, at commercials for laundry detergent, at the sound of certain frequencies of static, at nothing at all. He had cried once for eleven minutes because a barista spelled his name correctly on a coffee cup, and he had not been able to explain to himself why that, of all things, had broken him.
So he went to therapy, because his neurologist insisted, and because some small stubborn part of him still wanted to get better, even if he didn't fully believe getting better was possible anymore.
Dr. Amara Chen's office smelled like sandalwood and printer toner, an odd combination that Ryland had come to find almost soothing in its ordinariness. She was a short, sharp woman with kind eyes and an uncanny ability to sit through long silences without flinching, which Ryland appreciated more than he could say. He was fond of silences. He'd had a lot of practice with them.
"You said you dreamed about the ship again," she prompted, on the Tuesday that would change everything, though of course neither of them knew it yet.
"I dream about it most nights." Ryland picked at a loose thread on the arm of the chair. "Sometimes it's Rocky. Sometimes it's just the noise the ship made when the hull expanded from the temperature change. This horrible groaning sound. I used to think it sounded like something dying."
"And when you wake up?" Dr. Chen wrote a note in her notebook.
"I check the locks and doors." He said it like a confession, because it felt like one. "Even though I know, logically, that I am safe and nothing will happen if the doors are opened. It seems my body didn't get the memo."
Dr. Chen made a small hum. "Our bodies remember what minds try to forget. It's not weakness. It's biology."
"Tell that to the part of me that still thinks I should be over this by now." Ryland huffed exasperatedly.
Dr. Chen softened her voice and leaned forward. "You survived something almost nobody else on the planet can imagine. There's no timeline for that, Ryland. There's no chapter in a manual that says by month four you should feel human again."
He almost laughed. Almost. His smile was sour and tilted in self-deprecation. "I don't think I've ever felt human. Even before all this, not that I remember much still."
She studied him for a moment, the kind of look that meant she was deciding whether to say something. "Can I ask you something unrelated? Or maybe not unrelated. I'm not sure yet."
"Sure." Ryland sat back in his chair, bracing.
"Do you remember a student of yours, years back, named Mark Watney?"
Ryland blinked in confusion. The name landed somewhere distant and dusty, a name attached to a slideshow of faces he hadn't thought about in years: seventh grade, science class, a room that had smelled like formaldehyde and dry erase markers. "Watney." He turned the syllables over slowly, testing them. "I think so. Chubby kid. Always had something sarcastic to say. Built a working volcano for the science fair that actually worked, unlike everyone else's, which is the only reason I remember him specifically. Why?"
Dr. Chen's expression did something complicated, somewhere between sympathy and disbelief that she was the one who got to say this out loud. "That chubby kid survived eighteen months alone on Mars."
The room went very quiet. Ryland heard his own pulse in his ears. "I'm sorry, what?"
"Mark Watney. NASA astronaut. He was part of the Ares III mission. There was an accident during a storm, and the crew had to scrub the mission and evacuated without him, believing him dead. He was stranded on Mars for over five hundred days before they managed to get him home." She paused. "It was one of the biggest news stories of the decade, Ryland. I assumed you'd have heard about it, but I suppose you were rather occupied at the time."
"I was 11.9 light-years away," Ryland said faintly. "There wasn't exactly a newsfeed."
He tried to reconcile the images: a pudgy, wisecracking thirteen-year-old hunched over a science fair volcano, and a grown man alone on an alien planet, staring down a barren horizon with no other living soul for half a billion miles. It didn't fit. It didn't fit at all, and yet some part of him, some tired, aching part that recognized the particular loneliness of being the only human being for an impossible distance, understood immediately and completely.
"He teaches now," Dr. Chen continued. "Trains astronaut candidates at the Johnson Space Center. From what I understand, he's become something of a public figure. People love him. Charming, funny, resilient. The world's second favorite survival story."
"That must be exhausting," Ryland said, before he could stop himself.
"Why do you say that?" Dr. Chen tilted her head.
"Because being someone's favorite survival story means you're not allowed to still be surviving." The words came out rougher than he meant them to. "Everyone wants the after picture. The triumphant one. Nobody wants to hear that you still can't sleep with your back to the window."
Something shifted in Dr. Chen's expression, gentle and knowing. "I wonder if you two might have quite a lot to talk about."
Ryland didn't answer right away. He was thinking about Rocky, impossibly far away and impossibly alive, and about the particular ache of being the only person who understood a specific shape of grief. He thought about how it might feel to sit across from someone who had also once been the only heartbeat for millions of miles in every direction, who had also come home to a world that expected him to be fine now, to be grateful now, to perform wellness like a magic trick for cameras and gala audiences.
"Do you have his contact information?" he asked, and he heard the strange, cautious hope in his own voice, an emotion he hadn't felt in longer than he wanted to admit.
Dr. Chen smiled, small and pleased. "I might be able to find it."
That night, Ryland lay in bed with his phone glowing against his palm, Mark Watney's professional email address staring back at him from the screen, and he typed and deleted four different opening lines before he finally settled on the truth.
Hi Mark. This is going to sound strange, but I used to be your seventh grade science teacher. I think we might have more in common than either of us expected. I'd like to talk, if you're willing.
He hovered over the send button for a long, long moment.
Then, for the first time in months, he did something without checking the locks first.
He hit send.