Beth's alarm clock was noisy, Mark noticed, still half-asleep.
Beth Johanssen's alarm clock.
Getting louder and louder by the second.
Wait.
Panic. Mark was now, instantly, completely awake as he tried to think how to manage this situation, as he shut off the alarm. Why hadn't he set an alarm for himself? Idiot, he told himself. He sat up, carefully dislodging a still-sleeping-and naked, he couldn't help but quickly appreciate the view-Beth.
He shook one bare shoulder gently.
"Hey. Time to get up. I wasn't supposed to stay in here."
"S'okay," she mumbled, eyes still shut. "I don't care."
Um.
"No, I mean… Beth, people are going to be looking for me, I shouldn't be here."
Beth shrugged, and sat up, rubbing her eyes. She was surprisingly calm, while Mark was busily freaking the fuck out.
He put his clothes on, and was finished around the time she was getting started, languidly rifling through a drawer under the bunk for fresh clothes.
"You okay?" he asked her, trying to decipher her reaction, which seemed decidedly strange.
She nodded, matter-of-factly.
"M'fine. Just need some coffee." She lost her battle with a yawn, rubbing her eyes again.
"So, uh… how are we going to play this?" he asked her, trying to come up with a workable plan. Maybe if Beth left first, could he follow later, claim that he'd fallen asleep in the lab? What would Lewis-
"Play what?" asked Beth, meeting his eyes, curious.
"Um, this? You? Me? In here? Together? When we shouldn't be?"
"Oh. I told you already. Don't care. Fuck it, I don't care what anyone thinks about it."
Was she serious?
Mark thought about that for a few stressful, heart-pounding moments, before the tension began to fade out. She made a good point. Maybe that was the better way to go.
"You really don't care? If everyone knows?"
She shook her head again.
"Zero fucks. What are they going to do? Fire us?" She was serene and calm, as she managed to neatly set aside years of NASA indoctrination.
Mark couldn't help staring, and he also couldn't help but admire her nerve.
"Okay, then," he said, drawing out the syllables, looking at her like he couldn't quite believe she was serious. "We just stroll on over to the Rec, get some breakfast?"
"Yep." She smirked at him. "Also, don't bother moving your stuff over to Vogel's, if you'd rather sleep in here."
She laughed at the sudden expression on his face.
"I'm not proposing lifetime commitment, Watney. Just saying it would probably be more convenient; people are going to think what they're going to think. Feel free to be my roommate if you want."
He shook his head slowly, smiling in spite of himself, eyebrows raised, and finally he threw up his hands and shrugged.
"Okay. Sure. Yes to both. Lead the way," he gestured to the door.
"Wait. Hand me that, would you?"
She shrugged into her hoodie, pulling it up around her face, smiling up at him.
Opening the door without so much as a sideways glance, she turned and headed towards the Rec in search of coffee, Mark trailing in her wake.
Surely he was imagining things, thought Chris. It was just a coincidence that they'd walked in together, right? That they'd disregarded the normal seating arrangement and sat alongside one another instead of across.
The way they kept looking at each other. Almost as if…
Nope. He wasn't imagining it.
She was wearing that shirt, the one Watney had had stuffed into his EVA helmet. She had a glow.
It probably shouldn't have come as any surprise. But the realization hit him like a ton of bricks, anyway. She'd made her choice, now that she finally had the one she'd wanted all along. He'd never had a chance.
Dropping his unfinished breakfast into the recycler, he turned on his heel and headed for the lab.
"I can't work this way! I can't work with either of them." Beck paced back and forth. "How am I supposed to…" he trailed off, overcome.
Commander Lewis looked at Beck, reaching deep within herself to tamp down her irritation with the entire situation and find some sympathy. Playing referee for crew drama was not her favorite way to block her afternoon schedule, when there were far more important things to deal with.
Children, she thought. I'm the space mom for a minivan full of bickering space children.
"I can't even look at the two of them." Beck looked pained.
"Yesterday," she reminded him, "you said you'd be fine, if only I would assign Watney to another bunk," retorted Lewis.
"You said he could bunk with Vogel!"
"Yes. Well," she replied, carefully. "They're consenting adults, and they worked out an alternate arrangement on their own."
"You're not seriously going to allow that to fly."
"Indeed, I am." Lewis looked at him with one eyebrow raised, daring him to challenge her authority.
She wasn't disappointed.
"That's completely absurd," he fired back. "I plan on advising Dr. Shields about it in my next report. NASA isn't going to allow a sanctioned, inappropriate-"
Really? she thought. You're going to tattle? Do I have to threaten to turn this space car around?
"Dr. Shields suggested it, in the first place," she replied, cutting him off. "The mission is already pretty far off-script, anyway. As long as it doesn't interfere with their duties, I'm not going to say anything." She looked at him, evenly. "And neither are you."
He was silent, for a moment, while he absorbed this new information, looking ever more resentful.
"Think of it this way," she said, "If Johanssen had said 'yes' to you, instead, you'd have done the exact same thing. In a heartbeat. And Watney wouldn't have ever said a word about it."
Beck was silent for a long time. It was difficult to reconcile his current opinion of Watney with someone who would accept defeat and fade quietly into the background.
And yet, even as he tried not to, unbidden, he remembered all the times he'd talked about her with Watney, on the way to Mars. Considering the possibilities; him and Beth together. Mark had never said a word; never let on for one second. Backstabbing son of a bitch.
"The upcoming reactor repair, though Commander. It'll just be me and Watney on an EVA together for ten hours a day, for three days straight."
Lewis looked at him.
"And?"
"It's going to be... " he trailed off. "Can't you assign Vogel to it, instead?" He already knew the answer, but he felt compelled to ask, anyway.
"Watney is the mission specialist, after you, for EVAs, and the ship's engineer. He's the best crewmember for the repair, and we need the best. This is mission critical. You'll just have to put your personal feelings aside and do your job."
Beck sighed.
"And before you ask, the schedule has been blocked and signed off on by Mission Control, already. The EVA will take place as scheduled, unless you care to explain to the Mission Director why you feel that you are unable to do so."
Henderson would laugh his ass off at you, she thought. And then he'd tell you to cowboy up and do your fucking job.
"Fine." He shrugged. "Forget I said anything."
Not likely, Doc.
"Be careful out there," Beth told him, smiling. There was a certain nervousness about her demeanor though, and he knew her well enough by now to see that she could use some reassurance.
It was Day 6 of After. Would he ever stop counting things, counting days? Sols, mission days, had Mars turned him into an obsessive compulsive?
He'd be out there for ten hours or better today, during Phase One of the repair mission. Several teams at Mission Control had been working out the fine details for the past few weeks.
If it was just a matter of overheated bunkrooms, he doubted that mission control would have even bothered with the repair. But the reactor core output was mission critical, and it was failing, a little more every day.
The extra strain on the system wasn't advisable under the best of circumstances, but with another five months to go before Hermes fell back into orbit around Earth, attempting to fix the problem while traveling at 34,000 kilometers per hour had, scarily enough, become an acceptable risk.
Martinez would be talking them through the first part of the hull superstructure disassembly process, leaving Beth with not much to do, except wait and worry.
Beck, also waiting outside Airlock 3, glanced over at them with an expression similar to how he'd looked when Mark had first removed his helmet after the rescue mission, before he finished suiting up, locking his own helmet into place.
"It'll be fine." He stood there a moment, wanting to give her a hug, but EVA suits are awkward and bulky, and Beck was standing, floating, actually, right there…
This apparently bothered Beth not at all, as she leaned in to kiss the faceplate on his helmet.
"For luck," she said. "I guess that was silly."
Mark couldn't see his face, but he was about 99% certain he heard a barely audible groan issue from Beck's mic.
Probably best not to aggravate the guy too much, he thought.
He wanted to tell her that he loved her.
Instead, he reached out with one gloved hand and tweaked the hood on Beth's shirt. To remind her of all that they'd been through, so far.
