Chapter Text
The waiting room smelled like recycled air and budget coffee.
Ryland Grace had spent enough time in enclosed, oxygen-recycled spaces to find the smell almost comforting, almost. But this wasn't a ship. This wasn't the Hail Mary, with its hum of life support and the faint, impossible scent of Rocky's ammonia-rich atmosphere bleeding through the breach seal they'd fashioned out of desperation and duct tape. This was the Johnson Space Center, Houston, Texas, Earth, and the fluorescent lighting made everyone look vaguely ill.
He sat with a paper cup balanced on his knee, a legal pad open on his thigh with exactly nothing written on it. Six months back on Earth and he still caught himself looking for handholds when he crossed a room, still woke at 3am with the phantom certainty that he needed to check the CO2 scrubbers. Dr. Lamai, his trauma integration therapist, called it "re-entry dissonance." Grace called it "my brain hasn't caught up with my body yet," which was essentially the same thing but without the clinical distance he wasn't sure he wanted.
He watched the fern in the corner. Not because it was particularly interesting, but because it was the only thing in the room that wasn't moving, talking, or actively trying to make eye contact with him. Two NASA communications officers were murmuring over a tablet near the window. A junior analyst he didn't recognize was chewing a pen and pretending to read a printout. Everyone had that slightly electric quality of people who knew they were about to be in a room with someone famous and didn't know what to do with their hands about it.
Grace found this exhausting.
Then the fern started getting a pep talk.
"Listen." A man had crouched beside the ceramic pot, index finger extended toward the drooping fronds with the gravity of someone delivering a keynote address. "I've been through worse than you. I once grew potatoes in my own feces on Mars. Mars. A planet where the average temperature is negative sixty Celsius and nothing has been alive for three billion years. You are in a climate-controlled building with a regular watering schedule, access to indirect sunlight, and presumably someone who cares whether you live or die. You have," he paused for emphasis, "absolutely no excuse."
The fern did not respond. It did, arguably, look slightly ashamed.
Grace stared.
The man straightened up with the ease of someone who had spent years in low gravity , or possibly just someone who had never been embarrassed a day in his life , and turned around. He was maybe forty, with sandy hair that looked like it had opinions about being combed and had been overruled. He had the particular build of someone who had once been in excellent physical condition, lost thirty pounds to circumstance, and then put most of it back in a different order. He caught Grace's stare with the full confidence of a man who considered being stared at a form of applause.
He grinned. It was, Grace would later reflect, a very specific kind of grin , the grin of someone who had been in enough life-threatening situations to find ordinary social awkwardness physically comedic.
"She's been drooping," he said, jerking his thumb at the fern. "I gave her a pep talk. Standard procedure."
"Plants don't respond to verbal stimulus in any measurable way," Grace said.
The man blinked. "Well, not with that attitude they don't."
He dropped into the chair two seats away , not next to Grace, not pointedly far away, just two seats, the distance of someone who was friendly but not presumptuous. He extended a hand.
"Mark Watney. Botanist, mechanical engineer, and the only person in human history to grow food on another planet." He said it the way someone recites their name, rank, and serial number , automatically, without apparent vanity. It was just a fact. "I also drove a rover about eight hundred kilometers with a piece of tarpaulin for a windshield, but that one doesn't fit as neatly on a business card."
Grace shook his hand once, briefly. "Ryland Grace."
"I know who you are." Watney leaned back, arms folding over his chest, and fixed him with the expression Grace would eventually learn to recognize as his default state: insufferably, irrepressibly amused. "You're the guy who flew to another star system, made first contact with an alien species, figured out how to save Earth with the help of said alien species, then piloted a one-man ship back across four light-years. Kind of a big deal. They made a documentary."
"They made three," Grace said, looking back at his cup.
"I watched the second one. The reenactor they got to play you was way too handsome."
"I haven't seen any of them."
Watney tilted his head. "Really? I watched all mine. Terrible, every single one. The first one got my whole potato situation wrong , apparently a forty-minute scene of a man doing soil chemistry isn't cinematic enough. They replaced it with me jogging around the Hab looking determined. I have never jogged anywhere looking determined in my life. I looked desperate. There's a difference."
Grace said nothing. He was trying to decide if the man was performing at him or simply incapable of silence. Both, he suspected. He had a feeling it was always going to be both.
"You read the mission reports," Watney said, and his tone had shifted , not much, but enough. The performance dimmed a fraction. "The rover comment. That's in the technical appendix, not the main body. Most people don't read that far."
"I find technical appendices interesting," Grace said.
"Me too." Watney looked at him for a moment with something that wasn't the grin, then looked away. "I read yours too, by the way. All of it. The Astrophage biology section is insane. You basically reverse-engineered an extraterrestrial organism's entire metabolic process with a spectroscope and vibes."
"And a fairly good background in molecular biology."
"Sure, and that."
The door across the room opened. One of the communications officers looked up. The junior analyst put his pen down.
"They're ready for you," someone said.
Watney stood, stretched his back with a crack that made two people wince, and picked up a folder from the chair beside him. He caught Grace's eye and did a small, mock-formal nod.
"Shall we?"
Grace gathered his legal pad, on which he had still written nothing, and followed.
He did not particularly want to be in a room with Mark Watney for whatever came next.
He also, in some small and deeply unwilling part of himself, found that he had just had the first conversation in six months that hadn't made him feel like he was reading from a script.
He didn't examine that feeling. He'd learned, over four light-years, that some things were better left unexamined until you had more data.