Title: Here For You
Paring: Mark Watney X Male Reader
Warning: stranded in space, men in love, set in the future because it is, fluff.
Spoilers: go read The Martian and then we'll be set.
Requested By: LordImpossible
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When Mark's communication line cuts out, you make a break for it. It isn't exactly the smartest thing you've done on a foreign planet, but when you can no longer hear Mark's voice, it's like it's the end. Commander Lewis clamours for you over the link, but you dash after where you saw him last – it's Mars, for goodness sakes, not the high seas, and once one goes missing, it isn't every man for themselves. You're there for Mark. You're always there for Mark.
College was a time where ends barely met, but it still was a wonderful time. Overpriced textbooks, global warming, weird politicians pandering to you for a vote, sexual experimentation, liberation, and all that. It was when you ran into Mark Watney, biology major in the hallway of the dorms and fell completely in love with him. And in the other sense, with both of you upon the floor.
"Hey, sorry, man," you gushed, your armful of old comic books spewed across the mildewy carpet. "I wasn't looking – I mean –,"
His eyes widened. "Are those Aquaman comics?" He asked, incredulous. "Dude, don't worry about the trip, can I read some with you? Those are super awesome!"
You both became inseparable after that.
You drag the other man into the HAB, knowing full-well that the foreign object impaled into him is either going to kill him quickly with a suit breach, or slowly via infection and blood loss. When you're inside, you do all you can to not freak out – you're struck with an odd truth. The other crew members of the Ares III flight have left the planet without you two. You, and Mark Watney, are stranded. But shaking that horrid thought from the forefront of your mind, you set on extracting Mark from his suit, and using what little medical training you must save the guy.
He wakes halfway through the procedure.
"Wh-wha- aaah! Ow!" He groans, in a terrible agony.
You pass him two pills, and a vial of water. "Drink this. I'm nearly done."
Mark all but swallows the meds dry to get over the pain and does his best not to complain about your terrible tourniquet and even worse way to close off the surface area of the wound. There was no way you'd use the stapler to close it, you weren't a barbarian – you found Dr Beck's abandoned med kit, and applied butterfly stitches.
"Now are you done?" Mark moans.
You harrumph. "Yeah, you'll live." You regret those words as soon as they leave your lips; because it's exactly those three words that remind you of the situation you and Mark are in for, for however long it takes for rescue.
Sure, there's other things on your mind now – the grades of an upcoming test result to be released within the next month, job offers, the prospects of not passing any of the classes of your college courses...but tonight, you're not thinking of them. Nope. Not at all. While classmates are downing their third and fourth jägerbomb for the night, you're nursing a barely-touched Bud Light, sitting in the corner with a couple who've been making out for the last five minutes straight.
It's a new year's party, and it's nearly the next year, it's that late in the night. While you're excited for the prospects of 2019, it's not something you want to focus on.
"You look like hell," Mark smirks, sitting beside you. He smells of alcohol. He notices the couple making out, makes a face, and turns to you.
You harrumph. "Thanks, man." You mutter.
Mark raises an eyebrow. "I didn't mean it like...hey, if you're worried about getting into the NASA program, don't be. I put my name down too."
Your eyes widen. "But your grades are worse than mine!"
Mark splutters his mouthful of vodka and orange juice. "Hey!" The couple beside you finally break apart from their lip-locked love affair, and the two girls eye you both, and go to find somewhere else where there aren't any chatty, silly boys. "I meant it like, you know, if you don't get in, it probably means I won't get in." He says.
You feel a heat raise to your cheeks. It's when Mark says stuff like that that makes your heart splutter just so.
Downstairs where the main party's at, people watching the Times Square broadcast on the TV chant alongside the new years eve countdown. Five. Four. Three –
"Happy New Year, Mark says to you.
You kiss him on the cheek, just as you hear someone shout 'Two!'. But he moves his face, and suddenly, when nearby some asshole sets a bunch of illegal fireworks off, your lips aren't on his cheek, but his own lips, and they're soft, and taste like orange juice and it's so wonderful.
"I'm s–,"
Mark cuts you off, grabbing your neck, deepening the kiss.
While he's working on creating a way to splice the potatoes sent for Thanksgiving, you're working on a code to contact Earth using the pile of space junk they sent up here years ago. It's a small glimmer of hope, but using it, you work with it. It pays off – within a week, there's contact, albeit patchy with Earth, and Mark has a way to make sure the both of you have a sustainable food source.
When JPL and NASA end the communication one day, you're left with Mark, feeling just how empty this planet is without the use of decoded messages from scientists millions of miles away.
"I couldn't have done this without you," Marks says, that night over potatoes and ketchup. "I'd be dead for sure without you."
"Don't say that..." you whisper quietly. "I couldn't do this without you either," you say back to him, "I'm useless at agriculture, biology...anything beyond calculation and coding. When we get back to earth, I'm taking a real course on how to grow food. We'll never eat potatoes again."
Mark considers his meal before him. "But I like potatoes."
You laugh.
Later, you turn to your fellow Ares III crewmember, and stranded Earther. "This is probably going to sound weird...do you remember New Years, 2019?" You're sitting in the bunks, laying on Johanssen's bed, legs dangling down. "You were plastered."
Mark nods. "I can't believe it, that was ages ago. Yeah, I was pretty wasted."
You swallow, "Well, I wasn't. At midnight, we ah, kissed. Were you just drunk, or –,"
Mark's eyes light up. "_______, I remember that! I thought you were embarrassed, and didn't want to talk about it, you never brought it up again!" He practically explodes with words. He looks to you. "Are you still embarrassed?"
You shake your head. "Um, actually, the opposite."
Mark looks around, and quietly, walks to where you're perched on Johanssen's bunk. "Well, _______, if you want, we've done all the space stuff we need to do for today...and I think we've got seventeen years to catch up on."
You laugh. "Well, we've got the planet to ourselves..."
A year into the NASA program, a lady comes up to you in the break room. Apart from the fact you all but don't know how to talk to women (apart from the fact you grew up in rural Iowa on your single mother's teaching wage with two sisters), you have no idea what she's doing standing beside you at the water cooler. Except, if she's thirsty.
"I heard you and Dr Watney are close," she leads, filling up a recyclable paper cup with water. "Does he have a girlfriend? I think he's cute."
Your mouth would run dry if you weren't halfway through a mouthful. You want to spit it out, but that's rude, and the lady would think you're weird.
"You mean...Mark?" you stammer.
There's no way Mark would let people openly call him Dr Watney, at least to his face. He might have a PhD, but he was still that guy who smoked tokes behind the classrooms and liked to buy terribly maintained second-hand cars for their sentimental value, not gas efficiency.
The woman nods. "Yeah! I'm in the same physical class as him, but I don't want to seem desperate asking him out."
You raise an eyebrow into your cup, taking another sip. "I, um...Mark doesn't have a girlfriend." You manage to say.
Her face lights up. "Oh, thank god, I have a chance!" she clinks her paper cup against yours, and thanking you, goes off to speak to her regular friends and breaktime chatters on the other side of the break room.
It feels like ages, but NASA has finally worked out a plan on how to return you two to Earth. You and Mark have gone through a lot – losing most of the potato crop, slow starvation, and now, you both must travel to practically the other side of the planet to fly to the rendezvous. It'll take some time, as the rover is slower than hell.
But you and Blondebeard will get it done.
"You know how we've been talking about college and the early days in the NASA program lately," Mark says, day two of the trek to the rendezvous, "well, I wanted to bring up Pansy Grier."
You're confused. "Who?"
Mark keeps his eyes on the rocky Martian road before him as he drives the rover. "Pansy Grier. She was in the astronaut program with us, went on to work for SatCon?" He tries to elaborate, and still, you don't know who he's talking about. "She came up to me once and asked me out for drinks once."
Your eyes widen. "Um, was she tall? Dark hair?" You ask.
Mark nods. "Yeah. I had to turn her down."
You glance to him. "What? You never went out with her?" You ask, astonished. You thought it went well, that lady never talked to you again, and from what you could remember, Mark never brought it up. "She seemed nice."
"And she was under the impression that I was into women," he told you, giving you a look. "I know you talked to her. Why didn't you tell her I was gay?"
You shrug. "I guess it slipped my mind."
When you meet the other members of the Ares III team, you can't help but feel a little nervous. You're better around numbers and computers, not people. But Mark's with you, and while he breaks the ice with the other members, you make conversation with the petite woman with the laptop, sipping on bubble water.
"Cool laptop," you say.
She nods. "Thanks. I'm Beth Johanssen. Computer science and math."
You hold your hand to shake. "I'm, ah, _______. Coding and programming."
She laughs, smiling lighting her face. "They've got two computer nerds on this? Awesome, we can be debugging pals or whatever."
You glance over to where Mark is meeting a man with a German accent. Beside him, another man walks to you. He sidles up to you and gives Johanssen a playful punch to her shoulder. "This one giving you trouble, man?" He asks you, laughing. "I'm Rick Martinez."
You shake his hand. "Nice to meet you, Rick."
Beth grins. "This guy'll talk computers with me, Major!" She puts her hands together as if to pray, and looking up to the ceiling, cries out, "Hallelujah!"
"Attention please, Ares III crew," a voice you've heard on broadcasts speaks up. It's Theodore Sanders, director of NASA. He's practically your hero. "Now you've made the acquaintance of each other, you have a long three years to work together to prepare for your flight to Mars, to become the first people to step foot on its surface. While it may seem exciting now, you've got a lot of work to do..."
Once you're on board the Hermes spacecraft in one piece, the first thing you do is kiss the floor. Then, you kiss Mark. The rest of the crew don't raise an eyebrow at it, and instead, leave you two to be. But that's after you're subjected to a quantity of human contact and hugs that you've lived without for way too long. It's nice to be back, to see Johanssen, Commander Lewis, Vogel, Beck, Martinez.
"What'll you do when we get back to Earth?" Beck asks, passing you reconstituted oatmeal. It takes like heaven, not a potato in sight. "If you don't mind me asking, of course."
You and Mark share a look. "I for one, will never go to space ever again," you speak up.
The crew laughs.
"Hey, psst, _______." Mark whispers, the second night into your stay on Mars. "You awake?"
You roll over in the bunk. "Yeah, I'm awake."
He takes a moment to gather his thoughts. "Okay, good." He pauses once more, "I'm scared of being alone."
You nod. You reach out your hand in the darkness. Even though you can't see if his is extended, your fingers brush his own hand, reaching out from his bunk across from you. The touch is electric, soft, calming.
"You'll never be alone," you whisper back. "I'm here for you, Mark."
"Mm, five more minutes..." Mark moans, face furrowed into the pillow. He's taking up half the bed, splayed over it like a starfish, and luckily for you, you're already up, have been on an early morning jog, and aren't trapped beneath his limbs. "Don't make me go..."
You laugh. "Mark, you've got to get up. You're the main lecturer, you're basically the only person these kids are paying to learn from." You prod his back with a finger and then go to massage him. He moans as you relax a kink from his muscles, "Mark..."
He makes another noise. "Okay, okay, I'm getting up."
You smile at your husband. It's been five years since you've returned to Earth from your time on Mars together, and since returning, you've been offered a job to work alongside the mathematician Richard Purnell, whose calculations saved you and Mark. It's the best job, and you're forever sprouting numbers and working out problems. Just how you like it.
"I love you," you remind Mark, turning to go back to the kitchen. You're cooking waffles.
You hear Mark's feet hit the floor, and pad over to the en suite. "Love you too!"