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“So, we might have made a mistake.”
Mark doesn’t know what Martinez is talking about, exactly, but he’s hard pressed to argue with that statement when his birthday present is currently screaming at him.
The box is sitting on his mum’s handcrafted coffee table, rocking back and forth like it’s about to explode and take the table with it. Mark sends up a silent prayer of thanks that his mum and dad had been gracious enough to give him the house to himself today so he could feel like an actual adult. Would’ve worked better if he was sitting in an apartment of his own and not his parent’s living room, but his physical therapist, and his occupational therapist, and his actual therapist all agree that he really shouldn’t be living alone again just yet, so the furniture is just gonna have to deal with it.
“We thought —“ Beck winces as the box yowls “— that it could help with the — adjustment.” That’s one of those doctor-y words that Beck’s been throwing around since getting him back on the Hermes, like “trauma” and “recovery” and “long road ahead.” Mark appreciates the mothering, really (mostly, sometimes), but he’s not entirely sure when in medical school he learned…this.
“Is it, like, rechanneling therapy?” Mark asks, eyeing up the box warily. “Getting me to forget about Mars by giving me something else to be traumatised over?”
“Just show him, Martinez,” Beck sighs.
“Fuck no; the devil’s in that box. This was Johanssen’s idea, get her to do it.”
Johanssen blanches, and Mark raises a dubious eyebrow. Vogel mutters something under his breath — Mark’s German is pretty limited, but he’s picked up enough to figure out that Vogel’s calling Martinez a pussy — but he doesn’t make a move towards the box either. Finally, Lewis steps forward, and even she’s apprehensive as she lifts the cardboard lid, which isn’t exactly building Mark’s confidence for what’s to come.
Out of the box comes a ginger blob, which turns into a furry ball, which turns into a cat, which then turns into a shrieking grenade of unholy terror. Captain Melissa Lewis, Navy-bred and veteran of Ares IV, is pale faced as she holds the beast at arm's length, doing her best to keep Mark’s face out of the way of flying claws as she dumps it on his lap.
The demon tests Mark’s thighs with the press of her paws, presumably to see if he’s worth the effort of killing. Apparently he isn’t, because she settles down after that, curling into a ball with a put-upon harrumph that Mark isn’t entirely sure the situation calls for. Dinner-plate green eyes blink up at him. Mark blinks back.
“Hi there,” he says.
“Her name is Pumpkin,” Beck says. “She’s an emotional assistance cat, but honestly, I don’t know how she made the cut. She‘s, uh...”
“Spirited,” Johanneson chimes in helpfully, at the same time as Martinez says: “a total bitch.”
Mark runs a hand through Pumpkin’s fur. It’s ridiculously soft, like curtain tassels and long grass and all those beautiful things that don’t exist on Mars. He can feel a purr rumbling beneath his hand, like a revving engine. “That’s no way to talk about a lady, Martinez,” he says.
“Well, at least she seems to have calmed down now,” Lewis comments.
Chris nods. “She’s trained to sense anxiety,” he says, and Mark raises his eyebrows slightly, because the guy’s really just gonna expose him like that, huh? If he’s being honest with himself, he’s been on edge since his friends got here. He loves them, yeah, but his whole crew crammed into the living room of his parent’s house feels a lot more cramped than it ever did on the Hermes, even during those times when they’d all fallen asleep in the same cabin. And yeah, Mark realises the irony of him, the guy who spent a year and a half being literally the only person alive on an entire planet, feeling overcrowded, but that’s just another one of trauma’s fun little fuckeries, he supposes.
“So,” Vogel asks, “what do you think?”
Mark considers. Pumpkin’s weight presses down on his legs like he’d have to get a crowbar to pry her off. Her face is upturned, and it looks more squished and furious than Mark thinks is naturally possible.
“Well,” he says, “she’s prettier than Martinez.”
Pumpkin purrs in agreement.
Mark has been testing out a hypothesis ever since he got back to Earth, and now that he has Pumpkin to supplement his observations, he thinks he can safely say that his time on Mars has turned him into a cat. All the principal qualities are there: an unshakeable sense of independence, a very strong but selective desire for company that usually involves laying on top of people and napping, a paradoxical craving every second of the day for food that he will then refuse to eat, a need to nap for hours at a time despite doing literally nothing all day, and a nasty tendency to knock things off of tables when he’s frustrated or bored.
Since having Pumpkin in his life, Mark has, at the very least, become more aware of these — well, Dr Fernard would call them “trauma symptoms,” but Mark prefers the term “Bastard Planet Disease complications.” Some things she’s even helped with, though probably not in the way that she’s intended to. See, Mark doesn’t need to follow some stupid laminated meal plan schedule — that he may or may not have thrown in the bin three weeks ago in a fit of pique anyway — when he has a walking alarm clock that reminds him of the need to eat. Every. Single. Hour.
Speaking of the furry devil….
Pumpkin twists indignantly around Mark’s bare ankles, letting out a low screech that he can only assume translates to something along the lines of: “feed me at once, you heartless human, before I succumb once more to the throes of starvation that you subject me to each day without end.” It’s a lot to get across in one meow, but she’s an eloquent girl.
From the kitchen island, Mark’s dad chuckles over the rim of his coffee mug. “Those friends of yours not warn you not to feed her after midnight?”
“Trust me, she was cursed before I got to her.” Mark pads across the kitchen to the pantry, where he stores the tins of cat food. He relishes the feeling of the cool tile beneath his sockless feet; he goes barefoot as many places as he can get away with these days, just because he can. Honestly, he’d strut around the house in the raw if he could, but, once again, parents. Alright, tin open, dish filled, cat patted, and over to the fridge — it’s the ritual that he’s forced himself into. When Pumpkin eats, he eats, no matter how much his mind screams at him that he’s exceeded his ration portion for the day and he’s dooming himself to a slow death via starvation.
Is it the best system? Probably not. But it sure beats the time he broke down crying over a slice of deep dish, because he wanted it so badly but he couldn’t bring himself to take another bite, so.
Alright, PB&J; he can manage that. Mark takes each step slowly, reminding himself that his life isn’t on a time limit anymore. Unable to help himself, he cuts the sandwich into careful eighths — on the cutting board so his dad doesn’t have to watch him do it — and then sits down opposite him like he hasn’t just gone through the world’s weirdest food preparation ritual. Dad watches him eat one eighth, then another, then another.
“You want me to wrap that for you?” he asks, when he sees Mark flagging. Their fridge is chock full of leftovers — as much as Mark hates finishing his plate these days, he also can’t bear the thought of throwing any food away.
Mark shakes his head, and pops the last two squares of sandwich in his mouth. Victory!
Dad doesn’t say anything about it though, just quietly observes as he sips his drink. Mark is pretty grateful for it. Before the — well, before, his dad had always said that Mark would leave him behind with how he’d speed ahead with words. Mark treated conversations like sprints, while Dad is more of a marathon runner. Now, though, he’s spent so long on his own that sometimes, embarrassingly, he forgets how to carry his own end of the conversation, but he doesn’t have to worry about that with his father. They’re both fine to sit in silence.
Well, not quite silence.
“Yrrrrrrrrraaaaaauuuuuuuuuuuuugggggggggghhhhhhhh,” Pumpkin says from the floor, swishing her tail. Is this what you call lunch, you monster? Am I naught but a joke to you? You expect me to live on scraps?
Mark sighs and gets up. “You live a hard life, don’t ya, puss?” he mutters, and Pumpkin licks her lips in agreement. He fetches another tin, and on his way over to the at bowl, he snags the bread bag. Maybe he can manage a second sandwich.
The first thing Mark hears when he opens his eyes is the wind.
That’s weird, he thinks groggily. The night had been so still when he’d fallen asleep; this wind sounds like hurricane-quality.
Wait....
Mark springs upright, kicking the covers to the floor. He stares in horror at what should have been his bedroom door. Instead it’s the circular door to the Hud, covered in a furiously rippling tarp that looks closer and closer to ripping off every second he’s sitting there doing nothing. He can feel it already, the way oxygen is being sucked out of his lungs. Mark needs to get up, needs to patch the seal -- he’s trying to get up, but his boots won’t leave the ground. He pulls one off, and watches as a stream of red sand pours out, pooling on the floor, never seeming to end. It’s reaching his ankles, his knees, it’s filling up the room --
Mark opens his eyes. There’s no wind.
There is a demanding weight on his chest, though. A plump, purring weight tickling his nose as it presses up against his face. Mark reaches up and buries his shaking hand in Pumpkin’s mountain of fur, sucking in breath after breath of precious, oxygen-rich air, not caring that he’s inhaling a million cat hairs that are gonna be very unpleasant later on. He can already feel himself slipping into a panic attack, and he desperately reaches for his grounding strategies, those exercises that feel old hat to him now. What can he see? Orange fur. What can he hear? Purring. What can he feel? Two little paws kneading his chest.
He keeps this up until he can look up at his ceiling and believe that it’s actually there, and not just some isolation-induced hallucination he’s dreamed up while passed out on some Martian slope somewhere. This is real, he’s here, he’s fine.
Dr Fernard had warned him that this could happen. Adjustment-anxiety is common in post-traumatic stress, apparently. It’s why he’d fallen apart pretty much the moment his crew had gotten him back on the Hermes, and why he’d backslid again once they’d touched down on Earth, and why now, on his first night in his new apartment, he’s having worse nightmares than he’s had in months.
“What do you think, Pumpkin?” Mark asks, wiping his face with the back of his hand. “You like the new place?”
Pumpkin doesn’t answer, obviously. She also doesn’t move from his chest for the rest of the night. She’s still there when he wakes up the next morning.
This is Mark Watney, on Day One of being a Normal Human Being.
All these other days since setting his feet back on earthen soil? Nah, practice runs. Today was the real deal, one where he can actually say that his life is back on track without feeling like a liar or an idiot. And honestly, he reckons he knocked it out of the park.
First off, he’d had his first day back at work. Just pottering around in a lab, mostly — kiddie science shit, as Martinez would call it — but it had made Mark feel useful again. He isn’t sure if he’s going to stick with it though. Mark loves the work, but he’s not sure he’s cut out for lab life; there’s a reason he’d gone to Mars in the first place. And spending his days alone trying to solve problems has gotten kinda old for him now. It’s not like that’s his only option though — he’s Mark freakin’ Watney, Space Pirate, after all. NASA had offered him a teaching position a while back. It’s something to think about.
After that, he’d had drinks with the crew, and it had felt so nostalgic that he’d almost cried right there in the bar — but he hadn’t, because he’s a Normal Human Being now, remember? Now he’s the kind of person who can go out for drinks with his friends whenever he wants, because they’re, y’know, on the same planet as he is, and there’s absolutely nothing spectacular about it at all.
Now he’s finally home, crashing onto his worn couch and thinking absentmindedly about Chinese take-out. A whole dish, just for himself; he might even add on a side of spring rolls, if he’s feeling real frisky. Mark sprawls against the pillows, arm flung out in invitation, and like clockwork, Pumpkin leaps up, appearing out of nowhere to curl up on his lap. The feeling of her purrs go straight through his chest and fill up every part of him.
“So,” he asks, burying his hand in her fur. “What’s next for us, huh?”
“Rrrrraaaaauuuuuuuughhhhhhhh!” Feed me, you imbecile!
“Right, of course,” Mark chuckles. It’s just one problem at a time, right? He can handle that.