Work Text:
Chris steps out of his quarters – now a makeshift med bay – and loosens his grip on the professional mask he’s been holding for most of the last three days.
His shoulders slump and he buries his face in his hands. He leans heavily against the wall, and it’s several long moments before he can make himself move.
He needs to get somewhere private, before he can really fall apart.
He chooses the lab. Sits down in front of his workstation, but doesn’t even glance at the instruments that are still running – Watney’s latest batch of bloodwork.
Instead, he finally lets himself relax enough to cry.
God, he’s so unprepared for this. Seeing his friend like this hurts, stinging guilt and a punch in the gut.
He’s the one who told Lewis they had to leave, had to stop searching. What if he’d waited, just a little bit longer? Would they have found Watney, been able to bring him home with the rest of them? Or would they have all been trapped, doomed to a slow, horrible death from starvation?
He knows, logically, that it would have been the latter. But his brain won’t stop wondering what if, what if, what if.
It still hurts.
And what if he can’t save Watney now? He’s not let himself even hint at the possibility, not in front of the others. Watney will live, because he has to. He will recover.
But Chris has seen malnutrition before, and he’s read the statistics. They’re pretty grim – survival often means lifelong health problems, and Watney isn’t out of the woods yet. Nutrient deficiencies, electrolyte imbalances, the complications of long-term exposure to Mars’ low gravity, not to mention the physical strain he’d been under trying to survive it.
The odds aren’t bad, exactly. They’re just… not perfect. And Chris would like to be able to say, with 100% certainty, that Watney will be fine.
He can’t. He lets the others believe it, emphasizes the dozens of experts on Watney’s care team, how he’s got the best medical care anywhere on or off Earth.
But he can’t say for certain, and that eats at him.
Nothing in medicine is ever certain, but god, does he wish it was.