Chapter Text
If you had asked Evan Buckley what he wanted to be when he grew up, astronaut definitely would’ve been on the list. But so had race car driver, cowboy, fireman, and—though he’d never told anyone, not even his sister—a kindergarten teacher (it had just always seemed like the wrong type of career for someone like him to want). Somehow, he’d actually ended up with the astronaut option. Not at first, and not intentionally, however. No, at first he’d been a college dropout who lost contact with his sister and cut off contact with his parents. Then he’d very quickly been a homeless college dropout with no money, lucky to eat once a day. And, well, he’d never wanted to join the Navy. But he’d been fucking hungry and it felt like a good way to get three meals a day and a bed until he could figure something else out.
That was all well and good, until one of the officers had taken an interest in him. Robert Nash, Bobby, a Navy pilot with over twenty years of experience under his belt, hadn’t let Buck skate by playing the dumb pretty boy. He’d constantly pushed Buck to try harder, to play to his strengths. Bobby wasn’t even his commanding officer back then, he’d just “seen something” in Buck and taken him under his wing. Suddenly Buck was on track to be a Navy SEAL and getting a degree in botany with the Navy footing the bill. For the first time school had felt like it made sense. Buck had always liked plants, liked gardening. It was orderly but intricate, and a good excuse to be outside and away from his parents. Plants also didn’t annoyed with him for rambling, or forget about his birthday, or give disappointed stares. He was interested enough in them that the classwork had never felt quite as challenging as schoolwork always had before, and when it did trip him up Bobby was always willing to help.
Buck had unfortunately lost contact with Bobby a little over a year into his degree after the man had suffered a huge loss, his wife and two young kids dying in a massive fire that consumed their home, but Buck had managed to keep himself on track anyway. He’d made it through SEAL training, finished his bachelors at the top of his class, and raced through a PhD in botany as well. He’d been falling out of love with the Navy by then, though. With being a SEAL. It had never really been his thing. Too many nightmares, too many impossible choices. Too much weight at only twenty-seven years old. So he’d put in a request for a discharge, no idea what was supposed to come next. He had some research proposals floating around about experimental botany related to growing plants in harsh environments, but that was it.
He hadn’t gotten a discharge, though. He’d gotten a phonecall from Bobby. It turned out he’d left the Navy and been recruited by NASA to work as a pilot for their shuttle system to and from the lunar research base. Bobby had piloted almost two dozen missions to and from the moon since he’d started three years earlier, and now he was on tap to pilot one of the next missions to Mars. When he’d asked Buck to go through training to see if he could come along as the mission botanist, Buck had said yes without an ounce of hesitation. Who in their right mind would say no to Mars, after all?
It was the perfect mission for him. Important, but the fourth in a series of ten planned missions, so it wasn’t going to get an obnoxious amount of attention. Not the first, not the halfway point, not the last. Just an ordinary, run-of-the-mill jaunt to another planet. What an exciting time to be alive, that something like that could even exist. That Buck could be a part of it and enjoy it while just being a footnote in the whole thing, not someone who’d be paraded around in front of cameras or recognized as being involved every time he went outside. He could do the work, have the fun, and move on to the next adventure, just the way he liked it.
Or he could have, if it all hadn’t fucking gone wrong.
——
Eos 4 had six crew members, and Buck hated the sixth one the day they met. Eddie Diaz had been added to their crew at the last minute, swapped out with their original mechanical engineer, a guy named Tommy, after Tommy landed an assault charge for punching a guy in a bar two weeks before they were meant to take off. Not that Buck had liked Tommy much either at that point. He’d seemed great at first, all flirty charm and a willingness to get out and do just about anything if it sounded fun, but as the mission had gotten closer that charm had worn away to reveal someone who was self-centered and domineering. Not really someone Buck wanted to spend over a year crammed into a metal tube with, but he’d known Tommy. They’d trained together as a team with the other crew members for months and when the chips were down in the serious training scenarios, Tommy had always come through. Eddie was new. Untested. Ravi had also been added late in the game, after their original biologist stepped down due a death in his family, but not that late. Ravi had at least been with them a few months.
Well, Eddie had been new and untested with them. The guy was a former army medic, stepping back from front line duties in the army shortly after his son was born and transitioning to work as a mechanical engineer for NASA. He did know his stuff, and he had trained for Mars even if it wasn’t with their team. Buck just hadn’t known him, and even though swapping out crew members was a thing that was always planned for just in case, Buck didn’t much like it. It was one thing to swap out someone on a SEAL mission—still not his favorite when it happened, but it was manageable. Manageable on Earth. If things went wrong with a new guy on Earth you had options. Backup. You did not have options nor backup when being flung through space by ion engines and then hurled down to an alien planet. Not good ones, anyway.
And things had gone wrong. Just not with Eddie. Eddie, in fact, had been the reason they’d even survived long enough to get to Mars. Three days after the ion engines had been started up they’d experienced a malfunction that could’ve blown the whole Eos ship to smithereens. The only option for fixing it had been an unplanned spacewalk, something always considered a last resort, but it had been that or blow up. So Eddie’d gone out the hatch, Buck following him to provide the second set of hands Eddie said he needed, and they’d gotten it done. No muss, no fuss, no explosions. Calm, quick, controlled, and efficient.
Buck liked him a lot more after that. Liked him even more as the days wore on and they glided through space, orbiting around one another in their little tin can. Everyone had their own rhythms, their own routines and tasks. No moment could be wasted on a journey like this. Plenty of work to do, experiments to run, even before they reached Mars over a hundred days after they took off. Bobby piloted the ship and worked on his human factors and psychological research projects. Hen, their co-pilot and a doctor, worked on her medical experiments. Chimney worked on his geological and physics experiments. Ravi worked on his biological experiments, shadowed Chimney on the physics ones, and shadowed Bobby on the piloting. Buck worked on his botanical experiments and whatever else he was needed for. And Eddie worked on his mechanical experiments and kept the ship in shape. They all rotated through their assigned workout times, their assigned alone times, all shared meals and laughed over game nights. They were a good team, it turned out, even if they hadn’t gotten the chance to fully train together.
It had taken about a month for Eddie to pick up on the fact that Buck seemed to be the only one who never talked about home. Or it had taken him a month to say something about it. Even then, he hadn’t said much. Just asked if Buck had anyone to talk to. He didn’t. Part of him had been wanting to track down his sister, Maddie, for years, but a bigger part of him was afraid of what he might find when he did. So he hadn’t. That left him without anyone he cared enough to reach out to, aside from Bobby, and Bobby was on the mission with them, so unless Buck was hosting some sort of talk for NASA (he tried to always volunteer for the ones with schools) he generally wasn’t talking to anyone from Earth just for the fun of it.
Two days after Eddie had asked, he’d floated down next to Buck while Buck was reading, tablet in hand and a smiling young boy in glasses waving on the screen.
“This is my son, Christopher,” Eddie had introduced. “Chris, this is Buck.”
Buck had melted. The kid was adorable, and always happy, always excited to say hi to Buck and ask questions about his experiments. After that, Buck had pretty much always said hi to Chris during Eddie’s videocalls home. He’d felt guilty about it, thinking he was stealing Eddie’s time, but Eddie had pointed out that since Buck never made videocalls of his own, they could get away with Eddie’s calls being longer and just counting it as Buck’s time. Besides, Eos 4 was the first Eos mission to have the instant communications system that had been developed and tested on Eos 3. 3 had only had it for testing purposes, hadn’t yet been able to use it to talk with their families. So, since Eos 4 was lucky enough to have it, why not take advantage and push the rules a little? Make all the work to develop that technology worth it?
By the time they’d reached Mars Buck felt like he knew just about everything about the seven-year-old (almost eight-year-old, as Chris was quick to inform Buck ever since he’d reached halfway between seven and eight). He knew his favorite color, what Lego sets he was working on, his favorite movies. He knew Chris adored his dad, and spent a lot of time with Eddie’s parents because Eddie’s wife, Shannon, was busy trying to start her own hair salon business. Buck had even helped Chris with his science fair project about how plants would be effected by 24/7 sunlight.
And all of that was why, on their seventeenth day on Mars, Buck had shoved Eddie out of the way during the emergency evacuation, knowing it meant his own death instead of Eddie’s. Buck trusted Eddie to help get everyone else home, and Eddie had someone to go home for. Someone who needed him and loved him. Someone who Buck loved, even without ever meeting. He wasn’t going to let Chris grow up without a father. So in the split second he had to think after seeing the communications dish flying at them through the storm that was chasing them off the planet fourteen days early, he’d pushed Eddie out of the way, hoping like hell it would be enough and knowing he wouldn’t live long enough to find out.
——
MISSION DAY 17
It was the oxygen alarm in his suit that proved he wasn’t dead. Though, ironically, that alarm meant he was about to be dead. Just in a different way than he’d anticipated. The last thing he remembered was a small sharp pain in his side and a large dull pain in the back of his head, then blackness. The sharp pain was still there, though duller now, and the dull pain became sharp the second he tried to move.
Not being dead was deeply confusing, for a variety of reasons, but in the order of figuring things out, the oxygen alarm had to come first. The human body needed oxygen, but not the massive amounts his suit was currently generating in an effort to keep him alive despite whatever damage had occurred. Unsure what moving might do without knowing what the problem was, Buck went slow. Not too slow, though. Time wasn’t infinite here. Just slow enough that if whatever was wrong got more wrong somehow, he might have time to react.
Despite what some people assumed about him due to his willingness to take risks and fling himself into danger, Buck did not actually want to die. He generally just figured he had the least to lose out of most people, so he may as well take the risks. There was a difference.
“Fuck.”
Buck, now sort of on his knees, stared down at the thin metal rod jutting out of his right side. It looked like part of a support strut from the communications array, but his vision was a little fuzzy so it was hard to say. A lump of blood and dirt was packed in around where the rod had entered his suit just below his ribcage, and carefully running a hand down his back revealed it hadn’t come out the other side. That had probably saved him. The blood and dirt, combined with the fact that he’d fallen onto his front rather than his back, had sealed the hole just enough to keep him alive long enough to wake up from the head injury.
Two voices competed for attention inside his head: Eddie’s demanding he start treating the injury now, and Ravi’s playfully admonishing him for contaminating the Martian soil with his blood.
“Where are they…?” Buck muttered, swinging his head around to look for the rest of his crew.
The launch ship that would’ve taken them back up to the transport ship, the Eos, was gone. That was probably good. Well, good for them. Not so much for him, since there was no other way off the planet. They’d only had the one lander and one launch ship, both now used, so it wasn’t like the crew could come back down to him either.
There weren’t any other people lying on the ground that he could see, which was a relief as well. Hopefully they’d all made it up to the Eos. However, that meant he wasn’t just stuck on Mars, he was stuck on Mars alone. Good times.
As the oxygen alarm continued to beep, warning him he had only about fifteen minutes before things got dire again (assuming the blood and dirt over the hole in his suit held), Buck finally turned his head towards the place they’d all been living for the last seventeen days: the Eos Crew Habitat and Observatory, aka the ECHO, which was about forty yards away. From the outside, it still appeared to be in good condition. But there was no way to know for sure if it would actually provide safety until he made his way inside. Forty yards was a long way to go with a rod sticking out of his side and a hole in his suit patched only with dirt and blood, though. Too much movement would likely pop that hole right open. He did have an actual patch, but to use it he’d have to pull the rod out so the two or so inches still jutting above his skin and suit wouldn’t be in the way.
But you never pulled the rod out. That was stabbing treatment rule number one. Never pull the stabby thing out of the stab. Secure it in place and let the professionals handle it from there so you didn’t bleed out when pressure was taken off internal structures like veins and arteries and organs.
There were no hospitals here, though, and the only doctor and only medic had left the planet. Buck had a fair amount of field medical experience himself from being a SEAL, and additional training NASA had required, but he was far from a surgeon. How deep did the damn thing go, anyway? What if it was in his fucking liver? That was a surefire ticket to bleeding out if it was.
Retrieving the suit patch kit from his thigh pocket, Buck eyed the rod. Technically, he was eying two of them. His vision really wasn’t his friend right now.
“Fuck it.” Buck yanked the rod out in one swift motion, keeping it in hand as he slapped the patch over the hissing hole with his other hand, pressing it firmly into place.
A whole new slew of alarms started going off in his suit, and it was getting harder to breathe. Whether that was from decompression of the suit, the life support systems failing in general, or blood loss was hard to say. Probably all of the above. But if there was one thing SEAL training had drilled into him, it was the ability to ignore his body and push himself unhealthily far beyond most people’s normal limits.
One stumbling step in front of another, and fighting against his double vision just as much as anything else, Buck made for the closest door to hopefully safety. It was even the entrance that would put him closest to the area where most of their medical supplies were kept. Lucky him.
Fumbling the door to the airlock open, he all but fell inside, kicking it back closed and slamming the button to seal the door and fill the airlock with air. The hiss of balanced, breathable gases entering the small space was the most beautiful thing he’d ever heard. Almost beautiful enough to make his exhausted, addled brain give up and pass back out. Almost.
But he wasn’t done yet. Helmet off so he could breathe—and so his suit would shut up—he jabbed mostly numb fingers at the control screen on the wall, trying to parse the readouts for the rest of the structure. Would going through the interior airlock door kill him, or save him?
Screw it. If it was the latter, there was nothing he could do about it, not before dying from the injury in his side. Buck opened the interior door, almost passing out once again from the tension that drained out of him upon surviving.
The medical supplies were a few steps away and through a regular door, housed in a small room that also held some light workout equipment. So close compared to how far he’d already gone, yet somehow still so far away. But Eddie’s voice was still there in his head, urging him forward, telling him what to grab and what order to do things in. An injector of pain meds. A shot of clotting agents. An IV of artificial blood product to replace some of what he’d lost. A shot of antibiotics. The handheld ultrasound to check for internal bleeding—not that there was much he could do if he found any. Disinfectant. Stitches. Bandage.
Buck stumbled into the room and threw everything he needed onto a cart, then did a very ungraceful fall/roll maneuver to get onto the medical cot that flipped down over the treadmill. Somewhere along the way he’d realized he was still holding the rod that had pierced him, and examining it in the light revealed that it had only gone in about three inches. That was somewhat of a relief. Still enough to do damage, certainly, but he had a good amount of muscle and a healthy layer of fat, so not all of those three inches would’ve gone into any of his organs. Another mark in the lucky category.
With the pain meds administered and the IV of artificial blood product mixed and flowing through a needle into his arm—thank god they had a cuff to automatically insert an IV needle, his vision was still wobbly enough he doubted he could’ve done it otherwise—Buck felt functional enough to get through the rest of the treatment. The stitches weren’t pretty by any means, Eddie and Hen probably would’ve been aghast, but they got the job done. Then the bandage was on and…
“Now what?” Buck said to the ceiling.
He was alone on a hostile planet with no way for help to get to him even if they wanted to, an injury that might be more serious than he could handle, and extremely limited supplies.
He was still going to die.