Chapter Text

Shadow Girl of Mars

Chapter IV

A Survival Mission

The Martian

He didn’t like her laughter.

Oh, it was all perfectly human-like, soft and merry. She laughed with her eyes too, and he could almost believe it was completely genuine. As if she was a young woman laughing at a particularly funny video a friend had shown her.

If he had never seen her true form, he might have bought it.

Instead, it made him even more uncomfortable.

It was the first time he heard her laughing, too. Aside from a couple of careful smiles, she didn’t really come off like a cheerful sort of... Entity. Until that moment, she was all but locked into a concerned, strained expression, miles away from his attempts at communication.

Of course, this only applied to her human disguise. Mark hadn’t seen any indication she even had a face whenever she returned to the shadow form.

He swallowed the air nervously. It was as if there was an empty pit in his stomach, dragging him down, making him dizzy.

He pushed through. The message was too important.

“Please don’t eat me,” he repeated again, pointing at the doodles on the whiteboard. It was a miracle he didn’t whimper. “I’m prepared to offer coffee and meals as long as they last as a replacement.” 

He knew she wouldn’t understand every word, but he had to try to get the message across.

“Please; you no eat I,” he said and pointed at himself. “Nos peat. ”

“Nos,” she managed, her laughter turning a bit hysterical, even as she was trying to get it under control.

Mark shuddered. He had done a lot of preparation for this specific message, and the reception was not even close to what he hoped for.

He had prepared the place for them to eat; brought the whiteboard and a laptop, unfolded a slightly larger table for common meals, and placed two chairs. While her coffee had been brewing, he’d also heated up two meal packs, placing everything on the table.

Two chairs, two meals, two coffees.

The Shadow Entity was still chuckling.

It was a blessing that a lot of their gestures and expressions could translate easily like this. Of course, there was always a chance of false assumptions causing a misunderstanding - just like this one.

Mark frowned, and went through their interactions before him showing her the drawings.

He had called her over, and, boldened by her apparent agreement to communicate, he’d tried to establish a baseline for a few gestures. Mercifully, the Shadow Entity hadn’t shut down his attempts at communication. Head shake for ‘no’, a nod for ‘yes’. Just to be sure, Mark had also tried throwing in thumb’s up and down into the mix.

That had been the first two words successfully added for the Shadow-English dictionary. After that they had added a couple more - including ‘eat’ or ‘peat ’, and a couple of pronouns for ‘I’ and ‘you’. These last ones had required a lot of pointing to get the idea across.

Watney glanced at the laptop. The recording was still running, capturing all of his confusion. He was gonna have to review it all later, to see if there was some gesture or sign that he had missed. Or, some clues hidden in non-verbal communication, a hint hidden in the way her shadows behaved (he still wasn’t sure if the shadows she cast were a part of her body or not).

It looked like she was calming down.

Mark grabbed the whiteboard a second time. This time, he felt a lot more self-conscious about the little comic he’d drawn, but he had to be sure.

In preparation, Mark had sketched a stick-figure of himself, and a shadow blob with swirly tendrils. Even though her true form didn’t have actual eyes, he had added two tiny dots anyway. Artistic license.

Just to be extra sure this time, he pointed to each of the figures in turn. Much slower than the first time.

“I,” he had said when pointing at the stick figure.

She nodded, still chuckling under her breath. “You.”

“Yue.” He pointed at the shadowy blob and for good measure at her, too.

“I.” She showed him a thumb’s up.

Mark pointed towards the arrows leading to two possible outcomes - two little other scenes he’d pre-drawn.

One was of a shadow blob sitting at a table with his stick-figure, each with a cup and a stylized meal. He had drawn a passable triangular-sandwich and a flat plate upon witch he painted a  half-cloud to stand in for any porridge or noodles.

He’d chosen to draw a tiny smile for his stick-figure in that outcome. He’d left the shadow blob with simple eyes only (he hadn’t wanted to presume an emotional reaction to either outcome).

The other outcome was depicting a large blob with tentacles biting into a stick-figure. There was a tiny frown on the figure he was quite proud of. He had also crossed the whole picture out twice, with barely visible fail lines.

There had been a lot of finicky assumptions that had gone into this, but they had established the four words needed for the message beforehand.

“You no eat I - yue nos peat I,” Mark said slowly in both languages, and then pointed to the picture of him being eaten. “Nos.” Then, quickly, to the one depicting them peacefully enjoying a common meal. “Yoh.”

It seemed that this second repetition was just about enough for the Shadow Entity to calm herself down. She still was wearing an unsettling half-grin the whole time.

“Worry. I-hill nost peat yoe. I nos peat yoe,” she replied first in her own, Shadow-English, and only then offered her own translation, matching his. “I no eat you.”

That was a huge relief - Mark clenched the whiteboard in his hands, trying to hold on to the hope. Maybe - this time - he actually succeeded.

“Peat.” She pointed to her side of the offered meal and back to herself. “Eat - yes.”

As if to prove her point, two wooden chopsticks appeared in her hand from absolutely nowhere. She nabbed a little piece of beef, threw it into her mouth and then grabbed onto a couple of noodles to do the same.

She leaned the chopsticks on her meal pack as she chewed. And offered a small smile. “No eat you.”

Mark smiled back, and started to think about the next message he wanted to relay.

The Shadow Entity had other plans. She gestured in some specific and weird way, or perhaps just reached towards her own shadow, and then there was a large stack of strange bars wrapped in paper, neatly stacked on the table.

Each had a single hanzi marking, otherwise completely plain. She picked one bar, tore the top of the packaging, revealing something that might have been pressed food. It looked hard, had a texture like a biscuit, and clearly had multiple ingredients.

If this hadn’t been conjured out of literal Shadow Realm, Mark would have guessed the main ingredient was rice - due to the light gray color, and how it crumbled when the Shadow Entity tore off a small piece of it.

“Eat,” she said. Placed the piece into her mouth. Chewed it. Her expression wasn’t exactly cheerful as she swallowed, but the meaning was clear. 

She had her own supplies of food.

Then, she shrugged and pushed it towards him.

He reached out, and examined the ration bar carefully. Broke off a little piece of his own. There were little pieces of something else in the light gray bar, so perhaps it was closer to an energy bar than a hardtack. Mark couldn’t identify any ingredients with enough confidence. Even sniffing the piece revealed absolutely nothing for it had no smell to speak of, even at the point of breakage.

Exchanging food wasn’t exactly the smartest idea - but since she had asked for coffee, he had assumed that her knowledge of cross-species compatibility was better than his. Mark smiled for the laptop’s camera and threw the piece into his mouth.

It tasted a bit like paper, and it quickly soaked up all of the saliva in his mouth, turning slightly mushy, with harder bits and pieces. The texture wasn’t very pleasant, and only when he bit into a little piece of what could have been dried fruit, did he finally get a little hint of satisfaction. It was short lived.

“If there’s dried fruits or nuts in this, they’re older than my parents, aren’t they?” He mumbled under his breath. “Just how old is this ration bar?”

Unsurprisingly, the Shadow Entity didn’t have much to say on that. 

“Worry,” she mumbled under her breath instead and shrugged her shoulders again.

Then she scrunched her face in exaggerated dissatisfaction and pointed at the pile of bars, showing a quick thumb’s down to the pile. After that, she quickly manipulated her chopsticks to take a few more noodles out of his provided meal, and gave an exaggerated smile as she swallowed it, adding a thumb’s up, too.

“Yeah, the noodles with beef and sauce are one of the better meals I’ve got,” he said, nodding, and looked at the impressive pile of bland rations. At least a half-a month's worth of depressingly tasting food. “Are these what you’ve been living on?”

She didn’t seem to understand the question.

“Worry, ” she said.

By now he was reasonably certain that these warnings were nothing more but repeated attempts to apologize - which didn’t exactly fit the image of fearsome Shadow Entity. Maybe she was a very young abomination? Either that, or it was a verbal tic.

She pushed both the meal he set for her and her ration-bar towards him, clearing up a little space before herself. Then, she pointed at herself and showed another thumb’s up.

“You eat,” she urged him, and returned to her coffee.

Mark listened, and dug in, putting off the second planned message on the back burner. He glanced at the laptop - maybe he could show a few images while eating...

However, it seemed that it was Shadow Entity’s turn this time.

Barely a minute later, she placed the almost empty cup to the side, and started forming another one of her shadow plays.

“You eat,” she encouraged softly.

Perhaps she didn’t want him interrupting, Mark decided, and rolled with it.

Her message was certainly a lot more complex than ‘please don’t eat me’.

Images started appearing out of shadow, changing one after another.

A tear in a floating square box, as if torn from the inside.

A human-like figure falling onto the ground, as if sprung from the box.

The figure morphing into the twin of the shadow blob he had used in his drawings. Uneven shadow tentacles he’d drawn and all. Tiny dots for eyes, too.

A quick snapshots of the shadow blob (now even more simplified) finding a suited up figure on the ground and then traveling to the HAB together.

Then, indicating inside, she showed multiple spacesuits and their helmets separately, putting three sets closer to the stick figure and one closer to the blob representing her.

She merged the shadows of the blob and the single spacesuit, and had it move outside. Alone.

After that, she pointed northwest herself, indicating direction.

Then a final scene was shown. A single suit standing below the square with the split in the middle. The blob leaping out of the spacesuit and into the floating square. The hole in the square box filled in and it disappeared, leaving only an image of the spacesuit and its helmet..

“Again,” he said. He had a pretty good idea on what she was asking for, but he was missing vital details. She wanted to return to a ship that had brought her here, but needed a spacesuit for something? For a short trip in a vacuum?

The final image implied that she’d be leaving the spacesuit behind.

Did she expect him to pick it up later? Check up on it?

He took a few more quick bites of the spaghetti with beef, and pushed all of the unfinished meals on the side of the table - he’d have to pack it all up, and do a full biological analysis on the meal she had shared with him, too, but for now, he wanted to put all of his attention to deciphering the message.

“Is that why you’re in a hurry,” he muttered under his breath. “There’s a time window for them to pick you up?”

She shrugged, and then replayed the whole message from the start, adding an additional image.

A stylized scales balancing up and down - on one side, a spacesuit and its helmet, and on the other she showed bars or some sort, then a stack of coins, and a few other images he didn’t recognize.

“Oh,” he said, smiling. “You want to buy it? Rent it?”

He showed her a thumbs up, and cleaned his comic off the portable whiteboard. The strong stink of the Sharpie didn’t go well with his recent meal, but he ignored it and doodled a set of scales similar to the ones she’d shown. He painted a quick spacesuit on one, and rubbed at his chin, thinking on what to ask.

A part of him wanted to just give it to her; she had saved his life, after all.

And yet, this neatly tied into his second message. He added a few dots on her side, caught her eyes and tapped at his head and then flipped the portable whiteboard.

He’d drawn a little stylized solar system there, four inner system planets with all their moons, and the outer four further away, with even less details. A handful of arrows pointed the path from Mars to Earth.

At the same time, he pushed the laptop closer, showing off a much more realistic model side by side. It was a pre-rendered timeline of the orbits during the whole Ares III. He hit play.

The Shadow Entity

She’d been wrong.

This wasn’t an outpost of an advanced space-faring humanity, far into the stars. No space battles, nor super-advanced technologies. No star-destroyers or lightsabers (well, one lightsaber, until she got home).

The simulation ticked by quickly. Shikako couldn’t read the writing and could only estimate the numbers on display, but the solar system itself was quite familiar - and she could estimate time by the movement of the third planet.

Assuming this universe Earth matched her original life’s one, the little spec of a spaceship that delivered this man to local Mars - Marh - would take roughly a full year for a full trip from Earth’s year...

The whole animation took about three minutes, and then started again, numbers resetting.

“Marh,” she touched the fourth planet on the whiteboard, and then pointed to where her original Earth would have been. “Earh?” she guessed, mangling the world similarly to how Mars had been.

“Aereh,” the man corrected, suddenly excited by her near-guess.

She nodded.

He chartered - something . Sounded quite enthused about it, too. Maybe he took her guess to mean she had been on his home planet. Or that she'd get him there.

Just what exactly was his situation, then? Had the ship left him stranded, or would he return on the next pass-though of the craft? Shikako didn’t have a good enough grasp on orbital mechanics to even make an educated guess.

Did she have enough time to find out?

Not really.

The man stopped talking. Pointed at the little dot traveling between Aereth and Marh and named it, “Alieh. ” He followed the word by raising three fingers, and then to himself.

She frowned and shook her head. She showed a little hourglass shadow on the table, with shadow sand rushing down, and for added emphasis showed a small gap between her fingers and then narrowed it down.

“I don’t have much time,” she said, and sighed.

The man’s expression fell.

“Fine,” Shikako said. If she spent a few more minutes talking, that would almost count as resting, giving her chakra a chance to recover enough to risk another soldier pill. That, and she did want a spacesuit, which might be a valuable resource, if the man’s resupply was half-a-year away.

“Alieh three.” She pointed at the little dot on the screen and also raised three fingers. “You.”

“Yes,” he said in her version of English and nodded, quickly showing her a thumb’s up.

“Alieh one?” she guessed, raising one finger, and then pointed at the computer screen, where the potential spaceship Alieh was making a third animated loop through the digital solar system. She quickly traced the pattern from memory, connecting Aereth and Marh. “Not you.”

“Yes.”

“Alieh two?” This time, she raised two fingers and repeated the whole flight pattern again. “Not you.”

He nodded, a faint smile returning to his face.

“Alieh three,” she said, raising three fingers. This time she traced only half of the pattern, stopping at the planet Marh. “You.” She continued the pattern up to Aereth after a pause. “Not you?”

“Yes.” Then, he raised six fingers using both hands. Afterwards, he traced the rough flight pattern up to Marh, pointed at himself and to his side, mimicking a wince. Then he raised only five fingers and traced the pattern again.

“Oh,” she said, and felt her expression sour into something fierce.

Those who abandon their friends are worse than trash.

The man shifted uncomfortably in his seat. Clearly he felt betrayed by his team, too. Would there even be another mission, one where he would be picked up? 

“Alieh four, yes?” she asked, raising four fingers.

He nodded.

She traced half of the flight pattern. “Not you.” And the other half. “You.”

This time he hesitated. He wobbled a hand in the air, as if uncertain and only then replied, “Yes.” Added a few rushed words, which she didn’t understand.

Shikako stood up, and paced a little back and forth. Then, she took out a little piece of paper and a pencil from the hammerspace, leaned down to the table to quickly pen the solar system, then traced the same lines on the other side.

From what little astronomy she knew of Konoha and the rest of elemental nations, it was no guarantee that it was also a third planet from the Sun, but for her example it would have to be enough.

She raised the paper in the air, one side to him, and the other to herself. “You - I,” she said, pointing at the respective sides. “Marh - Konoha.”

Shikako shifted the paper so the side facing her was in the shadow, and then with minimal chakra expenditure she stabbed a hole through, letting a little controlled tendril though, and then retreated it back to her side. “I.”

She placed the little piece on the table. “Not you.”

The man nodded.

She pointed at the rack where he was keeping the spacesuits, then turned the whiteboard back to the painting of the scales. She tapped the scales a few times.

“Let’s trade,” she said. “Trade.” Then she pushed the pile of standard rations towards him, pointing once more towards the spacesuit storage. “Trade,” she repeated for the third time.

She couldn’t take him home, nor could she expend much chakra to help him in other ways, but she had more supplies than just standard rations, ones that wouldn’t have fit the table.

Without any chakra, he’d be unable to use her seals - which limited her support even further, but the least she could do was stock him up for a long haul.

Shikako ran a quick calculation of the supplies for the outpost she could sacrifice for this. A month of supplies for six people would translate to at least half a year for one. Maybe more, since these were intended for active-duty shinobi.

“Trade,” the man echoed back to her.

And trade they did.

The Martian

It seemed that the Shadow Entity had no desire to go to Earth or bring him there.

At the very least, he had confirmation that she came from some sort of shadow-universe.

That explained a lot of similarities in their languages and gestures - a whole duplicate realm, existing in some other dimension, all populated by shadow creatures like her. An inverted reflection of Earth. Perhaps.

For now, he was happy to leave the pain of figuring it all out, and the potential panic over future visitors from the shadow dimension to the ones in charge.

Knowing NASA, when the recordings of his negotiation would reach Earth, he’d be in more legal trouble for selling a top-of-the-line spacesuit to a Shadow Entity, than for fumbling through the first-contact with a representative from the shadow-universe.

Of course, none of that mattered if he never made it off Mars.

Even in his wildest dreams he didn’t expect to get as much as he did out of the exchange.

Out of nowhere - or directly from the Shadow Realm, she had conjured a huge pile of supplies.

First of all, he and by extension NASA were now proud owners of thirty large bags of grain, roughly ten kilograms each. Twenty of those were filled with shadow-rice and ten with shadow-wheat. Most of it was milled and processed, but almost a third was marked differently - strange hanzi again. Those were unmilled grain, ready for planting. 

However there were additional hanzi in red, and the Shadow Entity tried to communicate some kind of caution, so he only knew they were safe to eat, but not what would happen if he tried to grow them.

Second, there was a large wooden box with dried shadow-meat and shadow-fish, as well as another large box with a sack of salt inside - possibly intended for preservation of fresh meat. It looked like the supplies were originally intended for a place where hunting or fishing was an option - something that would be quite impossible on Mars, but Watney could hope.

Third, a small box of exotic spices. He tasted a few at her urging, but couldn’t barely identify any, except for shadow-ginger-root.

Finally, what was the absolute strangest thing of the bunch, there was a pile of instant noodle cups, at the very least twenty days worth of food, maybe more, depending on how filling they were. He couldn’t tell anything about them from the hanzi markings, of course, but the instructions included small pictures of pouring boiling water that were quite clear.

Out of non-food items there was also a large stack of firewood, Mark estimated was about seven cubic meters. She had also thrown in a simple grinding stone with a metal handle to facilitate in milling of his newly acquired riches.

Even in his roughest estimates, the grain alone could last him an extra 180 days, and with the dried meat and fish, the ramen and the extra-bland rations that she also left him, it would all add up to roughly 300 days, if he rationed everything well.

That put his current food supplies at 700 days, assuming he could fail at growing anything edible. Of course, there was a risk with trying shadow-food at all, but he was not going to throw away the extra 300 days of life just because it was risky. On Mars, he couldn't afford to be picky.

Those 700 days would not save him, but it firmly put him on the halfway mark for Ares IV, and gave him even more time and hope.

As for his part of the deal, he crammed as much information about donning and removing a spacesuit as he could, including helping to adjust one for her size. He wished to go through more, but the language barrier didn’t let him.

He wasn’t sure he managed to convey the most vital information, like the recommended four hour EVA limit. When he showed how to change a CO2 filter, the Shadow Entity declined his offer to share more of them.

Then, as a last offer, he tried to suggest driving her to whatever place she needed to get to, but she had also declined it.

Then, a few awkward minutes later of waiting in the airlock - Mark suited up for that too - she left.

“Safe travels,” he sent though the inside comms, and received an indecipherable answer back. Possibly something similar, just in her Shadow-English.

As the dust storm was winding down, he settled in to make the EVA useful by cleaning at least part of the solar cell array. He was tired, but he could stay up for a couple more hours, get the most of them clean.

All the while, he tracked her signal in his suit. The suits could communicate at a distance up to fifteen kilometers officially, and had a spotty, but somewhat workable connection at twenty. Past that, even the MAV would struggle to pick up the signal.

Every so often, Mark would track the distance she covered in the display panel on his arm. All of the suits shared their bio-monitor information, and had systems for navigation. He had given her an undamaged one, specifically because NASA might just forgive him if he gave them the readings from her bio-monitor.

However limited they were proving to be. At some point, he started suspecting that the Shadow Entity had hacked her bio-monitor. The breathing and heartbeat were almost that of regular humans. Almost perfectly even, controlled. No human would be able to keep such an even heart rate while traveling at nearly twenty kilometers an hour, not in a cumbersome, heavy spacesuit. 

After almost exactly forty minutes her bio-monitor data started becoming spotty, and past an hour he would only get occasional blips for her location. 

Mark sighed. There was little hope of recovering her spacesuit anytime soon, even if she left it at the point of departure as promised. With that impossible speed she was competing with the rovers almost one to one. If that wasn’t enough, the rovers had a ten kilometer operational radius, and judging from her location beacon her last ping was roughly at 23km mark.

When he attempted to explain the limits of oxygen, he figured that her destination would be a couple of hours away on foot, which was why she declined the offer of additional filters. Two hours on foot for a regular person would most likely fall into the ten kilometer operation radius of the rovers.

Now, if she had traveled the whole two hours, it meant that the palace of her arrival could be 45km away, which put it 10km over the maximum theoretical distance a rover could travel.

On a full charged battery!

One way!

That would have to be a problem for much, much later. First, he had to figure out how to stay alive for the full four years, and only then he could start thinking about how to extend the operational distance of the rovers.

In the end, he needed to somehow make the 3200 km to Acidalia Planitia, so maybe attempting to recover a spacesuit could be an experimental mission in preparation for the big one.

A problem for the future Mark Watney.

The Shadow Entity

It had been a while.

The spacesuit was beeping, warning her about - something.

The man had warned her that the oxygen supply was limited, but she’d been using the Shadow State to make it last as much as possible.

Was it the alert for oxygen running out?

The spacesuit stood in the exact place she had arrived in, and it was completely dark outside. She didn’t know how long the nights on Marh were, but the dawn shouldn't have been far behind.

Stars still shone brightly in the nights sky, mesmerizing and intimidating, even in the Shadow State.

She had tried.

She had tried so hard - flattened a larger area, drawn another version of the detection seal; had used the soldier pill and Madara’s finger as a focus....

She’d failed to provide nearly enough chakra, leaving herself barely enough to sustain the Shadow State.

She spent hours calculating things by drawing on the ground with a kunai, and... nothing.

Nothing.

She knew her limits. She didn’t have nearly enough chakra for this. Not without the Sage Mode accelerating her chakra recovery, and even then, she’d need for it to last quite a while.

Without any living things around that just wouldn’t happen.

Her only chance was an unexpected breakthrough on the chakra storage project - one which was still gathering dust in Nara R&D.

She felt sick.

Even under the most generous estimate, the fight with Madara was surely over by now. 

Either Naruto and Sasuke pulled through, or they didn’t. All without her.

She was stuck.

Stuck.

And the damned spacesuit just wouldn’t stop beeping.

Shikako screamed.

The Martian

She returned the next sol.

He was mid EVA, that next day, trying to find the satellite dish. By the time his suit picked up her spacesuit’s signal he had all but given up on finding it, since it probably got blown kilometers away in the dust storm.

It was impossible. Again.

First, there came the attempts at triangulating the signal.

Twenty kilometers away.

Then, her spacesuit signal only got stronger and stronger.

When the spacesuit was fifteen kilometers out from the MAV, he got the first signal from the bio-monitor.

No life signs.

According to the data Mark received, the spacesuit was completely out of oxygen. It had already completed all of the bloodletting, and was running a thin atmosphere of pure nitrogen.

Had... had the shadow entity send the spacesuit back on some sort of magical autopilot?

He went over the bio-monitor readings again. The system was clearly detecting - something - inside the spacesuit, as it could read pressure data, but it was obviously never designed to take readings of actual Shadow Entities..

There was also an unusual amount of water inside - inconsistent with sweat.

After monitoring the readings for longer, it seemed that the amount of CO2 was slowly rising inside. Something was clearly inside the spacesuit, even if the systems struggled to identify what.

She was coming back.

Mark felt a pang of guilt.

Had she missed her chance to board the trans-dimensional spaceship because he spent precious time asking her not to eat him?

Would she eat him for that?

With her speed of roughly eighteen kilometers an hour, he had some time until she was at the HAB, but just in case she wanted to take shelter as soon as she arrived, he started preparing the airlock for entry.

“Hey,” he broadcast when she was ten kilometers away. “Yoe? Yoh?”

The response was static, and some strange sloshing noise, as if there was water inside the spacesuit.

“I hear you,” he broadcast again. “Yoe?”

The radio couldn’t properly handle her response - the microphone cut off due to the volume spike, but it was clearly speech of some sort.

He remembered her talking on their first meeting - this was clearly more of the same. She was back to her original form again.

“I’ve opened the airlock and rolled out the carpet,” he said into the radio. “See you in half an hour, at the HAB.”

He watched the little dot getting closer and closer. She was gaining speed up, moving even faster than before.

“Make that twenty minutes,” he muttered into the radio, and then turned it off. “I hope the suit survives this trip or NASA’s definitely docking my pay.”

Fifteen minutes later he saw her approaching and waved, directing her towards the already open airlock two.

The spacesuit looked completely empty, only a swirling darkness behind the visor hinted at the Shadow Entity being real.

This unmanned spacesuit running towards him in a Martian desert would surely lodge itself into his nightmares.

At least it wasn’t after dark.

As soon as he closed the outer airlock, she started to remove the suit, ignoring his muffled protests.

Realizing that he wouldn’t be able to change her mind, he hurried to seal the outside of the airlock correctly. Only when the indicators showed that it was sealed fully, did he turn to help her.

Her helmet was already on the floor by that time, together with a weird puddle of water.

The spacesuit itself had slumped to the ground, while the Shadow Entity seeped outside like a formless shadow.

Then, this eerie, alien Shadow Entity spun into herself, gathering into a single place. Once again, a human-looking girl emerged from the shadows, crouched on the ground. Her whole body was shaking.

A small piece of paper was in her hand - and he could see that there was a strange current of air, suddenly rushing outside from it. It was strong enough to make her hair billow like in a strong wind.

He hadn’t even started pumping in breathable air from the HAB - but the airlock indicators were already lighting up.

2% oxygen.

3%.

He shook his head and started on the internal valves, to aid whatever process was happening.

Only when the oxygen levels reached 21%, did he take off his helmet.

At the same time, she put away the little paper - somewhere. Another sleight of hand trick to send it back into the Shadow Realm, for all he knew.

Her uncontrollable full-body shivers had subsided, but he could see her hands trembling a little.

“You’re back,” he said, placing the helmet under his arm. He still double checked everything was green before opening the inner airlock.

It was a fair bit against protocol, taking off the helmet inside the airlock, but what was NASA going to do, write him up?

He would have felt weird having it on, especially when she was completely out of her spacesuit. “Did your spaceship fly off and leave you here, too?”

He knew she wouldn’t understand, but he had to say something.

Her expression shifted. He couldn’t even start to guess at what she was thinking, for it had gone completely unreadable. Distant. Her eyes were watching him closely.

“Made me worry,” he said. “When is the next time they are picking you up?”

She shook her head. “Worry?” she asked.

“Oh, right. Yeah, I’m a bit sorry - worry - to see you didn’t make it off this deathtrap.”

She didn’t say anything, but went to pick up her spacesuit and helmet, to carry it into the HAB.

The inner airlock finally opened, and they both stepped inside.

“Here we are,” he said.

At the same time she mumbled a single word in another of her languages. “Tadaima.”

It was so quiet he could barely make it out.

She waited patiently until he closed the airlock from the inside and sealed it off again.

Then, when he turned completely to face her, she bowed to him.

He suddenly felt like he was in the presence of a dignitary, and snapped to attention without even thinking about it.

She pointed at herself.

“Shikako,” she said. Pointed at herself again. “Shikako Nara. ”

Was that the Shadow Entity’s name? Mark hadn’t even tried to ask before, wrongly assuming that it would be unpronounceable. “Shikako,” he repeated, gesturing at her.

She nodded. Then, she pointed towards him. “You?”

He had given her his name at least twice, but with the whole chattering thing it was no surprise she hadn’t picked it up.

“Mark Watney.”

And then there were two of them, fighting against Mars. 

Together.

Two of them and hope.