So I wasn't going to start posting this yet, but I have impulse control problems.

Okay so this story came about after seeing a what if gif set by holahydra on tumblr where both Mark and Beth were stranded on Mars on Sol 6. I tried to ignore it but the idea would just not leave me alone and the next thing I knew I had written 30+ pages of it even though I should be working on other stories. But the muse is fickle and she does what she wants.

SOL 7

Beth Johanssen hated waking up.

She hated waking up on Earth, on Mars or anywhere in the roughly 225 million kilometers between the two. As a night owl with tendencies towards insomnia, she was not what anyone in their right mind would call a morning person. Once she was asleep she liked to stay asleep and would fight consciousness with every bone in her body. For the last 131 days and 6 sols it was only Commander Lewis' insistence that got her out of her bunk with the rest of the crew.

Which is why, as she slowly woke, it registered as an anomaly that she was waking up on her own.

She also wondered why is was so bright.

And why was she so uncomfortable?

Was she in her EVA suit?

Beth's eyes snapped open and she sat up with a gasp, it all coming flooding back. The storm coming in faster than anyone expected, scrubbing the mission and subsequent emergency evac. They'd gone out in pairs and she and Watney were buddied up as they left the airlock and the relative safety of the Hab.

After that it got fuzzy.

She remembered walking out into the storm, the noise and lack of visibility was disorienting even though she could use her monitors to lead her to the MAV. She remembered reaching out to grab Watney's wrist, wanting the physical anchor as they made their way safety. But before she could touch him, something slammed into her upper back, and that was all she wrote until she woke up on the surface of Mars, half buried beneath the red sand.

Her head was killing her, she was dizzy, and she had to bite back a wave of nausea, but her survival training kicked in and the first thing she did was check the read out from her suit.

Which promptly informed her she was dead.

She certainly didn't feel dead. No, she felt too shitty to be dead. So she quickly concluded that whatever hit her must have knocked out her bio-feed. Good news was that the rest of her suit was intact and pressure and oxygen levels were good.

Climbing to her feet she realized that her shoulder didn't feel too great either. Her head was spinning so bad that she hadn't noticed it at first, but the second she put any weight on it she felt a grind and then a pop as her arm slipped back into place. She groaned in pain when she realized it must have been partially dislocated all night.

Once she was fully upright she took in the lay of the land. Of course the first thing she immediately noticed was that the MAV was gone.

"Fuck."

That really summed it up.

On the bright side, at least the Hab was intact, and she couldn't help taking a moment to thank a god she didn't believe in for small miracles. The Rovers were where they had left them as well, but that wasn't a surprise, JPL had made them tanks. Everything else was a mess though, a mess that she would worry about cleaning up later.

Since there was no point in standing there looking at where the MAV should have been feeling sorry for herself, when she could be inside nursing her obvious concussion and sore shoulder from the comfort of her bunk, she slowly started to make her way towards what was now her home for the foreseeable future. She'd only taken about ten steps in that direction when something white caught her attention out of the corner of her eye. At first she dismissed it, assuming it was debris from their last scheduled EVA, maybe a storage container, blown about in the storm.

A few more steps and she realized it wasn't debris at all.

"Oh my god! Oh my god. Please don't be dead. Don't be dead," she muttered as she skipped (the fastest mode of getting from point A to point B on foot when in 0.4 gravity) as quickly as she could at was now clearly the body of one of her crewmates. He was face down, but as she got closer she could plainly see WATNEY printed on the back of his helmet.

"Please don't be fucking dead," she repeated again as she flipped him over, revealing the length of antenna impaled in his side. "That's not good. That's actually really bad."

"Watney. Watney! MARK!" she shouted, shaking his shoulder trying to get any kind of response. "I swear to god, if you're dead I will kill you!"

Her heart about stopped with relief when she heard a groan, followed by a pained gasp as he jolted into consciousness. He tried to sit up, but she kept her hands pressed on his shoulders to keep him laying down. It looked like the antenna and the clotted blood had formed a weak seal around the puncture in his suit and she didn't want him ripping it open by moving wrong.

"Johanssen?" he asked disoriented, blinking up at her. "Fuuuuuuuck, what happened?"

"Nothing good," she told him honestly. "No, no, don't do that," she said when he reached to grab at his puncture wound.

He lifted his head to look at where his stomach felt like it was on fire. "Oh fuck me," he whimpered letting his head fall back again when he saw it.

"Yeah you're a shish ka-Mark," she said as she pulled out her breach kit. He groaned and she honestly wasn't sure if it was from pain or at her bad joke. "I'm gonna have to pull it out so I can patch your suit before we go inside."

He nodded his agreement even as sweat started to bead on his forehead and upper lip.

"Are you ready?" she asked once she had prepped the kit so she would be able to seal the hole as quickly as possible.

"Yeah," he nodded again. "Wait, wait!" he stopped her, as she reached for the antenna.

"What? What's wrong!?" she asked worriedly, frozen where he had interrupted her, searching desperately for the reason he stopped her.

"Sorry, I wasn't ready," he admitted.

"For fucks sake Watney don't scare me like that. My adrenaline is pumping enough as it is," she said as she exhaled shakily. She was already feeling queasy about pulling it out, blood wasn't really her thing, there was a reason she wasn't a doctor. And she knew it was going to hurt like a bitch and she didn't relish the idea of causing him more pain, but she also knew had to do what she had to do. She'd scored high in staying calm during crisis situations, of course they all did, they wouldn't astronauts otherwise. It didn't mean she was happy about it. "I gotta get it out man, it's a miracle your suit hasn't breached completely as it is."

"I know, I know, I'm sorry," he repeated. "Do it."

"Ready now?" she asked again.

He took a couple of quick panted breaths to steel himself. "Okay. Go."

"On the count of three," Beth said, watching his face as he braced himself. "One—"

"AGHHHHH!" he screamed in agony as she pulled the metal rod out of his side in one smooth movement. "MOTHER FUCKER! WHAT HAPPENED TO TWO AND THREE?!"

"Two, three," she deadpanned as she patched the hole in his EVA suit that the antenna left behind, grateful that the process had been drilled into them before they left Earth so she didn't even have to think about what she were doing. "You're not gonna pass out on me, are you?" she asked sparring a quick glance at his face as she finished up. She'd never seen someone look so pale.

"No, I just need a minute," Mark moaned, just as the O2 alarm on his suit started blaring.

"And we don't have a minute," she replied, squatting down to get under his arm to help him stand. "Up and at em' Watney."

He wanted to scream again as he stood and felt a rush of warm blood seep into his under suit, but he managed to keep it to a pained grunt, leaning heavily on Beth's shoulders.

"Getting impaled sucks, Johanssen," he sighed, as they slowly started making their way towards the Hab. "0/10 would not recommend."

"That's some solid advice Watney," she replied, trying to subtly shift his weight off of her bad shoulder and onto her good one. "I'll keep that in mind."

They were almost to the Hab when Mark finally noticed the elephant in the room. Or more accurately the elephant not on Mars. "Hey Johanssen?"

"What's up Watney?"

"Am I hallucinating from the pain, or is the MAV gone?" he asked really hoping he was hallucinating.

"The MAV is gone," she confirmed.

"Fuck."

"Yep."

"And the rest of the crew?" he asked, already knowing the answer but needing to hear it just the same.

"I assume on The Hermes already on their way home."

"We are so fucked."

"So very very very fucked."

A/N So I know the odds of both of their bio monitors going out is HIGHLY unlikely but just roll with me on this one... The crew needed to think them dead to leave them behind and I couldn't come up with a different reason for why they would think Beth was also dead.

Also this chapter is shorter than my usual but it's just to get us started and the next chapter is basically done, so it should be up soon. In the mean time feed the writer and let me know what you think! Hope you enjoyed it! :D