A/N Well I bet this is unexpected, it certainly has been awhile... it was unexpected for me too, so if you're reading this now you can thank Alexandra926 because she got tired of waiting for me to circle back around to this fic and took matters into her own hands and forced the issue by writing the first draft of this chapter herself ;)

MISSION DAY
SOL 66

TIME 10:13
LOG ENTRY WATNEY #031

PRESSURE
12.46 PSI

OXYGEN
20.98%

TEMPERATURE
30.59 C

ENVIRONMENT
ROVER 2 DASHCAM

"Alright, here we go! Big day today!" Mark addressed the camera, as soon as he started recording. He needed something to keep his mind off of how quiet it was by himself in the cab. "We have officially begun Day One of the first inaugural Martian road trip."

With nobody to engage with; nobody to listen to his smart-ass remarks, he turned to the camera instead. He figured that making a vlog under the guise of recording his trip for posterity was better for his mental health than talking to himself just to fill the silence.

It did not escape him that this was the first time that he'd truly been alone on Mars. He'd had Johannsen at his side, or within comm range at least, since the storm. Since Sol 1, really, and even before that. She'd been a constant presence on Hermes, and during three years of training leading up to their mission. Beth had always been right there when he had wanted to talk to someone (or even when he didn't).

He kept turning to speak to her, but the passenger seat, where Johannsen usually sat when it was his turn to drive, was instead piled high with the items he wanted to keep nearby during his trip. The smaller toolbox. His laptop. A bottle of water.

No Beth.

"So you know that nagging feeling when you start off on a road trip, and you're convinced that you've forgotten something?" he asked the camera. "When you're trying to decide if you should call your neighbor to ask if you left the garage door open? Or you're trying to remember if you packed socks? Well, it turns out that that feeling follows you no matter which planet you're on. Unfortunately, there's no neighbors to check in with, and no corner store to run to if it turns out I forgot toothpaste."

He fell silent, a small frown curling one side of his mouth down until the quiet started to get to him again.

"I'm sure it's nothing," he said, more in an attempt to convince himself than his hypothetical future audience. "Johannsen and I went over the planning for this trip backwards, forwards and sideways."

It was the truth, too. They'd spent days ironing out the fine details, wanting to leave as little to chance as possible. While it was true that they didn't have access to any really detailed topographic maps outside the immediate area of Ares III, they still had pretty decent satellite imagery, which they had to trust would suffice. They'd calculated and recalculated how much food, water and other supplies Mark should bring. They had brainstormed game plans for possible scenarios, should anything go wrong. Making sure that he brought along the tools he'd be most likely to need if the rover threw a tire or one of the seals developed a leak.

He felt confident that he was as prepared as he could reasonably be.

"I guess I just have to get used to the quiet," he finally shrugged.

He just wished he could talk to Beth. He knew that would make him feel better. She had been such a big part of Mark's comfort zone for so long now, that her absence, even though he'd just seen her a couple of hours ago, was really jarring. But the Hab was much too far away now for the comms to work now. And if he was being honest he knew that his last few transmissions probably hadn't even been received. He was on his own for the next few weeks, and he was just going to have to get used to being alone.

If only it wasn't so quiet in the cab.

Very quiet.

So quiet.

"Shit!" he exclaimed, slamming his hands against the steering wheel as he suddenly realized what he'd forgotten. "I did it again!"

He stewed for a moment before explaining his outburst to the camera. "I meant to bring a copy of Beth's music with me, so I'd have something to listen to on the trip. And you know where I left the thumb drive?" he paused for dramatic effect. "In her laptop. You wanna know why I was going to bring her music instead of my own?" he paused once more. "Because I left my personal drive plugged into my workstation back on Hermes when I was packing my kit for the surface mission. I can't believe I screwed myself over twice."

A deep frown settled over his face as he navigated around some scattered boulders. "I'm almost tempted to go back and get it," he admitted. "Almost. But that would set me back half a SOL. An entire SOL, actually, because I've already used more than half the battery. I wouldn't be able to make it back to the Hab without camping for the night."

"I'm just have to deal with it." He huffed in frustration.

He reached out to turn off the camera. "This is going to be a really long trip," he muttered before the screen cut to black.

.

MISSION DAY
SOL 67

TIME 21:47
LOG ENTRY WATNEY #032

PRESSURE
12.46 PSI

OXYGEN
20.94%

TEMPERATURE
28.87 C

ENVIRONMENT
ROVER 2 DASHCAM

Mark's face was alight with excitement as the camera began to roll.

"So I was settling in for the night," he began, launching right into his story, "poking around, doing an inventory, out of boredom more than anything else, when I found myself a few surprises. First, I found this in my toolbox, courtesy of one Beth Johannsen."

He held up a notecard to the lens, showing off a message of PATHFINDER OR BUST! with a cartoonish sketch of the lander drawn underneath it. His grin widening, he tucked it into the lining of the driver side window where it would be visible in the background of all his video logs.

"Thank you for that, Johannsen. But these were the real prize," he continued with a grin, holding up a protein bar, still sealed in its foil wrapper, and a small data drive. "I found them in JPL's version of a glove compartment. I don't know how we didn't find them before now. It took me a minute to figure out how they got there, but my best guess is that when Commander Lewis took this Rover out to bury the RTG on Sol 1, she brought along some tunes and a snack and then she forgot them in there."

"It's even one of the chocolate peanut butter ones," he grinned as he inspected the foil packaging again. "My favorite."

"Thank you, Commander Lewis," he said enthusiastically, throwing the camera a smart ass salute.

"Alright, let's see what music the commander brought along and subsequently left behind," he said, plugging the drive in, eager to see what the soundtrack to his next three weeks was going to be.

His enthusiasm shifted to amusement when the the first song played, and the sound of the Bee Gees filled the Rover's interior.

"Of course the woman who has nothing but 70s sitcoms on her laptop would also have disco on here," he says good-naturedly, reaching out to flip to the next song.

Gloria Gaynor.

Next.

Donna Summer.

Next.

ABBA.

He started flipping through songs faster, his grin fading.

Chic. KC and the Sunshine Band. Diana Ross. Kool & the Gang.

"It's all disco!" he exclaimed in horrified disbelief.

He continued to scan through the songs, looking for something, anything, that didn't give him images of polyester leisure suits, light-up dance floors, and the Hustle. He was only listening to the first fifteen seconds of any song, before moving on in desperation for a song recorded before 1966 or after 1981, to no avail.

"Seriously?" he groaned, sitting back heavily in his chair, as the chorus of Disco Inferno mocked him from the speakers.

He rolled his eyes in the general direction of Hermes, many millions of kilometers away by now. "Thank you, Commander Lewis."

.

SOL 68

All the lonely people where do they all come from?
All the lonely people where do they all belong?

Beth made a disgusted noise in the back of her throat, before reaching out to change to the next song. Eleanor Rigby was usually one of her favorite songs, but she couldn't help but feel like Paul McCartney was taunting her and she wasn't in the mood.

She skipped over Across the Universe and Yesterday since neither song would improve her mood, only settling back down once shuffle started playing Norwegian Wood. As she let the sounds of John Lennon and the sitar wash over her, she went back to staring at the bottom of the bunk above her, rolling the data drive Mark had accidently left behind, back and forth between her palms.

Beth had no doubts that Mark would be going nuts without it. And while most of her felt bad for him, she couldn't help the small bemused smirk that curled at the corner of her mouth, as she imagined his reaction when he realized he'd left his music behind again. It was a well-established fact that Mark didn't do silence well. And she had long since figured out that it was part of the reason he talked so much. She had found the drive almost immediately after coming back inside from seeing him off, but there wasn't much she could do about it at that point. It wasn't as if she could call him to let him know he'd forgotten it, since he was already out of range, and she certainly couldn't chase after him. All she could do was be ready to tease him about it once he returned. An event which she still had a long time to prepare for.

It had only been three days since Mark had set off towards Pathfinder, but it felt like it had been at least two or three times that long. She wouldn't have thought it possible, but the Hab managed to feel cavernously empty and claustrophobic simultaneously without his presence.

They had been living in each other's pockets for so long now, that his absence ached like a phantom limb. And it didn't help that she had nothing to do to pass the time. Mark may have been driving in silence, but at least he was going somewhere.

He had a mission, a goal, a destination.

Mark had some control over his own fate. She had nothing to do but walk the metaphorical widow's walk. She had nothing do but sit around all day, her whole day free to worry about things she had absolutely zero control over.

If only she had a project of her own to keep herself busy, but unfortunately it wasn't even lunchtime yet and she'd already done the negligible amount of daily chores required to keep the Hab running smoothly. She wracked her brain, trying to think of something that could keep her occupied for at least a few hours. Idle hands and all that. But the crops were watered, the solar panels were cleared, her laundry was rinsed, and she'd even spent the previous evening dusting and sweeping, fighting the ever losing battle of containing the red martian dust that left a film over everything in the Hab.

She was considering the cost benefits of trying to take a nap out of sheer boredom, if only to skip past the next few hours, when she was struck by an idea. She sat up so quickly, she nearly whacked her head on the bunk above hers, but she didn't let that slow her down, already heading into the other room so she could suit up.

.

SatCon, Johnson Space Center, Houston, Texas

Mindy stared up at the satellite images on the big screens, sliding so far down in her chair that what she was doing could hardly be considered sitting anymore. She flipped back and forth between pictures, but there just was nothing to go off of, as she once again tried to puzzle out what was happening. For the third day in a row, the rover's path seemed unchanged, an alarming straight shot away from the Hab and towards nothing good, as far as she could tell.

Venkat appeared in the doorway so soon after he'd been notified that the rover was on the move, that Mindy had to wonder if he had already been heading her direction. He was making his entrance just as the flashing light indicated that there were more incoming images from one of the satellites that now crisscrossed the site of Ares III.

"New images," Venkat nodded towards her desktop. "That's good."

Mindy shrugged, and turned her attention back to the monitor.

"That batch is images of the Hab," she told him offhandedly, knowing without having to verify. She couldn't find her car keys most mornings, but she knew where every satellite orbiting Mars was at any given moment these days. Especially now that her job had gotten exponentially more difficult trying to get comprehensive coverage of two locations, one of them moving, with a finite number of satellites. "A place where Watney and/or Johanssen apparently no longer are. Very useful." She couldn't manage to keep the smallest touch of sarcasm from her voice, and Venkat smirked.

That didn't stop her from immediately opening the images, however. Nor did it stop Venkat from sighing and pulling up his usual chair, leaning forward to rest his elbows on his knees while they waited for the thumbnail images to load.

"Why would they leave?" he mused, not for the first time, voice quiet, apparently thinking out loud. "Why now?"

Mindy couldn't help but throw her arms up in frustration. It was a fair question, and the same one she had been asking herself for the past three days. The Hab represented the only relatively safe haven for humans that Mars had to offer. What could possibly have compelled them to leave it?

"I bet Watney was getting on Johanssen's nerves," Mindy quipped, as she manipulated the image of the Hab, choosing that as the new centrepoint for the image. "He was probably always hanging the toilet paper the wrong way, and she just snapped. She couldn't take it anymore. And she either just tossed him out of the Hab, or she got in the Rover and started driving just to get away from him."

Venkat chuckled, as he watched her proceed to the next image, again setting the Hab as its centrepoint, orienting it to match the previous one.

"You're assuming a lot there, Park," he said, as he watched her efficiently cycle through the images with the ease that came with weeks of practice and repetition. He grinned, and added, "and besides, they've got bigger concerns when it comes to their toilet paper than the way it's hanging. One of which is the fact that they're going to run out of it sooner rather than later."

Mindy rolled her eyes. Gross. He wasn't wrong, though. But it did make her wonder, not for the first time, about the dynamics of being stuck with one person in such a small space for such a long time. How did Watney and Johanssen deal with that?

Venkat was staring intently at the third image now, tapping at it with one hand.

"It's just changed, hasn't it?" He pointed to the area where the rock message had previously read H MO, the remnants of their HI MOM message.

There was an EVA suit visible, smack dab in the middle of the rock formation.

Clambering at her armrests for leverage, Mindy hauled herself upright in her chair, leaning forward to match his posture as they both peered at the same photo. She nodded hesitantly, as she tried to make sense of what she was seeing. Venkat was right. One of the astronauts had been moving the remaining rocks around, right as the satellite had passed overhead.

"I think that's Johanssen," she guessed, pointing to the shape and length of the shadow, as her practiced eye picked out all of the subtle differences between the two astronauts.

"So that would confirm that it is Watney in the rover, then?" Venkat nodded, even as his hand went for his cellphone.

"That's an arrow she's making, right there," Mindy realized, as a new image loaded, replacing the old. "She's standing on the other letters."

Venkat was on the phone, with Director Sanders, she assumed, but he was still following her as she cropped and zoomed in on the pertinent portion of the image.

"Looks like a P? And I think that's an F," she said. "And the arrow. And that's it." She looked up at Venkat, "What does that mean?"

"I have no idea."

.

SOL 70

SatCon, Johnson Space Center, Houston, Texas

"Power Failure?" Venkat guessed again, playing what felt like the hundredth round of the world's worst game of Wheel of Fortune. "Pressure Failure? Primary Failure?" If only he could buy a vowel.

"None of those would explain why one and only one of them would leave the Hab," Mindy replied, leaning back in her chair until she was staring up at the ceiling.

"Obviously, there was some sort of problem, or they would have stayed in the Hab," Venkat reasoned. "But if there was a problem why would Watney leave Johannsen behind?"

They had been going in circles for the past two days, and they both knew they were going nowhere. Unlike Watney, who had been steadily going somewhere for the past five Sols.

"The message came from Johanssen specifically," Mindy said eventually, trying to come at this from a different angle. "She's the computer specialist, what could PF mean from her?"

Venkat was still staring at the outline of rocks that formed the letters P and F, and the shape of an arrow. His brow furrowed while he considered that hypothesis. "It could stand for Packet Filter, which is for firewalls. Or PF keys which were a type of function keys on old keyboards. Page fault… Page file… No, none of those make any sense either."

Mindy dug the heels of her hands into her eyes, exhaustion warring with her frustration. In just over an hour there would be an early morning meeting of the department heads; after that, Mindy was counting on being able to go home for at least six hours of sleep before Watney was likely to be on the move again late in the afternoon. It would be nice to have some sort of workable theory to offer Sanders, who was getting increasingly impatient by the day, as to why Watney had suddenly taken off in the rover, solo.

Two letters and an arrow wasn't a whole lot to go on, though she knew what she felt like it stood for at the moment. "I bet it stands for Probably Fuuuuu-" she trailed off as her brain caught up with her mouth. She let her hands drop from where they were covering her face, and cracked one eye open, to see that Venkat had finally turned away from the screens and was looking at her with one eyebrow arched. "I think I need a coffee refill," she said picking up her empty mug, her excuse for her slip of professionalism. "I'm half-asleep."

"Of course," he replied, not bothering to conceal the amusement in his tone.

"Can I bring you back something?" she offered, as she stood from her chair and stretched, groaning when her back cracked as her spine realigned itself.

"No, I'll come with you," he replied. "I could use a walk and some air. I've been here since…" he trailed off, unsure of when he had actually gotten to work.

"You were already here when I checked in, yesterday." Mindy tried, and failed, to cover her yawn. "And that was eighteen hours ago."

"I've been here more like twenty, then."

They walked in companionable silence, both of them lost in thought. They purposely took the longer route to the break room that took them outside and around the building, rather than cutting through the interior hallways, letting them breathe the bracing early morning air. The sun which was barely cresting over the horizon, lit their way, as the exterior building lights started to flicker off.

The carafe was empty when they arrived, as usual. Mindy frowned, but was too tired to raise any real ire, as she went through the familiar motions of starting the coffeemaker. Since a watched coffee pot never boiled, she turned her back to the appliance and let her mind wander while she waited for the caffeine that would get her through the next few hours.

Kapoor really did look exhausted, she thought, when she glanced his direction. He was staring at the wall, with a blank expression, at a framed satellite picture of Mars that had hung in the breakroom for longer than Mindy had worked for NASA.

The coffeemaker was gurgling away, and the first drops of hot coffee were just beginning to fill the pot, when he took a sudden step back, and Mindy could hear the sharp intake of breath he'd made.

Venkat lurched across the room suddenly and grabbed a break room chair from beneath a nearby table.

Before Mindy could even formulate a question, namely, what on Earth was he doing, Venkat had already climbed atop the chair, snatched the framed poster from the wall, and was taking off down the hall with it.

"I think I know where he's going," he yelled over his shoulder.

Coffee forgotten, not that it mattered anymore as a jolt of adrenaline surged through her veins, Mindy hurried behind in his wake, heading back towards his office, which was closer than SatCon.

"What direction was that arrow pointing?" he asked, grabbing a dry-erase marker from a can on his desk. "Was it south-southwest?"

"I think, yeah, that sounds about right..." she trailed off, as she began to understand what he was saying. He'd crossed off the approximate spot in Acidalia Planitia on the old poster, and was now drawing a line across the poster to Ares Valles. "PF! Pathfinder!"

It seemed so obvious in hindsight.

Venkat thumped the poster in agreement. "He's going to get Pathfinder!"

"He's going to get Pathfinder!" she echoed in excitement. It was brilliant. Watney and Johanssen could fix whatever was wrong with it, surely, and then they could finally be in contact with NASA.

Pathfinder, and all that it meant… the possibilities that Watney and Johanssen had opened by thinking of it.

She smiled, her cheek against the white cotton of Kapoor's button-down shirt. Mindy hadn't even realized that she had made any such move, but apparently she had just seized her boss's boss's boss and was giving him a hug.

Awkward.

A/N So, what did you all think? Well I hope everyone has a happy and safe new years, and let me and Ace know what you thought! :D