Some of my favourite quotes from my Mark/ Simon fic in my drafts so far which is officially 10k words in.
Mark: Everyone who won't tell Hermes are whores.
It wasn't exactly like Mars had Colorado potato beetles that could be harming his food.
And hopefully he wouldn't get impaled with an antenna this time. That would be nice.
If he'd asked NASA about burning the Hydrazine, they would have told him no fucking way was he doing that. He'd blow himself up— which.. alright, yes he had done. But only mildly, and he still successfully got water from it.
Glancing up, Mark felt his jaw physically drop. A submarine. On Mars. “What the actual fuck…”
Mark tapped a hand to it, watching it stick to his suit glove. “That…. Oh fuck! That's blood. Oh… oh no. What the fuck!?”
Maybe contact NASA? Perhaps they wouldn't scold him about being out in the storm if they knew about this? Although NASA would also definitely say ‘Mark! Get the fuck away from the blood covered submarine! What is wrong with you!?’ … he'd tell NASA later.
That submarine was somehow coated in entirely human blood.
Sue him if he was a little fuzzy on NASA’s rules about when to poke a blood coated submarine. Trust NASA to miss an obvious problem everyone deals with on Mars, they should have a procedure for this so Mark could ignore it.
Mark Watney, survived 100 Sols on Mars, grew Potatoes, burnt rocket fuel to make water, and died because he decided to cut into a submarine covered in human blood to see what was thumping in it. That seemed a fitting obituary.
Mark scrambled through the hole, staring at the man.. or most of a man, he was face down, barely breathing and one arm was entirely gone. It wasn't amputated either. At least not medically, it looked like a rather recent, involuntary sort of procedure that was still bleeding hideously, although it couldn't have been the source of the blood outside, it was possibly the source of most of the inside blood.
“Okay.. uh.. no? Earth isn't dead?? I had contact with them literally this morning. Mars definitely isn't gone, we're standing on it… and last time I checked the stars were all good?”
“Like… the blood ocean? You know?” “Uhhh… no the fuck I don't know!?” Mark borderline screeched “Blood ocean?? How the fuck did that happen?”
Everything was just dandy here on Mars!