Chapter Text
She hated lying to her brother. She always felt rotten afterwards, but deep down she knew it had been worth it.
Mark had remembered the incident. The one Chris hated himself for, felt disgusting about. And Mark thought it was a dream.
She couldn’t wait to tell Chris about this.
Maybe that was bad of her, betraying Mark’s trust like that, but she convinced herself it was for the greater good. Besides, thousands of teenagers would love her if they knew what she was doing.
She had spent months listening to Chris whine and complain about how poorly he had handled the situation. How he took advantage of Mark when he was so clearly traumatized. The amount of times she had wanted to tell him what she knew, that Mark had been in love with him since that day just before the launch date, where the reporters from various newspapers had been on Mark about being last on the priority list, and Chris had risen up like a knight in shining armour, as Mark had put it, and told them that yeah, sure, botany wasn’t very high on the list compared to the other options, but he sure as hell wasn’t going into the vast universe without an engineer by his side.
When Mark had recited the event during one of their earliest video calls, his mouth had grown into a smile, and to play it off, he had told Hannah a joke about Martinez and a horse, or something (Hannah hadn’t really payed a lot of attention to her brother at that precise moment, her brain already trying to conceive some sort of plan), and changed the topic.
And to be completely fair, this was getting ridiculous. How none of the two boys had picked up on the others’ affection yet, Hannah would never know. For the past seven months, she had been listening to both of the boys drone on and on about how they were wrong for the other person, how they weren’t deserving of the other, and quite frankly, Hannah had had enough.
So about five weeks before she was set for a nice spring break at the spa with her closest friends from school, she booked her flight to Houston, Texas for spring break instead and endured a two hour long scolding from Agnes, Tea and Nicole, but all in all, they couldn’t really argue with her when she said it concerned her brother. Mark Watney wasn’t just famous in America anymore, the whole world knew his name.
She had to give Johanssen some credit though, even though the two of them had never held a conversation. Because of that specific astronaut, Hannah’s plan was going to go quite smoothly. And yes, perhaps she was jinxing it, but she had always believed that things such as misfortune and jinxes were created by people who couldn’t blame their faults and mistakes on themselves. Her plan wasn’t that hard, really, it just took a bit of manipulation.
Ask Chris about the crew (Use “Mark doesn’t tell me anything, pleaaaase Chris” if necessary)
Get on the subject of Johanssen’s computer skills
This part of her plan was crucial if she didn’t want to spend thousands of dollars on buying extravagant computers and servers. She would if she could, but she was a struggling university student, after all. Thanks to Johanssen, Chris had a whole set if them, just collecting dust in his apartment. You see, Chris and Beth had lived together in the later states of their training due to Beth’s home being in New York City, very far from their training site. This had led Beth and Chris to bunk up together (which really wasn’t a smart move Chris, come on. Don’t share an apartment with the woman everyone thinks you have a relationship with if you want to diminish those rumours.).
This, however, was very useful to Hannah, who, through immense hacking of the NASA records and a bit of stalking one of the executives from one of their contractors, had figured out that this resulted in all equipment provided for Beth Johanssen, Astronaut in training and future member of the ARES III crew, was sitting in Chris’s apartment, just waiting to be started. This led her to her third part of the plan
3. Get Chris’s permission to use his apartment during spring break.
Hannah knew getting into Chris apartment and into the computers wouldn’t be a problem, but she didn’t like the idea of breaking and entering Chris’s home without his explicit consent. This also provided her with an excuse to ask him for his help for part number four
4. Ask him if he can ask Beth to put Hannah on her “Accepted contacts” list so she could send her a message (under the disguise to ask for her help with all the computers).
Hannah had taken a liking for the astronaut so alike herself. And since she had learned most about her from her two closest males in the universe who valued her very much, Hannah figured she was a safe bet. Besides, Beth’s information and knowledge about the Hermes coding and structure would be crucial if she wanted this mission to become a success. This brought her to the hardest, but not last, part:
5. Get Commander Lewis and the rest of the crew on her side and get Beth on your side. She’ll be your ears and eyes in space.
She needed Lewis to inform NASA about the upcoming events. A system breach not correctly supervised could lead SatCon into a mass panic, and she could be charged for all kinds of felonies. Therefore, she needed the Commander to speak with Vincent Kapoor, Teddy Sanders and whoever else Lewis needed to talk to before Hannah would even as much as lift a finger,
Hannah might be a daredevil, but she was not going in without a foolproof plan.
Her plan initially was to speak with the commander herself, but she figured using Beth would give more beneficial results, since, you know, she was Beth and the commander was Melissa. She wanted to be sure that her plan wouldn’t endanger anyone of the current inhabitants of the spacecraft known as the Hermes, and she wanted everyone, exclusive of Mark and Chris, to be on board. Even though she barely knew anyone on the ship except Mark and Chris, any friend of Mark was a friend of hers. Besides, this mission had been dramatic enough as it is, she didn’t need to add “University student hack her way into the Hermes, all astronauts dead” to that missions’ already bad reputation.
Because that was her sixth, and final step in her pretty thoroughly conceived plan.
6. Hack yourself into the Hermes’s mainframe and lock the idiots into a room for an extended period of time.
She had planned on locking them in tomorrow, had already spoken to Beth who had confirmed time and place, and she had received the green light from the Commander, who had simply said “If I have to endure any more of this moping and pining that is going on under my command, I will jump out of this airlock before we make it back to Earth, I swear”. According to Beth, Lewis had reasoned that they would be more productive if they were in a relationship as opposed to how inefficient they are right now.
Her conversation just mere minutes ago with her brother had caused some problems, however. It had been an impromptu video call, which had caught Hannah off guard. She hadn’t masked her environment yet, and that had resulted in Mark’s revelation near the end of their call. He had obviously recognized her environment, if his total look of shock and wonder was anything to go by. Fortunately, Hannah knew her brother well enough to know that Mark liked to think his way through any problem he faced before asking for an answer, so therefore, the odds of Mark asking Chris about anything before tomorrow were very slim.
The problem, however, was that she had probably caused Mark more anguish than he needed right now. At first glance, this would look like a love triangle worthy of a telenovela (no hate against telenovelas, Hannah’s first ever TV show addiction was Betty la fea). Just imagine, two siblings falling in love with the same man, it would make for a hell of a lot of ratings. Hannah certainly knew she would watch it.
But that wasn’t what was going on here, at all. Hannah had literally spent time and money on trying to get them together, for Christ’s sake! She loved them both like brothers.
She just hoped that after tomorrow, there wouldn’t be any doubt about it.