[Sol 27]|

Meanwhile, on Mars, Jisung was still alive. For now.

Although it wasn't particularly good for him to be up and about just yet, he had decided against staying in bed for another day.

All it would do was deteriorate his mental health, and that was arguably more important than his physical state in the situation Jisung was currently in.

He had been weirdly productive in the days since his sort-of-breakdown.

He'd finished laying dirt, and planting everything in the greenhouse, plus he already set up the solar panels.
All that was left was the water.

The formula was easy.

You take hydrogen, oxygen, and make it burn.

Simple.

What wasn't so simple was finding something to burn. See, space + flammable things = big no no.

In NASA's eyes, anyway.

Therefore, none of the space gear or anything provided by NASA would catch fire. Which meant that he'd have to go digging through his friends' stuff once again.

Ever since that day, four days ago, Jisung hadn't lain a finger on anyone's stuff but his own.

He hadn't even snatched Gyu to cuddle with at night, like he normally would.

He was afraid that, right now, he was a ticking time bomb, and if he began wallowing in his feelings too much, it would set him off.

Taking a deep breath, Jisung opened Changbin's box first.

Photos of the elder, and someone else whom he seemed to be close to, were scattered around the small, enclosed area.

It intrigued Jisung, as though he knew both Chan and Changbin pretty well, he never tried to peek into their private lives unless prompted to.
They'd first met a little over two and a half years ago, for training purposes.

Over time, the three of them- Chan, Changbin, and Jisung- had become a lot closer, and were now practically best friends.

However, that did not change the fact that Changbin was a pretty closed-off person, and liked his privacy.

That meant that if Jisung wanted to know anything about Changbin, he would have to wait until the older decided to approach him about it.

Usually, he respected that, and kept out of his business.

But, over the past few days, Jisung had been growing much more bitter about his whole situation.

With the little devil on his shoulder egging him on, Jisung reached for one of the Polaroids.

“Sorry Changbin, but if you didn't want me to go through your personal items, you shouldn'tve ditched me on Mars.”

They were just pictures of Changbin with IIIRacha's flight director. Their mission manager, or whatever his official name was. He took care of and managed the teams that were to go on Mars expeditions.

Before he could think as to why Changbin had pictures of them together, despite the fact that all four of them were great friends, the guilt started getting to him. He dropped the little squre picture back into the box, pretending he hadn't seen anything.

Just as he was about to give up the search in this box and move on to Chan's, he spotted something wedged in the spirals of a notebook.

The exact kind of 'something’ he needed.

A pencil, presumably used by Changbin when scrawling down his poems- or, lyrics, as the elder preferred them to be called.

Smirking to himself, Jisung brought the sharpened pencil up to his eye level. This was not supposed to be on the craft. The shavings were flammable, which was why NASA had payed for a pressurized pen that would work in low-gravity situations.

It should do the trick, although it'd be more difficult, given the graphite and yellow paint on and in the writing utensil. He would make it work.

If everything went to plan, it would produce water in the form of vapor. The vapor would then condense and drip down the sides of his makeshift greenhouse.

If all went to plan, that is.

And of course it didn't, at first.

He ended up burning pencil shavings instead of the whole stick.
That went fine.
Pencils were outlawed from space for a reason, afterall.

Unfortunately, the problem was that he had failed to account for the small amount of oxygen that he exhaled when he was creating the equations, meaning that the on the first try, he got blown away.

Not figuratively.

Literally.

Like, as in, the little tray he was combining the materials on exploded, throwing him back against the wall.

After taking a two hour long break, he managed to stand up long enough to complete another- thankfully, successful- attempt.

In even more pain than he'd been before, Jisung left the greenhouse with a small sense of accomplishment.

Stumbling into the kitchen, thoroughly exhausted, Jisung grabbed the first drink his hands landed on, which turned out to be grape juice.
He drank it straight from the bottle, too tired to even care.

Jisung slammed the jug down, heaving a deep sigh.

His wrapped wrist was aching terribly, not to mention his head.
God, his head hurt.

Dropping his heavy-feeling head onto his folded arms, the tired man got out a small, muffled sentence.

“Fuck you, Mars.”

-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-

WOo guYs biG moMEnT

Fun fact: that's the first time I've ever posted the F word in a story.

older me is gonna look back on this and be like PFFT

Update from future editing me: "pFFT"

YEeT, I'm out