“Down five kilo, Mark.”

“I’m not surprised,” Mark replied. “Most of it’s probably from my skeleton. Common in low-gravity environments. A little higher than this point in other Ares missions, though.”

Spitfire considered this. “Ares mission lasts one year, yeah? This point in other mission, you be home two months now.”

“You know what I mean,” Mark said. “Come on, your turn on the scale. Everyone else has been.”

“Blood pressure,” Spitfire said carefully. “Temperature. Reflex. Breathing. You know the drill.” That last was a pat phrase from several of the television shows they’d watched, and Spitfire liked it. She liked it even more once drill was explained to her as not being a tool in this particular usage.

The other four castaways had been through the process already. NASA had suggested this to them in the morning’s chat. Before long they would no longer have access to the sample scale (nonessential equipment for the cross-country drive to come). This seemed like a good time to do another physical and assess the health of the crew. Blood work was out of the question, of course, but the usual non-invasive diagnostics could still be done.

To no one’s surprise, Dragonfly had the worst results thus far, with her body weight down ten whole kilograms below the baseline readings taken three hundred sols before. Mark’s loss of five kilograms came in second, but he’d had much more mass to lose than any of the others, even Fireball.

The dragon, incidentally, had actually gained three kilos. There were a couple of jokes about eating rocks, and then they moved on.

Spitfire went on to administer the other tests. Lungs clear, lung capacity undiminished. (Dragonfly was the only one whose breathing had grown weaker.) Temperature normal, heartbeat sound normal. Pulse rate slower, blood pressure slightly lower, both within margins of error according to the database on the Hab computers. In short, Mark was about as healthy as could be expected, right down to the barely visible burn scars on his upper right arm.

Spitfire was silently grateful for one fact: the only illnesses among the crew, aside from varying levels of magic deprivation, had come from injuries. Apparently neither the Equestrians nor the lone human had brought any infectious diseases to wipe out the group.

Or anyway, if they had, they were diseases for which everyone had standard resistance. If Spitfire understood parallel universe theory, the odds of Mark’s germs and pony germs being more or less identical were actually not terrible. Of course, most of what Starlight Glimmer babbled about when talking about the two universes made no sense to Spitfire, so she could be wrong.

But that didn’t help with her main concern. Mark, by deliberate decision of his bosses, had been isolated for weeks prior to launch to ensure he didn’t have a communicable disease to give to his crewmates. The ponies hadn’t been as cautious, but their weeks of training came close enough to isolation that it seemed to have worked out the same. But whichever planet the lot of them returned to first, the non-native would have to deal with the full range of disease, and the rest of them would have weakened immune systems from all this time in space.

Put bluntly, when they got back, wherever they got back to, they were all going to be really, really sick.

“Okay, Spitfire,” Mark said. “Your turn.”

“Fine.” Despite her lack of hands, Spitfire had done most of the work so far. But hooves failed to cope with the added difficulty of performing the tests on oneself, so Mark had to step in for this part. She hopped onto the worktable, stepped on the scale- down one and a quarter kilograms, not bad- and then submitted quietly to Mark's careful and cautious movements.

She couldn’t resist the ear flick when Mark stuck in the ear thermometer (a much more pleasant tool than the old-fashioned model in the Amicitas medical kit- that dinosaur was getting left behind along with the scale). Mark flinched, and Spitfire’s ear-flick became two flattened ears. “Said sorry for kick you,” she said crossly.

“And I think my abs forgive you,” Mark said. The bruises had faded some, but they were still visible when he took off his shirt. “But I’m still a bit gun-shy.”

“Get on with it.” Another pat English phrase Spitfire had embraced wholeheartedly, especially since it had fewer syllables than a lot of single English words.

Everything else checked out fine until the last test, the breath capacity test. “How much?” she asked, when she heard the results.

“Twenty percent drop,” Mark said. “That’s as bad as Dragonfly’s.”

Spitfire groaned, flopping forward on the table. “No,” she said, “it’s worse.”

“You wanna tell me about it?” Mark asked.

Spitfire snorted. “So you can finish my… sentences… for me? So you can correct me?”

Mark sighed. “Everyone, can you go find something to do in the rover or something?” he asked.

“You sure about that, Mark?” Dragonfly asked. “I think we all know Spitfire can kick your ass, even with only eighty percent of her lungs.”

“Out.”

Fireball chuckled. “Bug isn’t wrong,” he said.

“Out, out.”

“Come on, everyone,” Cherry Berry said. “I’m sure Dragonfly can find us some more wires to inspect. Suit up.”

Five minutes later, Spitfire and Mark were seated on a bunk, alone in the Hab. “Okay, we here,” she said, not bothering to hide the bitterness. “What you want me say, huh?”

“Well…” Mark seemed to think (for a change) before speaking. “First, how about this? You say what you want in pony, and I’ll talk in English. That puts us on a level playing field.”

“What?” Spitfire slipped into Equestrian at once. “But you don’t understand Equestrian! You certainly can’t speak it for crap! That’s why we all learned English!”

“I understand more than you think,” Mark said. “I’m a bit rusty, since you guys don’t go off into huddles so much anymore, but I had a lot of opportunities to listen to you. And seriously, you guys never told me what’s so wrong when I try to speak it.”

“Remember Filthy Fred?” Spitfire asked. “When you try to speak Equestrian, you sound like that almost all the time.”

Mark flinched. “That bad?” he asked.

“Worse. Like walking past drunk stallions at the air show.”

“Um… I got walking and males, and something about flying,” Mark said.

“What do stallions sound like when sexy mares walk by on your world?”

“What do… ooooh,” Mark said, understanding. “I think I see where you’re going. I sound like that. I wish you’d said.”

“We didn’t want to embarrass you.”

“Was that embarrass?” Mark chuckled. “Believe me, that ship sailed long ago.” He sobered a little and said, “Think we can keep this up now? How about you tell me what your real problem is? I know it’s not me talking down to you, because I haven’t done that for ages.”

“You’re not gonna drop this, are you? Fine.” Spitfire slumped. “I’m not just a soldier, Mark. I’m an athlete. I’m one of the twenty-four top fliers in all Equestria. Or I was, before I spent over a year in space.” She shook her head. “I’ve read the parts of your medical papers I can understand. They all say space weakens the body. When you come back you get back most of it with time and work, but never all.

“And then you tell me I’ve lost twenty percent of my lung capacity? I’m a flyer. A high-altitude flyer. I need every bit of lung function I can get. You might as well tell me that I’ve had half a lung cut out,” she shouted, making a gesture with a forehoof across her upper barrel. “It amounts to the same thing! I’ll never have that edge again! I’ll never be able to go as fast for as long as I used to.” She slumped and finished, “Mark, you just told me I lost the Wonderbolts.”

Mark put his arm around the pony’s shoulders. “I think I got most of that,” he said. “And first off, you don’t know you’ve lost your edge. We studied humans in space for up to two years. Humans, not ponies. We know nothing about pony recovery time or abilities. And you’ll be going home to a world full of magic. Who knows what’s possible there?”

“I do,” Spitfire muttered. “Once you lose the edge, you never get it back. I’m going to be like Wind Rider- an old has-been clinging to lost glory.” She slapped a hoof against the frame of the bunk. “I’m too young to be like Wind Rider, darn it! I have ten good years left in me!”

Mark hugged Spitfire a little tighter. “Spits, I’m telling you, it’s going to be all right.”

“I’m telling you it’s not! Don’t patronize me, Mark! It’s over!” Spitfire, hardened veteran, steel-willed officer with over a decade in the EUP behind her, caught herself sniffling. After a moment she decided she didn’t care. “It’s over…” she moaned, and buried her face in Mark’s side.

And then, to her shock, Mark pushed her away.

Mark, the softest, most annoying person Spitfire could think of, Mr. Cheer Up, Mr. Good Feelings, had pushed her away just as she was going to start crying.

“I’m not going to accept that,” he said quietly. “It’s not over. You’re going to survive this. You’re going to go home, and you’re going to fly faster and higher than ever before. Because if you don’t, Mars wins.” He pointed a finger at the Hab wall. “That bastard of a planet out there has been trying to break us for four hundred and some sols. In a hundred and forty sols we’ll be on our way home laughing at this fucking planet that thought it could break us. Laughing, do you hear me?”

Spitfire had lost all urge to weep. For the first time she could recall, probably for the first time ever, she heard in Mark Watney’s voice the same tone that Cherry Berry had when she was in full Steel Eyed Missile Mare mode. No… like that time when she’d been a cadet at Wonderbolts Academy, and she’d been thinking about washing out after a particularly bad day. She hadn’t said anything, but the training officer had sounded exactly like this.

“Look at all the ways Mars has tried to kill us,” Mark continued. “Impalement. Explosion. Decompression. Suffocation. Poisoning. Lightning. Starvation. Blunt force trauma. And we’re beating it, Spitfire, we’re beating the bastard. For four hundred sols we’ve beaten it. So don’t you dare let it have a victory now!” He looked down into her eyes, which had gone as wide as any of the others’, and said, “Are you going to let this fucking planet beat you, Spitfire?!”

The answer was so automatic as to be involuntary. “Sir, no sir!”

The response to that was, apparently, tradition in two universes. “I can’t hear you!”

“SIR, NO SIR!!”

“Are you going to go home, work hard, get back into shape, and show this planet where it can shove its twenty percents?”

“SIR, YES SIR!”

“Good!” And then the moment was gone, and Mark was his smiling, gentle self again, giving Spitfire another hug. “Now let’s quit this touchy-feely remake of Full Metal Jacket and go join the others, okay?”

“Um… yeah,” Spitfire said, totally confused. Had what just happened been some sort of prank? Or had she actually touched something in Mark?

She did feel better, so there must be something real in it.

“One thing,” Mark asked, “What’s so bad about being me? And why do you call me Mark Windy?”

“Not Mark Windy,” Spitfire said in English. “A pony. Wind Rider. He was a hero, once. Not more, not now. Old. Angry. Washed up.” Another pat phrase, but not one Spitfire liked.

“Okay,” Mark said. “I know the type. But that’s not you. That’s never going to be you.”

As Mark walked over to his spacesuit rack, Spitfire could only hope he was right.

Author's Notes:

Mark Watney is never going to be R. Lee Ermey. But he's also a born survivor, and apparently one of his very few buttons involves giving up.

I had no idea where this was going to go at first; I just wanted Spitfire and Mark to have a scene, since Spitfire is far and away the most distant of the Equestrians from Mark. I don't think Spitfire will ever particularly like Mark, but we'll see...