fic: For A Purpose | The Social Network
Made for a Purpose
The Social Network
Mark/Eduardo
PG
6,500 words
Mark draws Eduardo long before he meets him.
Warnings
None
Notes
For my kink_bingo square "Obedience." It's not just kinky, though - it's a little weirder than that.
The Social Network is property of Columbia Pictures. This work was not created for money.
Also on:
Dreamwidth | AO3
Mark has been drawing for as long as he can remember. He was three and scribbling with crayons on the floor, and then he was eleven and just starting to experiment with different mediums, and now he's nineteen and always sketching something.
"Dude, that's morbid," Dustin says, peering over his shoulder. Mark has his binder of loose leaf sketches out, and he's been drawing this man all week. It took him a while to figure out they were all connected, because there was nothing recognizable about the man in the first one - he was entirely torn to pieces. This most recent one is probably the first in the series, though, and Mark keeps his hand relaxed while he uses vague lines for the car, shades the man's face, and adds the faint suggestion of rain. There's a little girl in the back seat, but Mark doesn't know where she went in the later scenes.
"Why don't you ever draw nice shit?" Dustin complains.
"Leave him alone," Chris says from in front of the couch, where he has pieces of collage spread out and is staring at them morosely. "At least he can draw."
Dustin sniffs. "I can draw! I just prefer more exciting work."
Dustin is majoring in Graphic Design, and he can't draw. Chris is majoring in Digital Media. He can't draw either.
Mark sometimes feels like all he ever does is draw, but at least it means architecture is easy.
"Seriously, are these a series?" Dustin continues, snatching up Mark's work. "Guy fucking dies?"
"Mark," Chris says, exasperated. "I thought you said you were going to stop that. You know what the dean said when she looked through your portfolio."
Mark shrugs and takes his pages back from Dustin. "It's on the news," he says, and closes everything into his binder.
It is, or at least it will be soon.
---
He has a folder for every important person in his life. There's one for his mother, and then a second folder for his sisters and a third for his father. They have everything from the earliest scribbles to the ones he drew last night, right before his mother called him to remind him about his sister's birthday. The folders are overfull, enormous, but there are some things he can't throw out. He stores everything in a box in the bottom drawer of his desk.
Since coming to RISD Chris and Dustin have gotten their own folder, too. Mark tried to delay the inevitable and just kept everything in a stack, but Dustin had come digging through one day and had teased Mark about being obsessed with them. Mark gave up the next day and bought a folder. It was a gesture, not that Dustin or Chris knew it.
Mark thumbs through and finds the last sheet of paper he'd drawn them on. It was just a preemptive sketch - he hadn't known what he'd need it for yet.
Now, though, he fills in the details. Dustin and Chris are already sitting on the couch, and the TV is blank behind them. Mark fills in the news there, the ten o'clock report, and then adds the pieces of Chris' collage to the floor. Last he changes Dustin's hand, has it waving in the air as he talks about something, and makes sure neither Dustin or Chris are looking at the TV.
It would be bad if Dustin or Chris figured out the news didn't show the accident until several hours after he'd drawn it, Mark is pretty sure. They've never noticed before, but this is insurance.
Nobody's ever looked at the pictures and figured it out. Mark has strips, like comics, where he'll detail entire days' worth of events, and when he shows them to people all he gets is a blank look and a question about why he's showing them stick figures. He spent almost two years trying to get his mother to understand what he was doing before she started to get worried and he started to shut up.
---
He wakes up too early the next day, antsy and unhappy. He grabs cereal and eats with his fingers, anything to keep his hands busy, but he ends up giving in and snatching up a sketchpad. His fingers are shaking as he gets the lines down as quickly as possible - but it's just a dog, in the end, and when the urgency is gone Mark scowls down at the paper and crumples it up.
Hours of lost sleep for a damn poodle.
He leaves early so Dustin and Chris won't wake up and wonder what's wrong with him.
But the urgency comes back as soon as he gets to the studio, and he snarls at nothing and grabs a sheaf of paper. It's the dog again, this time with a hand clutching its collar. Mark grabs for the paper but he can't make himself throw it away.
As if the poodle is something fucking special.
He keeps an eye out all that day for the dog, but he doesn't see it. In between and during classes he has his sketchbook out, ignoring all assignments in favor of that stupid picture.
Mark's not an idiot - by mid-afternoon he's figured out this is not going away. Instead of ignoring the urge, he focuses in on it. It's a pretty safe bet that the dog isn't the important part.
He draws the hand small, traces it up the wrist and to the arm. The picture doesn't want to come, and Mark frowns. He's never had this much trouble before. He gives up on the details, finally, just draws the vague outline of a person. He can't even tell if it's male or female.
It continues like that for a couple of days.
Chris even remarks on it, comes and watches over his shoulder a couple of times, asking if he wants to transfer and that's why he's building a different portfolio. Mark says something about portrait work and mumbles vulgarities until Chris fucks off.
Dustin just tells him his portraits suck and leaves him alone.
By the end of the week there's an entire scene, and Mark has drawn it from every possible angle. And then something new - Mark draws himself in.
He doesn't draw his face, but it's him nonetheless. He's in every picture, of course, inasmuch as he creates them and always leaves traces of his preferences and expectations, but this is different. He rarely literally sees himself.
But there he is, facing down the stranger poodle and all, and Mark snorts and sets the paper aside.
It doesn't stop yet. Next the person is talking to him, gesturing at him, and eventually Chris and Dustin join them, and when the familiar shapes of their apartment appear around the blank figure Mark starts to grow annoyed.
He only ever draws these scenes now. He can't even construct architecture - the rulers and angles always migrate to the side, lost to the appeal of curves and shadows on a blank face. It's killing his work, killing his grades, and he's furious with himself for not just finishing this. It's still refusing to come on its own, the compulsion stops as soon as he draws another blank profile, and finally, grudgingly, he pulls out every drawing since the first one and looks them over.
There's something missing in every single one, but Mark doesn't have to put it there. These pictures are happy to stay blank - but if this is going to happen, if he's drawn this for himself, he's going to finish it.
He starts with small additions, indiscriminate ones. First comes the hand, just that one hand with the dog, and he fills in the fingernails. They're smooth, all but the thumbnail, because the person is anxious and hides it except sometimes, except when they bite that one thumb. It's not enough to be irritating - it's good character, and somewhere in the back of his head Mark remembers his eight grade art teacher telling the class it's all in the details.
He snorts, and moves up to the wrist. It's still no-nonsense, he refuses to create someone obnoxious or irritating, and it isn't until he finishes the watch that he realizes it's big and bulky and male.
The watch defines the wrist, gives Mark rules so the arm has a faint dusting of hair, a knobby jut of wrist bone that shades up and disappears under a long-sleeved shirt. Mark skips that, because he hates drawing clothes - they denote status and roles and all the trappings he hates. Whatever the man with the dog is wearing, it's smooth and fitting, and Mark leaves it at that.
Then the wider portraits are shuffling under his hands, the edges of the paper already starting to feel well-worn, and Mark has an empty profile to fill. He smoothes out the shoulders, makes them broader and obviously male. He skips the torso and goes down the legs, moving feet and shadows until the guy has his weight balanced forward, though Mark can't tell if it's impatience or excitement.
Then he pulls up the first sketch with a full head and stares at it for a very long time.
He's never been good with faces. People's appearances sometimes match their personalities but not always, and he can never make the face fit the person. He does it piecemeal instead - first the eyebrows, and then the ears, and then the nose and the mouth and the neck. Then he has to fill in the eyes, and there's this wide open space there, so between the blankness and the dark lines of the brows Mark fills in large, dark eyes and eyelashes. It looks ridiculous, but also complete, so Mark scribbles a few lines for hair to elongate the face and then moves on.
Mark gets to the sketch he first drew himself in, where they are standing opposite each other. He erases the man from the feet up and redraws him, stretching him and making him taller. He could be any height, of course, but Mark won't make him shorter than himself - any shorter than him is too short, and Mark doesn't think this guy is supposed to be too anything.
He ignores the sun rising, and he ignores when his class should start, and he ignores when Chris knocks on the door. He just draws, filling in the blanks and finding smaller and smaller details, until the man is complete and standing stark on the page, darker and more elaborate than all his surroundings; more important.
Then Mark stops, and sets down his pencil, and looks.
It should be satisfying, that he's finally done, but there's exhaustion under his skin and impatience - with this much effort, he wants results, and there's no way to guarantee these pictures mean anything. They should, but while Mark's inclusion of himself and the details of his own life guarantee the two of them will meet, it doesn't promise anything beyond that initial appearance.
Mark narrows his eyes, staring at the guy's face, and then goes to call his mother.
---
Dustin and Chris are very alarmed when the boxes show up.
Mark signs for them and lets the guy drop them in the living room, and then he starts shoving them around, clearing a space in the middle so he can sort through.
"What the hell?" Chris says, for the third time, and then takes matters into his own hands and opens one of the boxes. "Are these--?" he says, and Mark makes a derisive noise. The boxes are all very clearly labeled, because moms are good at things like organization.
He finds the most recent box, the one from last year and his senior year in high school, and he starts digging.
"Dude," Dustin says, and Mark says, "Go away."
They don't, instead sifting through all of Mark's work as he tosses it onto the couch behind him. When he's done with the first box, he makes a frustrated noise and stands up, scowling.
"Mark, what are you looking for?" Chris asks, and starts putting the first box back to rights.
Mark turns, staring at the two of them, and then goes to grab his folder of the guy.
"This is what you've been working on," Chris says, and yes, wonderful observation skills, but then he adds, "You're looking for something to put with these?"
"Him," Mark says. "I need to find the other drawings of him." They have to be here. He's familiar.
Dustin makes a gleeful noise and upends the box nearest to him, scattering paper and plastic and metal and wood all over the place. Chris looks at Dustin, and looks at Mark, and then he grabs another box.
Dustin finds one first - it's sloppily done on notebook paper from some time in Mark's early high school years, a drawing in the margins that eclipsed the whole page, and it's just a practice in pose, the guy looking back over his shoulder at the viewer.
"Are you trying to make a collection showing your progress?" Chris asks, looking fascinated. "You've been drawing one person to show how your style changes? That's an amazing idea. You should've used this in your admissions portfolio."
"No," Mark says, and takes the paper from Dustin to add to the folder.
It takes them three hours to go through all the boxes. Chris looks skeptical when Mark starts digging through the earliest ones, the ones from his infancy when the crayons were the size of his fist and his paper was more likely to end up torn than colored. Mark looks, because he refuses to miss one, but the earliest drawing is from when he was six or seven, and it's done in purple colored pencil on construction paper. Dustin swears he sees no resemblance, but Mark sets it in the folder with the rest of the sketches and knows it's the same person.
All told there are probably close to a hundred drawings, and Mark looks through them, pleased.
"Are you going to explain what this is about?" Chris says, but Mark waves a hand over his shoulder and locks himself back in his bedroom.
---
It becomes a test of Mark's patience. He knows now, is absolutely certain, that he's going to meet this guy, and sometime soon. He's been working towards it a long time, and now the only thing Mark has yet to discover is who he actually is. It would be exciting, and it is, at first, except the excitement quickly edges into irritation.
Chris and Dustin keep pestering him about the drawings, and his mother wants to know too, since she sent him the boxes full of the work she'd insisted on keeping which he'd insisted he didn't need - and her self-satisfaction at that admittance is almost unbearable - and she feels she deserves to know why. On top of all that, Mark is having to work to catch back up in his classes. Everything considered, he's more than a little frustrated.
And then, in early winter, Mark trips over a poodle and lands in a snowbank.
He doesn't see, at first, what he tripped over, because he was paging through his sketchpad and tearing out all the pages Dustin has drawn obscene things on, by-products of too much alcohol and a proximity to a pencil and Mark's pad.
"Are you okay?" someone asks, laughing, and Mark lifts his head and stares.
"Hey," the guy says, sounding more concerned. The poodle comes up and licks at Mark's face, and the guy leans down and pulls it away by its collar.
"That's your dog," Mark says. It's disappointing - what sort of person owns a poodle?
"Uh, no," the guy says, looking confused, and then a girl jogs up from behind him and says, "Sorry! Sorry!"
"It's hers," the guy says brightly, and hands it over.
"Yeah," Mark says. The girl has put the dog on a leash and pulled it away, and Mark was capable of figuring that out on his own.
"Here," the guy says, reaching down, and Mark lets himself be pulled out of the snow.
"Seriously, are you okay?" the guy says again, and Mark nods sharply. He puts his hands in his pocket, and then realizes he doesn't have his sketchpad. He looks around for it, because it will be all wet, ruined, and then the guy says, "Oh, here," and picks the pad up from by his feet, where it lays only slightly wet and mostly safe on the sidewalk.
"Hey, you're in architecture?" the guy says, interested, and starts to flip through.
Mark slaps his hand and takes it away.
"Oh, sorry," the guy says, looking sheepish.
Mark shakes his head. There are still a few pages tucked in the back that Mark really doesn't want him to see, plus Dustin's dick drawings are a more than a little childish.
"I'm Eduardo," the guy says, and he holds out his hand.
After a minute, Mark shakes it, and then he says, "Mark."
Eduardo smiles at him. "It's nice to meet you."
Mark nods, and then shoves his sketchpad into his backpack.
"So, hey, you go here, right?" Eduardo asks.
They're in the middle of campus.
"Do you?" Mark says.
"Yeah," Eduardo says, "I'm studying industrial design."
Mark is saved by Chris calling for him from down the block. He turns, and so does Eduardo, and when Chris gets to them he stares.
"Hi," he says to Eduardo, and Mark glares.
"Hello," Eduardo says, and introduces himself to Chris, too.
Mark glares harder, and Chris looks between them, confused. "I didn't know you were a friend of Mark's," he says, because he's an ass, and Eduardo says, "Actually, we just--"
"Next time Dustin gets drunk," Mark interrupts loudly, "keep him away from my backpack."
"Did he draw all over your work again?" Chris asks, sighing, and Mark nods.
"Who's Dustin?" Eduardo asks.
"Our other roommate," Chris says, and, to Mark, "You were supposed to meet us for lunch. We need to help with his presentation."
Mark frowns.
"Oh, for the student exhibition?" Eduardo says, perking up. "He's in that?"
"Yeah," Chris says, looking pleased. "He's on the second day. We're supposed to go over his presentation for him." The last part is still a little pointed.
"Cool," Eduardo says, rocking back on his heels, and Chris darts a look at Mark and clears his throat.
Mark cocks his head.
Chris sighs. "Would you like to come, Eduardo? Since you know Mark, Dustin can't complain about you coming over, and we could use a more unbiased opinion."
"Sure!" Eduardo says brightly, and that's how Eduardo ends up at their apartment.
---
Dustin keeps making cracks about Mark's mystery man, which go mostly over Eduardo's head and make Chris kick him every time.
Mark ignores it, because he's used to this, and he's also still pissed at Dustin for scribbling on his shit. He can't yell, though, because that might scare Eduardo off, and also then Chris would probably kick him, too.
Mark thought Dustin's presentation sucked. Eduardo wasn't willing to offer any criticisms at all. Chris gave thoughtful consideration to every aspect and then took one look at Dustin's hopeful face and said it was the best thing he'd ever seen.
"A complete waste of time," Mark says, when Chris is safely ensconced in the kitchen with Dustin.
Eduardo laughs, and then says, "You're supposed to support your friends."
Mark shrugs. He supports Dustin. There's just not much to do - Chris already does everything important.
"Can I see some of your drawings?" Eduardo asks, nodding down at Mark's lap, where he's flipping his sketchpad back and forth between his palms.
Mark shifts. He should've seen this coming, especially considering they've just spent way too long looking at Dustin's shit, but he doesn't know how to answer. Years of requests have made him practiced at telling all and sundry to go fuck themselves, but Eduardo doesn't seem like the type to take that well.
And Mark wants to show him.
"He can show you some of his older stuff," Chris says, and looks at Mark knowingly.
Mark scowls at him, but then Dustin comes over with one of the boxes with the really old stuff, and Mark groans but doesn't protest, because embarrassing high school attempts at abstract aside, anything's better than Eduardo seeing Mark's folder of him.
Eduardo coos over Mark's baby drawings, and laughs at his poor attempts at comics, and just generally makes Mark wish he'd sent all the boxes back home at break.
Chris doesn't stop smirking at Mark all evening.
When Mark looks down at what he's been drawing, he winces. It's the scene in front of him, and it's ridiculously sappy - all brightness and fuzzy lines, like a soft lens frame from an old movie, and Mark scratches dark black gashes across the page before crumpling it up.
Eduardo looks up, but Dustin says, "Don't mind him, he just throws tantrums when he screws something up."
Mark gives him the finger, and Eduardo laughs again, and Chris asks Eduardo to stay for dinner; then Dustin convinces him to stay for video games, and a movie after that, and by the time Mark is done doodling his entire family, both nuclear and extended, it's well past midnight and Eduardo has fallen asleep on his feet.
He vaguely remembers Chris turning out the overhead light and saying, "Goodnight," quietly, and grunting back, but he doesn't know what else is going on, like why Eduardo is asleep on their couch and keeping Mark's toes warm. Mark wiggles said toes, as a test, but Eduardo doesn't even twitch.
Sighing, he grabs all of his pencils and scattered papers, and manages to get out from underneath Eduardo without falling on his face. Then he stops and looks for a moment. He hadn't drawn this: not Eduardo sleeping here, or the way his eyes move under his eyelids, or how uncomfortable his ridiculous clothes look to sleep in.
Mark sort of wishes he'd taken the time to draw the clothes - this professional look is almost unbelievable. He can't correct it now, though - Eduardo wears suits, Mark is absolutely sure, just as sure as he was that Eduardo was taller than him or had dark eyes. Finding out after the fact doesn't make it any less irrefutable.
"You don't have to be my friend," Mark tells Eduardo's sleeping face, but he doesn't mean it, and when he gets to his room he draws Eduardo coming by the next day.
---
Eduardo comes by the next day, and the next, and eventually it's a surprise the one day he doesn't come by, and that is when Chris finally cracks and corners Mark.
"So who is he?" Chris asks.
"Our roommate," Mark says. "His name is Dustin."
"Fucker," Dustin says cheerfully. "Stop avoiding the question."
"Why are you always here?" Mark says. Dustin, if possible, leaves even less than he does. But Chris never yells at Dustin.
"I'm your roommate," Dustin says, because he thinks he's funny, and Chris waves a hand in front of Mark's face and says, "Eduardo."
"Another student," Mark says, and Chris frowns at him.
"I thought you'd known him for a long time," Chris says. "You have drawings of him from years ago."
"I drew him years ago," Mark says, shrugging. "We ran into each other over a poodle."
"So he's like, a long-lost childhood friend?" Dustin says, looking intrigued.
Mark rolls his eyes and shoves past Chris.
He is a little worried Chris might try asking Eduardo next - they've been having a lot of conversations ever since Chris discovered Eduardo is in one of his classes, and they'd both wondered for days how they'd never noticed; that particular week made Mark uncomfortable, and he mostly kept his head down - but when Eduardo comes over and Chris starts to bring it up, Dustin butts in with, "So, tell me about your and Mark's lifelong love!" and Eduardo says, "We fell in love the day we were born," completely straight-faced, and leans against Mark.
Mark aims a triumphant look at Chris and tucks his sketchpad away.
---
Eduardo kisses Mark after class one day.
Mark drew it early, and gave himself a couple of days to adjust to the idea, so when it happens he kisses back, just enough to learn Eduardo's taste, and then backs away.
"What?" Eduardo asks, and tugs him forward again. His hands are wrapped in Mark's hoodie, and he's smiling softly, as if Mark has done something to deserve his attention or affection.
"No," Mark says, and shakes his head, and waits while Eduardo slowly starts to believe him.
"I should go," Eduardo says at last, looking away when he finally believes Mark is serious.
"Don't," Mark says, then bites his tongue.
"I'll come by tomorrow," Eduardo says, and smiles in a way that makes Mark want to yell at him for trying lie.
"It's not your fault," Mark says.
"Of course not," Eduardo says, and keeps pulling away.
"I just can't - it's not fair," Mark says finally, before Eduardo can walk out the door.
Eduardo turns around and looks puzzled, and Mark--
Mark doesn't know how to explain. Instead he brings out the folder, emptier by far than the others because he's not quite stupid enough to show Eduardo the ones from his childhood. Eduardo watches him curiously, a faint shadow of rejection still hiding at his mouth and in the curl of his brow, and Mark's fingers twitch. He could make that go away, there are so many ways.
The easiest way, the most complicated, is to hand over the folder. He does, and watches Eduardo open it and flip through, confusion turning slowly to delight as he watches their story shape itself over the pages.
"Mark?" he says, and looks up. "You've been drawing us."
"I drew us," Mark corrects him. He rocks forward onto the balls of his feet but otherwise refuses to move closer. "I drew the first ones almost a month before I met you."
Eduardo flips back to the beginning. "I don't understand."
Mark blows air out. "I've been drawing since I was young. The things I draw happen."
Eduardo looks up at him, frowning. "You think you draw the future?" He sounds hesitant, unsure, as if Mark were mocking him; or worse, as if he's worried Mark might be serious and he's worried about what that would mean.
"No," Mark says, and watches Eduardo's shoulders relax just a fraction. "I create it."
"Mark," Eduardo says slowly, and then is quiet for a very long time. Mark stands, and waits - he knows Eduardo will speak again eventually; Mark would never make someone so infuriating as to let their conversations trail off unfinished. "Mark," Eduardo says finally, "you know that's impossible."
"Yes," Mark says, "but I also know it's true."
Eduardo closes his eyes, as if he's counting for patience or praying. Mark doesn't know, and he doesn't particularly care. "Mark," Eduardo repeats, "that's impossible." He stresses the last word, as if Mark might have missed it the first time around.
Mark scowls. "I'm not going to argue with you. You'll believe me in a minute."
Eduardo looks doubtful, and Mark turns his back to open his desk drawer. The thin sheets of paper rustle as he pulls them out, and Mark is careful to keep them hidden as he turns to face Eduardo.
"I've been with you all evening," he says clearly. "You know I have."
When Eduardo nods, Mark holds out the sheets.
Eduardo gets it almost instantly. Mark could tell by the noise he makes as he breathes in, even if Mark hadn't made sure he would. Mark had drawn Eduardo, shoulders hunched over as he looks at papers, and he'd made sure the impression of sudden awareness drenched the scene. Eduardo looks down at a drawing of himself looking down at a drawing and then he looks up at Mark, startled.
"Look at the rest," Mark says, refusing to hold his breath.
Nobody else has ever seen the future in his pictures, but Mark needs Eduardo to see it more than anyone. There's more after the first one, showing Eduardo as he sees the pages, as he understands that Mark is telling the truth.
When he does start to look through, does start to understand, Mark's sense of accomplishment is faded and secondary; he's already felt it, after all, he felt it when he created this outcome the first time around.
Eduardo finally lets his hand fall to the side, looking exhausted and sort of blank. Mark tilts his head.
"No," Eduardo says abruptly. Mark can feel himself startle. Eduardo doesn't notice. "You're right," Eduardo says. "You draw the future."
"I create the future," Mark says.
"No," Eduardo repeats. "You just draw it."
Mark blows out a breath and steps away.
"I'll prove it to you," Eduardo says, and stands up. He sets the pages very carefully, very cautiously down, because Mark has taught him to be protective of art.
Mark shakes his head.
"Yes," Eduardo insists. "Watch," and he steps forward, and holds Mark's face, and kisses him again.
Mark kisses back, helplessly, and then twists away. Eduardo lets him go, laughing.
"Oh, no, Mark," Eduardo says, soft and bright, "you see? You couldn't have created this. How could I surprise you otherwise?"
Mark swallows and doesn't look around.
Eduardo touches his shoulder lightly. "I believe you create some of your future, you know," he says softly. "I think everyone does. And you drew all of that a long time before you met me. But you're wrong - I think you just draw the future, after all, and that's why you saw me, and why you saw us, and now I've come in and messed the future up. If you created me I couldn't do that."
Mark shakes his head, wordless.
Eduardo tries to kiss him again, shaking his head, but Mark backs away. The pictures don't show him doing this, and Mark feels a sense of relief only until Eduardo's face falls, disappointment and every awful thing Mark ever envisioned.
"I'll prove it to you," Eduardo says again, voice edging into determination, and Mark stays still as he leaves.
---
"Look," Eduardo says as he sits down across from Mark the next day on the quad, and Mark flips back three pages in his sketchbook as a response. Eduardo sighs out, frustrated. "Maybe you should just stop drawing me," he says. "Then you'd know you have nothing to do with my actions."
"I have to draw you," Mark says, and puts the last of the lines onto the kid's soccer ball.
Eduardo looks at the paper, and then stares over as a little boy and his sister run by, perfect in the details down to backpacks and ball. "Okay," he says, after a minute. "That's a little creepy."
Mark shrugs.
---
Eduardo won't give up.
That afternoon he makes Mark draw Dustin in the wrong shirt.
Chris comes in, spills coffee on Dustin, and Dustin changes into the shirt Mark's drawn, which he explains his mother mailed to him that morning.
Eduardo looks mildly perturbed but unwavering.
The next morning, Eduardo catches Mark before he can go to class and makes him draw something impossible. If it can't physically exist, he insists, then when it doesn't show up Mark will realize he can't create anything he draws.
Mark draws a twisting, impossible shape, and Eduardo stays with him all day. When they're leaving a campus coffee shop after lunch, though, a truck is delivering a new modern art sculpture to the building across the street.
Mark watches, impassive, while Eduardo's face falls.
There's a series of predictable displays - Mark draws flying pigs, which show up on a new commercial, and blue swans, which become a girl's earrings, and a terrible haircut on Chris, which is caused by Dustin's prank gone wrong.
By the end of the week, Dustin and Chris are both furious with their recent run of bad luck, Mark's hand is cramping, and Eduardo looks resigned.
"You see," Mark says.
"No," Eduardo says stubbornly, but he's lying down on the couch, exhausted.
"There's no other explanation," Mark says, and finishes shading the line of Eduardo's shoulder.
"You draw the future," Eduardo insists. "You just draw nothing but, and to an insane amount of detail and accuracy."
Mark snorts. "So everything I've ever drawn is a premonition. I've never done anything original?"
"It's no more ridiculous an idea than thinking you create the entire world," Eduardo mutters.
"Not the entire world," Mark corrects, prickling. "My world."
"I have a family, Mark," Eduardo says. "I have memories and a childhood and my own life. You didn't create me," and he sounds a little panicked and a little sad.
"Even if I did, the other stuff is still real," Mark says. "It might not have existed before I made you, but it does now."
"Mark," Eduardo says, and laughs wetly. He has his arm over his face. "I'm a person."
"Yeah," Mark says, but that evidently was not right, because Eduardo pushes himself up and leaves.
"Wardo," Mark says, and Eduardo turns around long enough to say, "I'll come by in a couple of days. Try not to draw me until then, okay?"
---
It was like telling Mark not to think of elephants. The first thing he does in the morning is draw, and habit makes him draw Eduardo. He erases it as soon as he catches himself, and hopes there weren't enough details for it to count.
Chris asks, after a couple of days, what Mark did to Eduardo to make him disappear, but Mark ignores him until he goes away.
---
Eduardo is back one day when Mark comes home. They look at each other, and Eduardo sighs before smiling tentatively, and Mark says, "I didn't draw you."
Touching the back of Mark's head lightly, Eduardo sits next to him on the couch, and they watch some television show that is honestly terrible.
"One more try," Eduardo says quietly, and Mark sighs and pulls his sketchpad from his backpack.
"This television show - draw something happening that could very obviously never show up."
"It will just flicker over," Mark says, "and then later the cable company will make an apology for the crossed lines that led to the mistake."
"Try it," Eduardo says.
"Tell me what to draw," Mark says. "When it shows up, you'll know it's not just me predicting the future, because I'll only draw what you tell me to."
Eduardo says, voice low. "Just draw this scene, right now, however you have to do it, and then draw us on TV."
Mark does, and when the drawing is done he sets the pad on Eduardo's knee and drops his pencil off the arm of the couch.
Eduardo rifles the pages absently with his thumb, and watches the TV unblinkingly.
Mark yawns, and stretches out. "We might have to wait a while," he warns, and then the screen goes dark.
In the reflection on the dead glass they stare at themselves, and then Eduardo looks down at the paper, and then back up, and says, "Fuck me," and starts to laugh.
Mark drums his fingers on his thigh. "I told you."
"Well, you don't predict the future," Eduardo says wryly. "You were entirely wrong about how we'd show up on TV."
Mark frowns, and drums harder.
"Mark," Eduardo says, and reaches over to still his fingers. "I have to figure out a way to prove you're wrong."
"Why? And I've been testing it since I was a child," Mark says, and pulls his hand away. "You're not going to come up with any new ideas."
"Because I know I'm making decisions on my own," Eduardo says softly. "But you think you control me."
Mark says, "Yes."
"It's the most egotistical thing I've ever heard," Eduardo says.
Mark straightens. "I draw something, and when I dislike it, I change the details. Any changes I make happen just like the original did. I got rid of my first grade teacher because she yelled at me. I don't know what happened to her, but she never had anything to do with me again."
"What I don't understand, then," Eduardo says, ignoring him and leaning forward, "is how you're passing your classes." He laughs a little at Mark's expression and says, "If everything you draw shows up in the real world, how do you ever turn in an original design? The professors should be failing you for lack of creativity."
Mark rolls his eyes. "Not everything I draw is meant to be real. Only the things I want."
When Eduardo gives him an odd expression, Mark narrows his eyes right back. "You wanted me," Eduardo says, and Mark rolls his eyes and grabs a folder full of a hundred pieces of paper off the coffee table to drop on his lap, and Eduardo drops it onto the floor in turn when he reaches for Mark.
"You haven't drawn me for a week," Eduardo says, when Mark twists away.
"No, but--" Mark says.
"Because I told you not to," Eduardo says. "Doesn't that make us even?"
Mark tries to explain about expectations, about his creative process, how every picture has hundreds of surrounding details that never make it on the page, and one week is not enough time to guarantee a clean slate. How he only drew their first kiss, and because Eduardo hasn't disrupted anything, how even without words Mark knew how the scene would go, because Mark knew how he wanted it and what he would want Eduardo to do.
Eduardo laughs quietly the whole time, blatantly ignoring him, and Mark finishes his explanation against Eduardo's mouth, and Mark could've rendered this, too; Eduardo drawing him down, and tracing his lines, and ignoring every hint of boundaries and doing every other thing Mark has always wished someone would do.
---
"Maybe you did create me," Eduardo says quietly, sleepily, and Mark freezes. "Maybe you were lonely, and I'm what you wanted. I don't mind," Eduardo says. He's tangled in the sheets still, lazy and relaxed with early morning exhaustion.
"No," Mark says, because he can't know it's true.
"Yes," Eduardo counters, and Mark turns when the linens rustle to see him stretching out, fingers and toes flexing everywhere. On the pad of paper underneath his fingertips Eduardo has just taken the same pose, and Eduardo smiles to see it. "Does it matter?" Eduardo asks, and comes to Mark. He folds his fingers over Mark's pencil, leads the lead up to the sketch of his own face, eyes and nose and ears and hair all exactly where they are. "I don't mind."
"You couldn't mind," Mark says, and resists the pressure Eduardo puts on his fingers. "You wouldn't be able to. If I didn't want you to."
"Maybe not," Eduardo agrees. "Maybe I can only be everything you want," he says, "but that's not too bad."
Mark swallows hard, and his hand twitches.
"If you make me," Eduardo says, "then make me happy," and he holds his hand over Mark's as Mark draws in a smile.
End.
The Social Network
Mark/Eduardo
PG
6,500 words
Mark draws Eduardo long before he meets him.
Warnings
None
Notes
For my kink_bingo square "Obedience." It's not just kinky, though - it's a little weirder than that.
The Social Network is property of Columbia Pictures. This work was not created for money.
Also on:
Dreamwidth | AO3
Mark has been drawing for as long as he can remember. He was three and scribbling with crayons on the floor, and then he was eleven and just starting to experiment with different mediums, and now he's nineteen and always sketching something.
"Dude, that's morbid," Dustin says, peering over his shoulder. Mark has his binder of loose leaf sketches out, and he's been drawing this man all week. It took him a while to figure out they were all connected, because there was nothing recognizable about the man in the first one - he was entirely torn to pieces. This most recent one is probably the first in the series, though, and Mark keeps his hand relaxed while he uses vague lines for the car, shades the man's face, and adds the faint suggestion of rain. There's a little girl in the back seat, but Mark doesn't know where she went in the later scenes.
"Why don't you ever draw nice shit?" Dustin complains.
"Leave him alone," Chris says from in front of the couch, where he has pieces of collage spread out and is staring at them morosely. "At least he can draw."
Dustin sniffs. "I can draw! I just prefer more exciting work."
Dustin is majoring in Graphic Design, and he can't draw. Chris is majoring in Digital Media. He can't draw either.
Mark sometimes feels like all he ever does is draw, but at least it means architecture is easy.
"Seriously, are these a series?" Dustin continues, snatching up Mark's work. "Guy fucking dies?"
"Mark," Chris says, exasperated. "I thought you said you were going to stop that. You know what the dean said when she looked through your portfolio."
Mark shrugs and takes his pages back from Dustin. "It's on the news," he says, and closes everything into his binder.
It is, or at least it will be soon.
---
He has a folder for every important person in his life. There's one for his mother, and then a second folder for his sisters and a third for his father. They have everything from the earliest scribbles to the ones he drew last night, right before his mother called him to remind him about his sister's birthday. The folders are overfull, enormous, but there are some things he can't throw out. He stores everything in a box in the bottom drawer of his desk.
Since coming to RISD Chris and Dustin have gotten their own folder, too. Mark tried to delay the inevitable and just kept everything in a stack, but Dustin had come digging through one day and had teased Mark about being obsessed with them. Mark gave up the next day and bought a folder. It was a gesture, not that Dustin or Chris knew it.
Mark thumbs through and finds the last sheet of paper he'd drawn them on. It was just a preemptive sketch - he hadn't known what he'd need it for yet.
Now, though, he fills in the details. Dustin and Chris are already sitting on the couch, and the TV is blank behind them. Mark fills in the news there, the ten o'clock report, and then adds the pieces of Chris' collage to the floor. Last he changes Dustin's hand, has it waving in the air as he talks about something, and makes sure neither Dustin or Chris are looking at the TV.
It would be bad if Dustin or Chris figured out the news didn't show the accident until several hours after he'd drawn it, Mark is pretty sure. They've never noticed before, but this is insurance.
Nobody's ever looked at the pictures and figured it out. Mark has strips, like comics, where he'll detail entire days' worth of events, and when he shows them to people all he gets is a blank look and a question about why he's showing them stick figures. He spent almost two years trying to get his mother to understand what he was doing before she started to get worried and he started to shut up.
---
He wakes up too early the next day, antsy and unhappy. He grabs cereal and eats with his fingers, anything to keep his hands busy, but he ends up giving in and snatching up a sketchpad. His fingers are shaking as he gets the lines down as quickly as possible - but it's just a dog, in the end, and when the urgency is gone Mark scowls down at the paper and crumples it up.
Hours of lost sleep for a damn poodle.
He leaves early so Dustin and Chris won't wake up and wonder what's wrong with him.
But the urgency comes back as soon as he gets to the studio, and he snarls at nothing and grabs a sheaf of paper. It's the dog again, this time with a hand clutching its collar. Mark grabs for the paper but he can't make himself throw it away.
As if the poodle is something fucking special.
He keeps an eye out all that day for the dog, but he doesn't see it. In between and during classes he has his sketchbook out, ignoring all assignments in favor of that stupid picture.
Mark's not an idiot - by mid-afternoon he's figured out this is not going away. Instead of ignoring the urge, he focuses in on it. It's a pretty safe bet that the dog isn't the important part.
He draws the hand small, traces it up the wrist and to the arm. The picture doesn't want to come, and Mark frowns. He's never had this much trouble before. He gives up on the details, finally, just draws the vague outline of a person. He can't even tell if it's male or female.
It continues like that for a couple of days.
Chris even remarks on it, comes and watches over his shoulder a couple of times, asking if he wants to transfer and that's why he's building a different portfolio. Mark says something about portrait work and mumbles vulgarities until Chris fucks off.
Dustin just tells him his portraits suck and leaves him alone.
By the end of the week there's an entire scene, and Mark has drawn it from every possible angle. And then something new - Mark draws himself in.
He doesn't draw his face, but it's him nonetheless. He's in every picture, of course, inasmuch as he creates them and always leaves traces of his preferences and expectations, but this is different. He rarely literally sees himself.
But there he is, facing down the stranger poodle and all, and Mark snorts and sets the paper aside.
It doesn't stop yet. Next the person is talking to him, gesturing at him, and eventually Chris and Dustin join them, and when the familiar shapes of their apartment appear around the blank figure Mark starts to grow annoyed.
He only ever draws these scenes now. He can't even construct architecture - the rulers and angles always migrate to the side, lost to the appeal of curves and shadows on a blank face. It's killing his work, killing his grades, and he's furious with himself for not just finishing this. It's still refusing to come on its own, the compulsion stops as soon as he draws another blank profile, and finally, grudgingly, he pulls out every drawing since the first one and looks them over.
There's something missing in every single one, but Mark doesn't have to put it there. These pictures are happy to stay blank - but if this is going to happen, if he's drawn this for himself, he's going to finish it.
He starts with small additions, indiscriminate ones. First comes the hand, just that one hand with the dog, and he fills in the fingernails. They're smooth, all but the thumbnail, because the person is anxious and hides it except sometimes, except when they bite that one thumb. It's not enough to be irritating - it's good character, and somewhere in the back of his head Mark remembers his eight grade art teacher telling the class it's all in the details.
He snorts, and moves up to the wrist. It's still no-nonsense, he refuses to create someone obnoxious or irritating, and it isn't until he finishes the watch that he realizes it's big and bulky and male.
The watch defines the wrist, gives Mark rules so the arm has a faint dusting of hair, a knobby jut of wrist bone that shades up and disappears under a long-sleeved shirt. Mark skips that, because he hates drawing clothes - they denote status and roles and all the trappings he hates. Whatever the man with the dog is wearing, it's smooth and fitting, and Mark leaves it at that.
Then the wider portraits are shuffling under his hands, the edges of the paper already starting to feel well-worn, and Mark has an empty profile to fill. He smoothes out the shoulders, makes them broader and obviously male. He skips the torso and goes down the legs, moving feet and shadows until the guy has his weight balanced forward, though Mark can't tell if it's impatience or excitement.
Then he pulls up the first sketch with a full head and stares at it for a very long time.
He's never been good with faces. People's appearances sometimes match their personalities but not always, and he can never make the face fit the person. He does it piecemeal instead - first the eyebrows, and then the ears, and then the nose and the mouth and the neck. Then he has to fill in the eyes, and there's this wide open space there, so between the blankness and the dark lines of the brows Mark fills in large, dark eyes and eyelashes. It looks ridiculous, but also complete, so Mark scribbles a few lines for hair to elongate the face and then moves on.
Mark gets to the sketch he first drew himself in, where they are standing opposite each other. He erases the man from the feet up and redraws him, stretching him and making him taller. He could be any height, of course, but Mark won't make him shorter than himself - any shorter than him is too short, and Mark doesn't think this guy is supposed to be too anything.
He ignores the sun rising, and he ignores when his class should start, and he ignores when Chris knocks on the door. He just draws, filling in the blanks and finding smaller and smaller details, until the man is complete and standing stark on the page, darker and more elaborate than all his surroundings; more important.
Then Mark stops, and sets down his pencil, and looks.
It should be satisfying, that he's finally done, but there's exhaustion under his skin and impatience - with this much effort, he wants results, and there's no way to guarantee these pictures mean anything. They should, but while Mark's inclusion of himself and the details of his own life guarantee the two of them will meet, it doesn't promise anything beyond that initial appearance.
Mark narrows his eyes, staring at the guy's face, and then goes to call his mother.
---
Dustin and Chris are very alarmed when the boxes show up.
Mark signs for them and lets the guy drop them in the living room, and then he starts shoving them around, clearing a space in the middle so he can sort through.
"What the hell?" Chris says, for the third time, and then takes matters into his own hands and opens one of the boxes. "Are these--?" he says, and Mark makes a derisive noise. The boxes are all very clearly labeled, because moms are good at things like organization.
He finds the most recent box, the one from last year and his senior year in high school, and he starts digging.
"Dude," Dustin says, and Mark says, "Go away."
They don't, instead sifting through all of Mark's work as he tosses it onto the couch behind him. When he's done with the first box, he makes a frustrated noise and stands up, scowling.
"Mark, what are you looking for?" Chris asks, and starts putting the first box back to rights.
Mark turns, staring at the two of them, and then goes to grab his folder of the guy.
"This is what you've been working on," Chris says, and yes, wonderful observation skills, but then he adds, "You're looking for something to put with these?"
"Him," Mark says. "I need to find the other drawings of him." They have to be here. He's familiar.
Dustin makes a gleeful noise and upends the box nearest to him, scattering paper and plastic and metal and wood all over the place. Chris looks at Dustin, and looks at Mark, and then he grabs another box.
Dustin finds one first - it's sloppily done on notebook paper from some time in Mark's early high school years, a drawing in the margins that eclipsed the whole page, and it's just a practice in pose, the guy looking back over his shoulder at the viewer.
"Are you trying to make a collection showing your progress?" Chris asks, looking fascinated. "You've been drawing one person to show how your style changes? That's an amazing idea. You should've used this in your admissions portfolio."
"No," Mark says, and takes the paper from Dustin to add to the folder.
It takes them three hours to go through all the boxes. Chris looks skeptical when Mark starts digging through the earliest ones, the ones from his infancy when the crayons were the size of his fist and his paper was more likely to end up torn than colored. Mark looks, because he refuses to miss one, but the earliest drawing is from when he was six or seven, and it's done in purple colored pencil on construction paper. Dustin swears he sees no resemblance, but Mark sets it in the folder with the rest of the sketches and knows it's the same person.
All told there are probably close to a hundred drawings, and Mark looks through them, pleased.
"Are you going to explain what this is about?" Chris says, but Mark waves a hand over his shoulder and locks himself back in his bedroom.
---
It becomes a test of Mark's patience. He knows now, is absolutely certain, that he's going to meet this guy, and sometime soon. He's been working towards it a long time, and now the only thing Mark has yet to discover is who he actually is. It would be exciting, and it is, at first, except the excitement quickly edges into irritation.
Chris and Dustin keep pestering him about the drawings, and his mother wants to know too, since she sent him the boxes full of the work she'd insisted on keeping which he'd insisted he didn't need - and her self-satisfaction at that admittance is almost unbearable - and she feels she deserves to know why. On top of all that, Mark is having to work to catch back up in his classes. Everything considered, he's more than a little frustrated.
And then, in early winter, Mark trips over a poodle and lands in a snowbank.
He doesn't see, at first, what he tripped over, because he was paging through his sketchpad and tearing out all the pages Dustin has drawn obscene things on, by-products of too much alcohol and a proximity to a pencil and Mark's pad.
"Are you okay?" someone asks, laughing, and Mark lifts his head and stares.
"Hey," the guy says, sounding more concerned. The poodle comes up and licks at Mark's face, and the guy leans down and pulls it away by its collar.
"That's your dog," Mark says. It's disappointing - what sort of person owns a poodle?
"Uh, no," the guy says, looking confused, and then a girl jogs up from behind him and says, "Sorry! Sorry!"
"It's hers," the guy says brightly, and hands it over.
"Yeah," Mark says. The girl has put the dog on a leash and pulled it away, and Mark was capable of figuring that out on his own.
"Here," the guy says, reaching down, and Mark lets himself be pulled out of the snow.
"Seriously, are you okay?" the guy says again, and Mark nods sharply. He puts his hands in his pocket, and then realizes he doesn't have his sketchpad. He looks around for it, because it will be all wet, ruined, and then the guy says, "Oh, here," and picks the pad up from by his feet, where it lays only slightly wet and mostly safe on the sidewalk.
"Hey, you're in architecture?" the guy says, interested, and starts to flip through.
Mark slaps his hand and takes it away.
"Oh, sorry," the guy says, looking sheepish.
Mark shakes his head. There are still a few pages tucked in the back that Mark really doesn't want him to see, plus Dustin's dick drawings are a more than a little childish.
"I'm Eduardo," the guy says, and he holds out his hand.
After a minute, Mark shakes it, and then he says, "Mark."
Eduardo smiles at him. "It's nice to meet you."
Mark nods, and then shoves his sketchpad into his backpack.
"So, hey, you go here, right?" Eduardo asks.
They're in the middle of campus.
"Do you?" Mark says.
"Yeah," Eduardo says, "I'm studying industrial design."
Mark is saved by Chris calling for him from down the block. He turns, and so does Eduardo, and when Chris gets to them he stares.
"Hi," he says to Eduardo, and Mark glares.
"Hello," Eduardo says, and introduces himself to Chris, too.
Mark glares harder, and Chris looks between them, confused. "I didn't know you were a friend of Mark's," he says, because he's an ass, and Eduardo says, "Actually, we just--"
"Next time Dustin gets drunk," Mark interrupts loudly, "keep him away from my backpack."
"Did he draw all over your work again?" Chris asks, sighing, and Mark nods.
"Who's Dustin?" Eduardo asks.
"Our other roommate," Chris says, and, to Mark, "You were supposed to meet us for lunch. We need to help with his presentation."
Mark frowns.
"Oh, for the student exhibition?" Eduardo says, perking up. "He's in that?"
"Yeah," Chris says, looking pleased. "He's on the second day. We're supposed to go over his presentation for him." The last part is still a little pointed.
"Cool," Eduardo says, rocking back on his heels, and Chris darts a look at Mark and clears his throat.
Mark cocks his head.
Chris sighs. "Would you like to come, Eduardo? Since you know Mark, Dustin can't complain about you coming over, and we could use a more unbiased opinion."
"Sure!" Eduardo says brightly, and that's how Eduardo ends up at their apartment.
---
Dustin keeps making cracks about Mark's mystery man, which go mostly over Eduardo's head and make Chris kick him every time.
Mark ignores it, because he's used to this, and he's also still pissed at Dustin for scribbling on his shit. He can't yell, though, because that might scare Eduardo off, and also then Chris would probably kick him, too.
Mark thought Dustin's presentation sucked. Eduardo wasn't willing to offer any criticisms at all. Chris gave thoughtful consideration to every aspect and then took one look at Dustin's hopeful face and said it was the best thing he'd ever seen.
"A complete waste of time," Mark says, when Chris is safely ensconced in the kitchen with Dustin.
Eduardo laughs, and then says, "You're supposed to support your friends."
Mark shrugs. He supports Dustin. There's just not much to do - Chris already does everything important.
"Can I see some of your drawings?" Eduardo asks, nodding down at Mark's lap, where he's flipping his sketchpad back and forth between his palms.
Mark shifts. He should've seen this coming, especially considering they've just spent way too long looking at Dustin's shit, but he doesn't know how to answer. Years of requests have made him practiced at telling all and sundry to go fuck themselves, but Eduardo doesn't seem like the type to take that well.
And Mark wants to show him.
"He can show you some of his older stuff," Chris says, and looks at Mark knowingly.
Mark scowls at him, but then Dustin comes over with one of the boxes with the really old stuff, and Mark groans but doesn't protest, because embarrassing high school attempts at abstract aside, anything's better than Eduardo seeing Mark's folder of him.
Eduardo coos over Mark's baby drawings, and laughs at his poor attempts at comics, and just generally makes Mark wish he'd sent all the boxes back home at break.
Chris doesn't stop smirking at Mark all evening.
When Mark looks down at what he's been drawing, he winces. It's the scene in front of him, and it's ridiculously sappy - all brightness and fuzzy lines, like a soft lens frame from an old movie, and Mark scratches dark black gashes across the page before crumpling it up.
Eduardo looks up, but Dustin says, "Don't mind him, he just throws tantrums when he screws something up."
Mark gives him the finger, and Eduardo laughs again, and Chris asks Eduardo to stay for dinner; then Dustin convinces him to stay for video games, and a movie after that, and by the time Mark is done doodling his entire family, both nuclear and extended, it's well past midnight and Eduardo has fallen asleep on his feet.
He vaguely remembers Chris turning out the overhead light and saying, "Goodnight," quietly, and grunting back, but he doesn't know what else is going on, like why Eduardo is asleep on their couch and keeping Mark's toes warm. Mark wiggles said toes, as a test, but Eduardo doesn't even twitch.
Sighing, he grabs all of his pencils and scattered papers, and manages to get out from underneath Eduardo without falling on his face. Then he stops and looks for a moment. He hadn't drawn this: not Eduardo sleeping here, or the way his eyes move under his eyelids, or how uncomfortable his ridiculous clothes look to sleep in.
Mark sort of wishes he'd taken the time to draw the clothes - this professional look is almost unbelievable. He can't correct it now, though - Eduardo wears suits, Mark is absolutely sure, just as sure as he was that Eduardo was taller than him or had dark eyes. Finding out after the fact doesn't make it any less irrefutable.
"You don't have to be my friend," Mark tells Eduardo's sleeping face, but he doesn't mean it, and when he gets to his room he draws Eduardo coming by the next day.
---
Eduardo comes by the next day, and the next, and eventually it's a surprise the one day he doesn't come by, and that is when Chris finally cracks and corners Mark.
"So who is he?" Chris asks.
"Our roommate," Mark says. "His name is Dustin."
"Fucker," Dustin says cheerfully. "Stop avoiding the question."
"Why are you always here?" Mark says. Dustin, if possible, leaves even less than he does. But Chris never yells at Dustin.
"I'm your roommate," Dustin says, because he thinks he's funny, and Chris waves a hand in front of Mark's face and says, "Eduardo."
"Another student," Mark says, and Chris frowns at him.
"I thought you'd known him for a long time," Chris says. "You have drawings of him from years ago."
"I drew him years ago," Mark says, shrugging. "We ran into each other over a poodle."
"So he's like, a long-lost childhood friend?" Dustin says, looking intrigued.
Mark rolls his eyes and shoves past Chris.
He is a little worried Chris might try asking Eduardo next - they've been having a lot of conversations ever since Chris discovered Eduardo is in one of his classes, and they'd both wondered for days how they'd never noticed; that particular week made Mark uncomfortable, and he mostly kept his head down - but when Eduardo comes over and Chris starts to bring it up, Dustin butts in with, "So, tell me about your and Mark's lifelong love!" and Eduardo says, "We fell in love the day we were born," completely straight-faced, and leans against Mark.
Mark aims a triumphant look at Chris and tucks his sketchpad away.
---
Eduardo kisses Mark after class one day.
Mark drew it early, and gave himself a couple of days to adjust to the idea, so when it happens he kisses back, just enough to learn Eduardo's taste, and then backs away.
"What?" Eduardo asks, and tugs him forward again. His hands are wrapped in Mark's hoodie, and he's smiling softly, as if Mark has done something to deserve his attention or affection.
"No," Mark says, and shakes his head, and waits while Eduardo slowly starts to believe him.
"I should go," Eduardo says at last, looking away when he finally believes Mark is serious.
"Don't," Mark says, then bites his tongue.
"I'll come by tomorrow," Eduardo says, and smiles in a way that makes Mark want to yell at him for trying lie.
"It's not your fault," Mark says.
"Of course not," Eduardo says, and keeps pulling away.
"I just can't - it's not fair," Mark says finally, before Eduardo can walk out the door.
Eduardo turns around and looks puzzled, and Mark--
Mark doesn't know how to explain. Instead he brings out the folder, emptier by far than the others because he's not quite stupid enough to show Eduardo the ones from his childhood. Eduardo watches him curiously, a faint shadow of rejection still hiding at his mouth and in the curl of his brow, and Mark's fingers twitch. He could make that go away, there are so many ways.
The easiest way, the most complicated, is to hand over the folder. He does, and watches Eduardo open it and flip through, confusion turning slowly to delight as he watches their story shape itself over the pages.
"Mark?" he says, and looks up. "You've been drawing us."
"I drew us," Mark corrects him. He rocks forward onto the balls of his feet but otherwise refuses to move closer. "I drew the first ones almost a month before I met you."
Eduardo flips back to the beginning. "I don't understand."
Mark blows air out. "I've been drawing since I was young. The things I draw happen."
Eduardo looks up at him, frowning. "You think you draw the future?" He sounds hesitant, unsure, as if Mark were mocking him; or worse, as if he's worried Mark might be serious and he's worried about what that would mean.
"No," Mark says, and watches Eduardo's shoulders relax just a fraction. "I create it."
"Mark," Eduardo says slowly, and then is quiet for a very long time. Mark stands, and waits - he knows Eduardo will speak again eventually; Mark would never make someone so infuriating as to let their conversations trail off unfinished. "Mark," Eduardo says finally, "you know that's impossible."
"Yes," Mark says, "but I also know it's true."
Eduardo closes his eyes, as if he's counting for patience or praying. Mark doesn't know, and he doesn't particularly care. "Mark," Eduardo repeats, "that's impossible." He stresses the last word, as if Mark might have missed it the first time around.
Mark scowls. "I'm not going to argue with you. You'll believe me in a minute."
Eduardo looks doubtful, and Mark turns his back to open his desk drawer. The thin sheets of paper rustle as he pulls them out, and Mark is careful to keep them hidden as he turns to face Eduardo.
"I've been with you all evening," he says clearly. "You know I have."
When Eduardo nods, Mark holds out the sheets.
Eduardo gets it almost instantly. Mark could tell by the noise he makes as he breathes in, even if Mark hadn't made sure he would. Mark had drawn Eduardo, shoulders hunched over as he looks at papers, and he'd made sure the impression of sudden awareness drenched the scene. Eduardo looks down at a drawing of himself looking down at a drawing and then he looks up at Mark, startled.
"Look at the rest," Mark says, refusing to hold his breath.
Nobody else has ever seen the future in his pictures, but Mark needs Eduardo to see it more than anyone. There's more after the first one, showing Eduardo as he sees the pages, as he understands that Mark is telling the truth.
When he does start to look through, does start to understand, Mark's sense of accomplishment is faded and secondary; he's already felt it, after all, he felt it when he created this outcome the first time around.
Eduardo finally lets his hand fall to the side, looking exhausted and sort of blank. Mark tilts his head.
"No," Eduardo says abruptly. Mark can feel himself startle. Eduardo doesn't notice. "You're right," Eduardo says. "You draw the future."
"I create the future," Mark says.
"No," Eduardo repeats. "You just draw it."
Mark blows out a breath and steps away.
"I'll prove it to you," Eduardo says, and stands up. He sets the pages very carefully, very cautiously down, because Mark has taught him to be protective of art.
Mark shakes his head.
"Yes," Eduardo insists. "Watch," and he steps forward, and holds Mark's face, and kisses him again.
Mark kisses back, helplessly, and then twists away. Eduardo lets him go, laughing.
"Oh, no, Mark," Eduardo says, soft and bright, "you see? You couldn't have created this. How could I surprise you otherwise?"
Mark swallows and doesn't look around.
Eduardo touches his shoulder lightly. "I believe you create some of your future, you know," he says softly. "I think everyone does. And you drew all of that a long time before you met me. But you're wrong - I think you just draw the future, after all, and that's why you saw me, and why you saw us, and now I've come in and messed the future up. If you created me I couldn't do that."
Mark shakes his head, wordless.
Eduardo tries to kiss him again, shaking his head, but Mark backs away. The pictures don't show him doing this, and Mark feels a sense of relief only until Eduardo's face falls, disappointment and every awful thing Mark ever envisioned.
"I'll prove it to you," Eduardo says again, voice edging into determination, and Mark stays still as he leaves.
---
"Look," Eduardo says as he sits down across from Mark the next day on the quad, and Mark flips back three pages in his sketchbook as a response. Eduardo sighs out, frustrated. "Maybe you should just stop drawing me," he says. "Then you'd know you have nothing to do with my actions."
"I have to draw you," Mark says, and puts the last of the lines onto the kid's soccer ball.
Eduardo looks at the paper, and then stares over as a little boy and his sister run by, perfect in the details down to backpacks and ball. "Okay," he says, after a minute. "That's a little creepy."
Mark shrugs.
---
Eduardo won't give up.
That afternoon he makes Mark draw Dustin in the wrong shirt.
Chris comes in, spills coffee on Dustin, and Dustin changes into the shirt Mark's drawn, which he explains his mother mailed to him that morning.
Eduardo looks mildly perturbed but unwavering.
The next morning, Eduardo catches Mark before he can go to class and makes him draw something impossible. If it can't physically exist, he insists, then when it doesn't show up Mark will realize he can't create anything he draws.
Mark draws a twisting, impossible shape, and Eduardo stays with him all day. When they're leaving a campus coffee shop after lunch, though, a truck is delivering a new modern art sculpture to the building across the street.
Mark watches, impassive, while Eduardo's face falls.
There's a series of predictable displays - Mark draws flying pigs, which show up on a new commercial, and blue swans, which become a girl's earrings, and a terrible haircut on Chris, which is caused by Dustin's prank gone wrong.
By the end of the week, Dustin and Chris are both furious with their recent run of bad luck, Mark's hand is cramping, and Eduardo looks resigned.
"You see," Mark says.
"No," Eduardo says stubbornly, but he's lying down on the couch, exhausted.
"There's no other explanation," Mark says, and finishes shading the line of Eduardo's shoulder.
"You draw the future," Eduardo insists. "You just draw nothing but, and to an insane amount of detail and accuracy."
Mark snorts. "So everything I've ever drawn is a premonition. I've never done anything original?"
"It's no more ridiculous an idea than thinking you create the entire world," Eduardo mutters.
"Not the entire world," Mark corrects, prickling. "My world."
"I have a family, Mark," Eduardo says. "I have memories and a childhood and my own life. You didn't create me," and he sounds a little panicked and a little sad.
"Even if I did, the other stuff is still real," Mark says. "It might not have existed before I made you, but it does now."
"Mark," Eduardo says, and laughs wetly. He has his arm over his face. "I'm a person."
"Yeah," Mark says, but that evidently was not right, because Eduardo pushes himself up and leaves.
"Wardo," Mark says, and Eduardo turns around long enough to say, "I'll come by in a couple of days. Try not to draw me until then, okay?"
---
It was like telling Mark not to think of elephants. The first thing he does in the morning is draw, and habit makes him draw Eduardo. He erases it as soon as he catches himself, and hopes there weren't enough details for it to count.
Chris asks, after a couple of days, what Mark did to Eduardo to make him disappear, but Mark ignores him until he goes away.
---
Eduardo is back one day when Mark comes home. They look at each other, and Eduardo sighs before smiling tentatively, and Mark says, "I didn't draw you."
Touching the back of Mark's head lightly, Eduardo sits next to him on the couch, and they watch some television show that is honestly terrible.
"One more try," Eduardo says quietly, and Mark sighs and pulls his sketchpad from his backpack.
"This television show - draw something happening that could very obviously never show up."
"It will just flicker over," Mark says, "and then later the cable company will make an apology for the crossed lines that led to the mistake."
"Try it," Eduardo says.
"Tell me what to draw," Mark says. "When it shows up, you'll know it's not just me predicting the future, because I'll only draw what you tell me to."
Eduardo says, voice low. "Just draw this scene, right now, however you have to do it, and then draw us on TV."
Mark does, and when the drawing is done he sets the pad on Eduardo's knee and drops his pencil off the arm of the couch.
Eduardo rifles the pages absently with his thumb, and watches the TV unblinkingly.
Mark yawns, and stretches out. "We might have to wait a while," he warns, and then the screen goes dark.
In the reflection on the dead glass they stare at themselves, and then Eduardo looks down at the paper, and then back up, and says, "Fuck me," and starts to laugh.
Mark drums his fingers on his thigh. "I told you."
"Well, you don't predict the future," Eduardo says wryly. "You were entirely wrong about how we'd show up on TV."
Mark frowns, and drums harder.
"Mark," Eduardo says, and reaches over to still his fingers. "I have to figure out a way to prove you're wrong."
"Why? And I've been testing it since I was a child," Mark says, and pulls his hand away. "You're not going to come up with any new ideas."
"Because I know I'm making decisions on my own," Eduardo says softly. "But you think you control me."
Mark says, "Yes."
"It's the most egotistical thing I've ever heard," Eduardo says.
Mark straightens. "I draw something, and when I dislike it, I change the details. Any changes I make happen just like the original did. I got rid of my first grade teacher because she yelled at me. I don't know what happened to her, but she never had anything to do with me again."
"What I don't understand, then," Eduardo says, ignoring him and leaning forward, "is how you're passing your classes." He laughs a little at Mark's expression and says, "If everything you draw shows up in the real world, how do you ever turn in an original design? The professors should be failing you for lack of creativity."
Mark rolls his eyes. "Not everything I draw is meant to be real. Only the things I want."
When Eduardo gives him an odd expression, Mark narrows his eyes right back. "You wanted me," Eduardo says, and Mark rolls his eyes and grabs a folder full of a hundred pieces of paper off the coffee table to drop on his lap, and Eduardo drops it onto the floor in turn when he reaches for Mark.
"You haven't drawn me for a week," Eduardo says, when Mark twists away.
"No, but--" Mark says.
"Because I told you not to," Eduardo says. "Doesn't that make us even?"
Mark tries to explain about expectations, about his creative process, how every picture has hundreds of surrounding details that never make it on the page, and one week is not enough time to guarantee a clean slate. How he only drew their first kiss, and because Eduardo hasn't disrupted anything, how even without words Mark knew how the scene would go, because Mark knew how he wanted it and what he would want Eduardo to do.
Eduardo laughs quietly the whole time, blatantly ignoring him, and Mark finishes his explanation against Eduardo's mouth, and Mark could've rendered this, too; Eduardo drawing him down, and tracing his lines, and ignoring every hint of boundaries and doing every other thing Mark has always wished someone would do.
---
"Maybe you did create me," Eduardo says quietly, sleepily, and Mark freezes. "Maybe you were lonely, and I'm what you wanted. I don't mind," Eduardo says. He's tangled in the sheets still, lazy and relaxed with early morning exhaustion.
"No," Mark says, because he can't know it's true.
"Yes," Eduardo counters, and Mark turns when the linens rustle to see him stretching out, fingers and toes flexing everywhere. On the pad of paper underneath his fingertips Eduardo has just taken the same pose, and Eduardo smiles to see it. "Does it matter?" Eduardo asks, and comes to Mark. He folds his fingers over Mark's pencil, leads the lead up to the sketch of his own face, eyes and nose and ears and hair all exactly where they are. "I don't mind."
"You couldn't mind," Mark says, and resists the pressure Eduardo puts on his fingers. "You wouldn't be able to. If I didn't want you to."
"Maybe not," Eduardo agrees. "Maybe I can only be everything you want," he says, "but that's not too bad."
Mark swallows hard, and his hand twitches.
"If you make me," Eduardo says, "then make me happy," and he holds his hand over Mark's as Mark draws in a smile.
End.