Fic: say goodbye (to the world you thought you lived in) (1/9)
say goodbye (to the world you thought you lived in)
Part One
-----------------------------------
It’s raining.
It’s dark -- well past sunset, and the ballroom is shimmering, shining in that way that’s not quite genuine, mostly illusion: all low-lights and crystal chandeliers -- and no one’s noticing the storm. No one even sees the windows, or looks past their own stark outlines, their own near-opaque reflections; and its suffocating, because all Mark can see are the lines, the drops on the glass, slowly falling, tiny jumpers taking forever to hit the ground, tragic; and that’s the only meaningful thought that he has as people speak at him, as they all just move their lips and make noise, peripheral.
It’s raining outside.
Mark feels his fingers slip a little around his cocktail glass, sweat and condensation because he remembers the rain, remembers watching it, and his minimum attention, and how the rest unfolded, how what’s left of him isn’t stuck back at Facebook, now -- it’s wrapped up in the storm, in the way the lightning hits, and the thunder gets lost in the rumble of conversation, of music and strings; how the most magnificent parts of this are being drowned in inanity, wrapped in glitter but sour at the center.
He takes a sip from his glass, enjoys the soft bite of top-shelf vodka as it slips over his lips, across his tongue, and he nods at something that’s said, lets the curve of the glass make a polite grin for him before he plans, moves to retreat, and he wonders a little and how surface-level all of this is, because he’s blank. He’s useless in his three-piece suit and the tie that someone else knotted for him, too tight at the base of his throat, ready and thick, a silk-slick noose that might just have cost more than a funeral.
He’s already got one shined-up toe of his never-worn shoes pointed in the opposite direction, ready to bolt in as acceptable a manner as he can force himself to manage. Except that suddenly, all eyes are on him, all attentions are focused at least partially on his person and he freezes, because he never got used to that, he never acclimated to getting what he thought he wanted but didn’t, or did, just not quite as much as he’d originally supposed, or something.
He never got used to it.
“What about you, Mr. Zuckerberg?” comes the innocent, airy voice of a red-head, just this side of auburn, standing at his side. Mark looks at her, and it’s strange, but it catches his notice, it unsettles something in his gut: he can’t make out the color of her eyes. “Is fame worth the fall?”
He doesn’t know the context, doesn’t quite comprehend what the laughing, pleasantly-intoxicated stares are expecting, but it doesn’t matter. It never mattered what anyone expected of him, what they were looking for. Mark only knows what comes to mind, because of the date, because of the time, because he feels alone in a crowded room like every goddamned cliche in the world, and he always felt that way, more often than not. Except when there was someone, someone in particular, catching his gaze from across the way with that fucking sombrero, that was almost as pointless as the loop of Niagara Falls, but better.
It was better.
And Mark, he feels smothered, consumed in all of a second, and he doesn’t answer the question, whatever it might have meant; barely even looks up as he tips back the rest of his drink and fights down a shudder as the alcohol slides through his throat, catches in the middle and shudders through his neck, down his spine. And maybe he shakes his head, gives his response unconsciously. Maybe he gives himself away without meaning to, but it doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter, because he leaves his glass on a passing tray and walks out, puts distance between himself and the ballroom, makes himself scarce and small like he did as a kid, before he became somebody, before he made a name for himself and proved himself worthwhile.
He’s breathing hard when he leans back against the wall, for reasons he can’t explain; he’s a little breathless when his eyes focus, narrow in on a passing figure, a woman in the dusk, the sallow light that filters in through crystal, precarious chandeliers in the entryway -- red hair, lithe figure, long dress in a color Mark can’t quite place; the woman with the strange question and the stranger look in her eyes.
Mark doesn’t pretend to know why he follows her, but the fact that he does: it’s not the first thing he’d ever done that he hasn’t understood. It doesn’t stop him from doing it anyway.
He keeps a good few paces behind, up to the elevator; he watches the numbers as they rise, stop, and then he slips into the adjacent car and lifts, up, father, until the doors open up into the storm, into the night.
Onto the roof.
The woman is standing near the ledge, drenched: Mark sees her silhouette, but he doesn’t approach, doesn’t speak -- he wonders for a moment what’s happening, cognitively cannot bring himself to jump to dramatic conclusions, but it’s suffocating, now, that knot in his tie: choking and reigning in the thump of his heart, failing spectacularly, and it’s almost like each beat coaxes it tighter, pulls at the fabric and hurts, torments, and Mark can’t help it, won’t pretend that he doesn’t think about it. He thinks that most people probably do. A perpetual what if, the larger dare of the universe, the pride before the stumble, the long trip down.
Is fame worth the fall?
Mark blinks -- he swears, he’d swear it to anyone: he just fucking blinks, and that’s it. She’s gone when his eyes stretch back open.
Mark looks up, oddly -- there are stars beyond the city, if he squints, or maybe it’s the rain, the drops as they fall and catch in the light; he makes a point of not looking anywhere else, just breathing through the sudden thunder of his pulse, matched to the lightning, if the lightning struck quicker, closer, straight through the chest.
Mark backs away, safe inside the doorway, and thinks that maybe there’s an answer there; maybe there’s something to be said about how little he ventured, how he only put a foot onto the roof before turning back -- how much space he leaves between the risk. Between himself and the death that looms, yawns wide.
Mark thinks that maybe that’s an answer in itself.
___________________________
The reasons -- the ones he couldn’t explain before, that fucked with his breath and his mind and the feeling in his chest that sometimes noticeable but maybe always there, waiting in the wings; Mark wouldn’t even know. Objectively, they’ve probably got something to so with what time of year it is, what day it is, how much time has passed.
It’s three days after the charity dinner, this time around. He goes out for drinks every year, like a memorial, a remembrance. He gets himself shitfaced, alone, so he won’t ever forget the look on Eduardo’s face, the day he signed the last of the settlement papers.
He doesn’t analyze the reasons any more than that. There are just some things in the world that deserve to be indelible. Mark can respect that much, in the larger scope of the universe. Some things, no one should be allowed to forget.
He’s already been through at least eight fingers of scotch by the time someone slides onto the stool next to him at the bar.
“Excuse me,” the person, a woman, directs toward the bartender, gesturing at Mark’s empty glass instead of asking for something of her own, and it’s then that Mark looks up, processes the auburn hair, the too-wide, too-fathomless eyes in the dank lighting of the pub: the woman from the gala, from the roof. The woman with the question.
“Evening, Mark,” she says, knowingly, a little hint of condescension, and Mark licks a little at the glass, for the drops left, the dregs -- for lack of another occupation to claim his attention.
“I never quite caught your name,” he says, as a full glass slides his way across the counter top.
“I never quite got your answer,” she counters, and Mark tries to shrug away the shiver that her words, her tone, her simple presence sends shooting down his spine; takes a long drink, instead -- draining half the glass and fighting a cough at the burn.
“Was it all worth it, Mark? In the end?” she asks him, and he feels faint, not drunk; he feels wrong on the inside, and he can’t quite reconcile the sensation with anything he knows.
“S’not the end, yet,” he says, a little hoarse, a little uncertain -- mostly wanting to toss down a few bills and just walk away, to wallow for the evening in peace, to get up in the morning and forget, or avoid, the best he can for another twelve months.
“Isn’t it?” the woman counters, her lips too red, her teeth too white as she sneers, smirks. Mark doesn’t know what to say in response.
“If you could,” she asks, without prelude; “if you had the chance, would you turn it around?” Mark blinks, confused, sick to his stomach; “Change things? Do it differently?”
The unspoken commentary of do it right may as well have been voiced, for how powerful it is, how strong it rings out.
How Mark wonders whether it’s her placing the emphasis there, or if he’s doing it himself.
“I could do it better,” Mark says, sure of it; he doesn’t have to ask what she means, what she’s referring to. In the long list of things he’s royally fucked up in his life, there’s a whole high tier for just one thing. Just one. “Of course I could.”
“I think you’d do it exactly the same,” the woman tells him, just as certain, and it takes a moment for the indignation to build; a moment she takes full advantage of, keeps criticizing, speculating, telling him he’s wrong.
“If you had a million opportunities to make it right, I think you’d still lose,” she declares, as if it’s a proven fact. “Every single time.”
In the moment, Mark only thinks of his reply; in retrospect, it’ll seem strange that Mark didn’t wonder too long on who this woman was, what she wanted, what tied her to the gala, to here, to him. Maybe it’s the alcohol, or something bigger. But Mark doesn’t think too hard on it.
“You’ll have to forgive me,” is what he says, what he gives in return; “but I think you’re full of shit.”
Her eyebrow quirks, too arched, too high, inhuman: “Am I?”
“Not that there’s any way to test either theory,” Mark scoffs a bit, waves his hand, drains his glass as cocks his head to ask for another refill; “but yeah.”
“And why should I believe that?”
“I fucked over my best friend,” Mark spits, tastes the undertones of the whiskey all over his tongue; “I don’t deny that.” He’s aware of what he did, how the effects of it resonate, how they hurt more, wider, deeper than he’d ever dreamed. “It could have been done differently,” he concedes; he’s not afraid of that anymore, because there’s no going back. “I was young, and I was stupid.” He breathes, heavy and slow. “I’d do it better, now.”
“Care to prove it?” She’s got a cocktail glass in her hand now, something neon swirling in the glass; Mark didn’t hear her order, never saw it arrive.
“Excuse me?”
“I think you could spend the rest of your life trying to fix things, fix how it all went down,” she elaborates, cold, unwavering; “and I think you’d still be unhappy, unfulfilled; still be as miserable as you are right here, years later, drowning the recollection of what you did, how it crumbled, the people, the hearts,” and that’s a way of putting it that Mark’s never tried, maybe on purpose, maybe not -- he’s both surprised, and not surprised, that it fits like a glove; “that you stepped on to get where you are.”
“And you,” she tilts her head toward him; it feels like a sentence, a punishment, death row; “think that I’m wrong.”
“So I’m asking you to grow some goddamned balls, Mark Zuckerberg. Step up to the plate, and back up your claim.”
Mark feels frozen, so cold, like everything in him has seized, like time has stopped, like this stranger and himself are the only things left standing in all of creation. He feels that, just then. “I don’t think I understand,” he speaks, soft and slow; all she does is raise glass.
“To second chances,” she proposes the toast, leans in and clinks against Mark’s glass, held precariously loose in his grip. “And thirds and fourths,” she adds, takes a long sip; “ever on.”
“Cheers?” she asks, like it’s an agreement, like it’s a gamble, and Mark doesn’t think to ask questions or read into it, into anything: he doesn’t think much at all, to be honest.
“What the hell,” he murmurs, and drinks what’s left in his tumbler; shortly thereafter, the world turns dark.
The last thing he sees is the woman’s red hair.
Part Two --->
// Master Post //
Part One
-----------------------------------
It’s raining.
It’s dark -- well past sunset, and the ballroom is shimmering, shining in that way that’s not quite genuine, mostly illusion: all low-lights and crystal chandeliers -- and no one’s noticing the storm. No one even sees the windows, or looks past their own stark outlines, their own near-opaque reflections; and its suffocating, because all Mark can see are the lines, the drops on the glass, slowly falling, tiny jumpers taking forever to hit the ground, tragic; and that’s the only meaningful thought that he has as people speak at him, as they all just move their lips and make noise, peripheral.
It’s raining outside.
Mark feels his fingers slip a little around his cocktail glass, sweat and condensation because he remembers the rain, remembers watching it, and his minimum attention, and how the rest unfolded, how what’s left of him isn’t stuck back at Facebook, now -- it’s wrapped up in the storm, in the way the lightning hits, and the thunder gets lost in the rumble of conversation, of music and strings; how the most magnificent parts of this are being drowned in inanity, wrapped in glitter but sour at the center.
He takes a sip from his glass, enjoys the soft bite of top-shelf vodka as it slips over his lips, across his tongue, and he nods at something that’s said, lets the curve of the glass make a polite grin for him before he plans, moves to retreat, and he wonders a little and how surface-level all of this is, because he’s blank. He’s useless in his three-piece suit and the tie that someone else knotted for him, too tight at the base of his throat, ready and thick, a silk-slick noose that might just have cost more than a funeral.
He’s already got one shined-up toe of his never-worn shoes pointed in the opposite direction, ready to bolt in as acceptable a manner as he can force himself to manage. Except that suddenly, all eyes are on him, all attentions are focused at least partially on his person and he freezes, because he never got used to that, he never acclimated to getting what he thought he wanted but didn’t, or did, just not quite as much as he’d originally supposed, or something.
He never got used to it.
“What about you, Mr. Zuckerberg?” comes the innocent, airy voice of a red-head, just this side of auburn, standing at his side. Mark looks at her, and it’s strange, but it catches his notice, it unsettles something in his gut: he can’t make out the color of her eyes. “Is fame worth the fall?”
He doesn’t know the context, doesn’t quite comprehend what the laughing, pleasantly-intoxicated stares are expecting, but it doesn’t matter. It never mattered what anyone expected of him, what they were looking for. Mark only knows what comes to mind, because of the date, because of the time, because he feels alone in a crowded room like every goddamned cliche in the world, and he always felt that way, more often than not. Except when there was someone, someone in particular, catching his gaze from across the way with that fucking sombrero, that was almost as pointless as the loop of Niagara Falls, but better.
It was better.
And Mark, he feels smothered, consumed in all of a second, and he doesn’t answer the question, whatever it might have meant; barely even looks up as he tips back the rest of his drink and fights down a shudder as the alcohol slides through his throat, catches in the middle and shudders through his neck, down his spine. And maybe he shakes his head, gives his response unconsciously. Maybe he gives himself away without meaning to, but it doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter, because he leaves his glass on a passing tray and walks out, puts distance between himself and the ballroom, makes himself scarce and small like he did as a kid, before he became somebody, before he made a name for himself and proved himself worthwhile.
He’s breathing hard when he leans back against the wall, for reasons he can’t explain; he’s a little breathless when his eyes focus, narrow in on a passing figure, a woman in the dusk, the sallow light that filters in through crystal, precarious chandeliers in the entryway -- red hair, lithe figure, long dress in a color Mark can’t quite place; the woman with the strange question and the stranger look in her eyes.
Mark doesn’t pretend to know why he follows her, but the fact that he does: it’s not the first thing he’d ever done that he hasn’t understood. It doesn’t stop him from doing it anyway.
He keeps a good few paces behind, up to the elevator; he watches the numbers as they rise, stop, and then he slips into the adjacent car and lifts, up, father, until the doors open up into the storm, into the night.
Onto the roof.
The woman is standing near the ledge, drenched: Mark sees her silhouette, but he doesn’t approach, doesn’t speak -- he wonders for a moment what’s happening, cognitively cannot bring himself to jump to dramatic conclusions, but it’s suffocating, now, that knot in his tie: choking and reigning in the thump of his heart, failing spectacularly, and it’s almost like each beat coaxes it tighter, pulls at the fabric and hurts, torments, and Mark can’t help it, won’t pretend that he doesn’t think about it. He thinks that most people probably do. A perpetual what if, the larger dare of the universe, the pride before the stumble, the long trip down.
Is fame worth the fall?
Mark blinks -- he swears, he’d swear it to anyone: he just fucking blinks, and that’s it. She’s gone when his eyes stretch back open.
Mark looks up, oddly -- there are stars beyond the city, if he squints, or maybe it’s the rain, the drops as they fall and catch in the light; he makes a point of not looking anywhere else, just breathing through the sudden thunder of his pulse, matched to the lightning, if the lightning struck quicker, closer, straight through the chest.
Mark backs away, safe inside the doorway, and thinks that maybe there’s an answer there; maybe there’s something to be said about how little he ventured, how he only put a foot onto the roof before turning back -- how much space he leaves between the risk. Between himself and the death that looms, yawns wide.
Mark thinks that maybe that’s an answer in itself.
___________________________
The reasons -- the ones he couldn’t explain before, that fucked with his breath and his mind and the feeling in his chest that sometimes noticeable but maybe always there, waiting in the wings; Mark wouldn’t even know. Objectively, they’ve probably got something to so with what time of year it is, what day it is, how much time has passed.
It’s three days after the charity dinner, this time around. He goes out for drinks every year, like a memorial, a remembrance. He gets himself shitfaced, alone, so he won’t ever forget the look on Eduardo’s face, the day he signed the last of the settlement papers.
He doesn’t analyze the reasons any more than that. There are just some things in the world that deserve to be indelible. Mark can respect that much, in the larger scope of the universe. Some things, no one should be allowed to forget.
He’s already been through at least eight fingers of scotch by the time someone slides onto the stool next to him at the bar.
“Excuse me,” the person, a woman, directs toward the bartender, gesturing at Mark’s empty glass instead of asking for something of her own, and it’s then that Mark looks up, processes the auburn hair, the too-wide, too-fathomless eyes in the dank lighting of the pub: the woman from the gala, from the roof. The woman with the question.
“Evening, Mark,” she says, knowingly, a little hint of condescension, and Mark licks a little at the glass, for the drops left, the dregs -- for lack of another occupation to claim his attention.
“I never quite caught your name,” he says, as a full glass slides his way across the counter top.
“I never quite got your answer,” she counters, and Mark tries to shrug away the shiver that her words, her tone, her simple presence sends shooting down his spine; takes a long drink, instead -- draining half the glass and fighting a cough at the burn.
“Was it all worth it, Mark? In the end?” she asks him, and he feels faint, not drunk; he feels wrong on the inside, and he can’t quite reconcile the sensation with anything he knows.
“S’not the end, yet,” he says, a little hoarse, a little uncertain -- mostly wanting to toss down a few bills and just walk away, to wallow for the evening in peace, to get up in the morning and forget, or avoid, the best he can for another twelve months.
“Isn’t it?” the woman counters, her lips too red, her teeth too white as she sneers, smirks. Mark doesn’t know what to say in response.
“If you could,” she asks, without prelude; “if you had the chance, would you turn it around?” Mark blinks, confused, sick to his stomach; “Change things? Do it differently?”
The unspoken commentary of do it right may as well have been voiced, for how powerful it is, how strong it rings out.
How Mark wonders whether it’s her placing the emphasis there, or if he’s doing it himself.
“I could do it better,” Mark says, sure of it; he doesn’t have to ask what she means, what she’s referring to. In the long list of things he’s royally fucked up in his life, there’s a whole high tier for just one thing. Just one. “Of course I could.”
“I think you’d do it exactly the same,” the woman tells him, just as certain, and it takes a moment for the indignation to build; a moment she takes full advantage of, keeps criticizing, speculating, telling him he’s wrong.
“If you had a million opportunities to make it right, I think you’d still lose,” she declares, as if it’s a proven fact. “Every single time.”
In the moment, Mark only thinks of his reply; in retrospect, it’ll seem strange that Mark didn’t wonder too long on who this woman was, what she wanted, what tied her to the gala, to here, to him. Maybe it’s the alcohol, or something bigger. But Mark doesn’t think too hard on it.
“You’ll have to forgive me,” is what he says, what he gives in return; “but I think you’re full of shit.”
Her eyebrow quirks, too arched, too high, inhuman: “Am I?”
“Not that there’s any way to test either theory,” Mark scoffs a bit, waves his hand, drains his glass as cocks his head to ask for another refill; “but yeah.”
“And why should I believe that?”
“I fucked over my best friend,” Mark spits, tastes the undertones of the whiskey all over his tongue; “I don’t deny that.” He’s aware of what he did, how the effects of it resonate, how they hurt more, wider, deeper than he’d ever dreamed. “It could have been done differently,” he concedes; he’s not afraid of that anymore, because there’s no going back. “I was young, and I was stupid.” He breathes, heavy and slow. “I’d do it better, now.”
“Care to prove it?” She’s got a cocktail glass in her hand now, something neon swirling in the glass; Mark didn’t hear her order, never saw it arrive.
“Excuse me?”
“I think you could spend the rest of your life trying to fix things, fix how it all went down,” she elaborates, cold, unwavering; “and I think you’d still be unhappy, unfulfilled; still be as miserable as you are right here, years later, drowning the recollection of what you did, how it crumbled, the people, the hearts,” and that’s a way of putting it that Mark’s never tried, maybe on purpose, maybe not -- he’s both surprised, and not surprised, that it fits like a glove; “that you stepped on to get where you are.”
“And you,” she tilts her head toward him; it feels like a sentence, a punishment, death row; “think that I’m wrong.”
“So I’m asking you to grow some goddamned balls, Mark Zuckerberg. Step up to the plate, and back up your claim.”
Mark feels frozen, so cold, like everything in him has seized, like time has stopped, like this stranger and himself are the only things left standing in all of creation. He feels that, just then. “I don’t think I understand,” he speaks, soft and slow; all she does is raise glass.
“To second chances,” she proposes the toast, leans in and clinks against Mark’s glass, held precariously loose in his grip. “And thirds and fourths,” she adds, takes a long sip; “ever on.”
“Cheers?” she asks, like it’s an agreement, like it’s a gamble, and Mark doesn’t think to ask questions or read into it, into anything: he doesn’t think much at all, to be honest.
“What the hell,” he murmurs, and drinks what’s left in his tumbler; shortly thereafter, the world turns dark.
The last thing he sees is the woman’s red hair.
Part Two --->
// Master Post //