FIC: pieces from my heart (1/2)
title: pieces from my heart
rating: pg
pairing: mark/eduardo
word count: 12,200
disclaimer: this is fiction. no harm intended. don’t sue, etc.
summary: mark gets drunk, watches the video of the depositions, and comes to some startling realizations. featuring dustin moskovitz (whose awesomeness cannot be overstated) and chris hughes (like a boss). a little bit of angst, a little bit of fluff, and a whole lot of ridiculous. thank you to iamtheenemy for the rec!
a/n: written as a gift for the very lovely savetomorrow. welcome home, love!
this fic has been translated into chinese by chuttsuns.
Mark is not drunk.
Yet.
He’s on his way, though, because that’s the only way in hell he’s going to get through this. “This” being the stack of transcripts currently strewn all over his bed, and the stack of numbered DVDs sitting on the nightstand. He’s loaded the first one on his laptop, but Mark hasn’t quite worked up the nerve to actual play the video yet.
There’s a bottle of Jameson on the nightstand next to the DVDs. Mark has been drunk on Jameson exactly twice in his life: the night the lawsuit was filed (the lawsuit, the one that mattered-then and now, Mark could give a flying fuck about the Winklevosses), and the night the settlement was signed (ditto). Symmetry, he’d told Dustin on that second occasion, while they sat in some hole-in-the-wall of a bar where no one would recognize Mark.
Dustin had nodded grimly, bought the drinks, carried Mark to the car three hours later, driven him home, sat up with him all night and stayed the next day through the worst hangover of Mark’s life.
Dustin is a good friend, Mark thinks, staring down at the transcript.
Eduardo was a good friend, too.
They hadn’t been friends anymore, not by that point, but nobody had bothered to correct Eduardo and Mark had clung silently to the words for days afterward. Weeks-months, even. They were a tacit promise, in his mind, that Eduardo was coming back. Eduardo was hurt and angry, but somewhere deep down they were still friends and eventually he would forgive Mark and come to California and everything would be the way it should have been in the first place.
It hadn’t worked out that way, of course. In the years since the settlement, Mark has been forced to acknowledge a series of increasingly unpleasant realities.
At one year, he’d been faced with the understanding that things would never be the same.
Two years: the possibility that he and Eduardo might never be friends again.
Three years: the sickening realization that Eduardo might never forgive him at all.
Five years in, Mark has pretty much accepted all of that, but he’s never quite let go of the hope that lingers around Eduardo’s continued interest in Facebook. Every time the quarterly shareholders’ meeting rolls around, Mark sets up e-mail alerts for exactly one name on the invite list; each time, though, he gets the same response: “Eduardo Saverin: Declined.”
A year ago, in a fit of optimism, Mark had purchased round-trip first-class tickets from Singapore to San Francisco and mailed them to Eduardo with a note (handwritten, which these days is one hell of a gesture, coming from Mark). The package had come back unopened.
Eduardo doesn’t even attend the meetings via Skype. It’s like he would actually rather review pages and pages of minutes (and copious notes in Chris’s meticulous handwriting) than subject himself to the possibility of seeing Mark’s face.
That is, until a week ago.
A week ago, Mark had spent a full ten minutes staring at the alert in his inbox (“Eduardo Saverin: Accepted”). Then he’d picked up the phone and instructing his assistant, Jess, to call Eduardo’s office and correct the mistake-only to have her call back a few minutes later with confirmation that Eduardo was indeed planning to attend, since it would be the last shareholders’ meeting before Facebook’s IPO in January.
That day, Mark had left the office early for the first time in over a year. He’d gone home to think things over and plan what he would say to Eduardo, but mostly he’d just succeeded in freaking out.
He’d continued to freak out right up until this morning, when the email arrived in his inbox.
To: Mark Zuckerberg
From: Jess Andersen
Subject: Shareholders’ Meeting
Mark,
Mr. Saverin’s assistant just called to inform me that due to a last-minute schedule conflict, Mr. Saverin will be unable to attend tomorrow’s meeting. He sends his regrets.
Jess
Then, a minute later:
To: Mark Zuckerberg
From: Chris Hughes
Subject: I heard.
I’m sorry, Mark.
And, ten seconds after that:
To: Mark Zuckerberg
From: Dustin Moskovitz
Subject: :(
SORRY. :( :( :(
want to ditch work and get drunk?
The suspicion that the entire staff was giving him sympathetic looks through the glass of his office had proven intolerable, if not quite worse than the news of Eduardo’s last-minute cancellation. In the end, Mark had opted to go home early, though sans Dustin and sans getting drunk-right then, anyway.
He’d left the office without a word to anyone, called Legal from the car and demanded that copies of the deposition transcripts and videos be hand-delivered to his house immediately. They’d arrived on his doorstep shortly before noon. The best thing about being CEO, Mark thinks, is that people tend to do exactly as he asks (except Dustin), and nobody ever questions him (except Chris).
Mark is going over the transcripts and the tapes for the first time since the depositions because he is obviously missing something and he is grasping at straws, at this point. There might not be a way to bring Eduardo back even to the periphery of his life, and Mark thinks he can (maybe) live with that if he really, really has to, but he needs to understand why.
If there’s a clue of any kind, anywhere, Mark suspects it’s somewhere in here: the complete visual, auditory and written record of the last time he and Eduardo looked each other in the eye. Mark’s sort of torn on the drinking because the alcohol is already sinking in around the edges, making him less exact, less attentive-but, as previously stated, it’s also the only thing that’s going to make this survivable.
Mark drains his glass, sucks in a deep breath, and presses Play.
*
“It was a great idea,” says Eduardo, on the screen, throwing a sidelong glance at Mark.
Five words, and the acknowledgment hits harder than millions of members and billions of dollars, a clear indication that Mark is nowhere near drunk enough. He pauses the video and takes a few long swigs straight from the bottle, because who the hell cares.
Eduardo would care. Eduardo cares about things like politeness and germs and not being gross.
Eduardo is not here, though.
He is never fucking coming back, apparently.
Mark spits a little of the amber liquor back in the bottle, just for spite, and presses Play again.
“A billion dollars,” Eduardo says, not looking at Mark or Gretchen or Sy or anyone, and Mark knows he’s picturing it: those few heady, buzzed hours with Sean, the beginning of the end. “And that shut everybody up.”
It wasn’t about the money, Mark thinks.
It was never about money, for him.
It was all about Facebook.
But Eduardo had handed Mark a check for $18,000 the day after that huge fight about advertising and Sean and California and the chicken, so maybe it wasn’t really about money for Eduardo, either.
Mark remembers the look on Eduardo’s face while he flipped through the settlement agreement, reading carefully, initialing each page. He’d looked like he was being tortured. Mark had stared at him the whole time, trying to parse why Eduardo looked so unhappy when he was getting everything he’d asked for and then some: $600 million, 5 percent stock, his name restored to the masthead. All that, and still the best Eduardo could manage was abject misery?
It was definitely not about the money for Eduardo.
Mark is pretty sure it wasn’t about Facebook, either, is the thing.
What it was about doesn’t hit him until 5:58 A.M., in the middle of the last DVD. Mark is very, very drunk by this point, and the words I was your only friend, you had one friend kind of make him want to throw something at the screen because they aren’t true, they were never true. Not at Harvard, not in Palo Alto, not ever. Mark had plenty of friends-and still does, even if he still is kind of an asshole, although not quite so much as the cocky, angry-eyed boy on the screen, not anymore.
Through the haze, it occurs to Mark that Eduardo knew it wasn’t true. Eduardo knew he wasn’t, had never been, Mark’s only friend.
Of course he knew. He was there, after all.
But why would he say it, then?
Mark is really fucking drunk.
He thinks maybe Eduardo must have meant something else.
Something he couldn’t say, not in front of the lawyers and the cameras, not on the record or off it, not even to Mark.
Especially not to Mark.
It hits him like being shaken violently and punched in the stomach and stabbed through the heart, like every other stupid, cliché physical metaphor and then some, a million things flashing through his head at once: Eduardo tumbling through the door of the Kirkland suite, I’m here for you. Eduardo stretched out on Mark’s bed with a book while Mark coded for hours at a time. Eduardo, the night in the CS lab when they hired the interns, his smile brilliant and warm and all for Mark-only, ever, for Mark. Eduardo, always in his face about remembering to eat and getting enough sleep, even over the phone those first months in Palo Alto: just, take care of yourself, Mark, okay? Eduardo, rain-soaked and angry, looking like he wanted nothing more than to throw Mark against the wall in that tiny, cramped hallway and-
On the screen, Eduardo turns away from the table to stare out the window. The camera captures a profile of his face, pale and drawn, the shadow of a dark circle under his too-bright eye. He swallows hard, and his chin trembles ever so slightly. He looks tired and sad and lost and strangely young and so, so hurt, but there’s no anger in his face.
The only thing Mark can see is love.
*
“Mark!”
Someone is yelling at him from very, very far away.
Disoriented and groggy, it takes Mark a full minute to register that the voice is actually coming from the direction of his living room, and that it has to belong to Chris or Dustin-no one else knows the code to bypass his house’s alarm system. It takes another couple of seconds for Mark’s eyes to focus enough to distinguish the glowing numbers on his alarm clock.
9:16 A.M.
Mark hears himself make a choked, horrified noise. The shareholders’ meeting starts at 10:00, and he was supposed to be at the Facebook offices an hour ago for a pre-meeting strategizing session with Chris.
“Mark?”
Chris, who is in Mark’s house right this very second.
“Shit, shit, shit,” Mark mutters, and the word sounds strange on his ears, but he doesn’t have time to think about it.
He sits straight up, and is about to throw the covers off when a wave of nausea and dizziness hits him so hard he has to lie right back down. Mark blinks a couple of times, experimentally, but if anything the blurriness of his vision gets worse. His head is beginning to throb, his hearing is sort of fuzzy, and everything feels slow and thick, like he’s underwater or behind glass or-
Oh, god.
He’s still drunk.
Really, really drunk.
“Mark!” Again, sharper, from what sounds like the hallway this time. Chris sounds more worried than angry, but that’s going to change in a hurry as soon as he figures out that Mark is alive and unharmed. In a manner of speaking.
Mark actually contemplates hiding under the bed, except that he’s pretty sure he will be violently sick if he tries to move at all, let alone quickly-so there’s really nothing for it but to lie still, comforting himself with the knowledge that death-by-Chris is probably going to be a lot faster and less messy than alcohol poisoning.
Because, really, Chris is going to kill him.
And Eduardo-
Eduardo’s not coming, Mark reminds himself, and for an instant his whole body goes loose with relief, but then he realizes he’s still surrounded by pages and pages of transcripts, remembers watching the videos, remembers-
The bedroom door swings open, Chris is there, and Mark suddenly understands the expression “towering rage” with complete and vivid clarity.
Three months ago, Chris had abruptly announced he was moving back to California. Mark, for reasons he’s having a really hard time remembering right now, had immediately offered to re-appoint him head of PR. Chris had accepted, although he’d warned Mark that he probably wouldn’t stay at Facebook in the long-term: a year, maybe two.
Then why did you move back here, Mark had grumbled, but Chris had just shrugged mysteriously, said Politics are all over, I can do that work anywhere, and completely evaded all further questions on the subject.
“Mark, do you want to explain to me what the hell you’re still doing in bed when you and I were supposed to be meeting forty-five minutes-”
Chris cuts off abruptly to take in the scene, eyes widening when they land on the stack of transcripts and the pile of DVDs, narrowing when they note the nearly-empty Jameson bottle, and turning dangerous when they land back on Mark, who promptly rolls over on his stomach, hides his face in the pillow and pulls the covers up over himself.
“I can still see you,” he hears Chris say darkly, and then there are footsteps, and the mattress sinks down under Chris’s weight. “Mark, why do you have all this stuff? What happened?”
Mark is too drunk for pretense, or equivocation, or anything but the truth.
“He loved me,” he says miserably, into the pillow.
“I can’t hear you.”
It’s an effort, but Mark manages to turn his head enough that the pillow isn’t blocking his mouth.
“I think Wardo loved me,” he says again, hoarse and scraped.
There’s a long, long silence. Mark tries to remember the last time anyone shocked Chris into shutting up completely, and comes up empty. It’s possible that this has never happened. Mark makes a mental note to take pride in it when he’s not occupied with actively wanting to die.
Then: “Jesus fucking Christ,” Chris says, and Mark sort of instinctively braces himself. When he dares to glance up, Chris’s expression looks like it can’t quite decide where it’s going, but his blue eyes are bright with anger.
“Are you fucking kidding me?”
“Please stop yelling,” Mark suggests piteously.
“I’m not yelling,” Chris snaps, getting to his feet, “but I’m going to start in about ten seconds if you don’t get out of that bed, get in the shower and get ready for the extremely important meeting we’re supposed to be attending in less than an hour. God, Mark, you seriously couldn’t have picked some other night in the past, I don’t know, five years to figure this out?”
Mark tries to put this together and can’t. Not even a little bit. Chris just rolls his eyes, stomps over to the door, and flicks the lights on without warning.
“Fuck me,” Mark hisses, yanking the blankets up over his face again.
“Not even if you actually paid me the astronomically high salary I so richly deserve for putting up with this shit,” Chris says flatly, dragging the covers back down. “Get up.”
“No,” says Mark, pointlessly.
“Mark Zuckerberg, if you do not get up and get your shit together immediately, so help me, I will not be held responsible for my actions.”
Mark manages to drag himself into a sitting position, though his stomach lurches dangerously and his vision swims. Chris goes on glaring while he pulls out his cell phone and puts it to his ear.
“Dustin,” he says into the phone, after a minute, “I need you.”
This is when Mark decides he has had some sort of transformative experience over the course of the night, because all of a sudden he is seeing things and hearing things which do not compute in any way, shape or form. The inflection in Chris’s tone, for example, when he says those words. The way everything about him seems to relax the slightest bit when Dustin answers. The hint of a smile that tugs at Chris’s mouth when Dustin says something Mark can’t hear.
“What-” Mark begins, but shuts up in a hurry when Chris shoots him a murderous look before storming out of the room and closing the door behind him. Mark can hear snatches of conversation in the hall, but he can’t pick out the words.
He’ll ask Dustin about it later, he decides. Dustin threatens Mark with bodily harm on a much less frequent basis than Chris, and he usually means it a whole lot less. Dustin is generally just nicer, Mark thinks grumpily, glaring at Chris as he comes back through the door.
Chris just glowers back at him. “Dustin will be here in a minute. He’s going to make sure you get to the office something resembling on time while I deal with opening the meeting. Which is going to be a clusterfuck, by the way, since you decided to get hammered instead of showing up for our planning session.”
Mark cannot envision leaving his room, let alone getting dressed, going to the office and sitting through a six-hour meeting. He groans and squeezes his eyes shut. “Can’t you just tell everyone I have food poisoning?”
“No, I can’t. Not this time, not with the IPO next month. Besides, everyone got the list of attendees, Mark. Everyone knows that Eduardo was supposed to be there. How do you think it’s going to look if neither one of you shows up?”
Truthfully, Mark doesn’t give a single fuck how it’s going to look, but he decides he’d rather go on living beyond the next ten seconds than have the satisfaction of saying so.
“I’ll tell everyone you’re not feeling well, and that’s why you’re running late,” Chris goes on, and Mark can see him thinking it through, covering bases, sorting out potentialities. Even pissed off, Mark thinks grudgingly, Chris is really fucking good at his job. “We’ll do the best we can once you get there. And by we, I mean ‘I,’ because absolutely the only thing you are going to be doing in that meeting is sitting still and trying not to breathe on anyone, do you understand me?”
Mark nods, then sort of ruins it by belching loudly. Chris raises his eyes to the ceiling.
“Okay, I’m here,” Dustin says, appearing in the doorway. “What have we got?”
“That,” Chris says distastefully, gesturing vaguely at Mark.
“CEO with a hangover, huh?” Dustin tosses Mark a conspiratorial wink.
“Still drunk,” Mark corrects him, pleased that somebody in the room is not turning lights on or cursing at him.
“Mark,” says Chris, ignoring the snort of laughter Dustin doesn’t even bother trying to suppress, “you’re an idiot.”
Mark’s pretty sure this is not strictly true in the conventional sense, but he knows better than to say so as long as Chris is making that face, so he just nods. If Chris claimed that the earth was flat, the whole of humanity was descended from a hippopotamus, and Google Plus’s user interface was more intuitive than Facebook’s, right this second, Mark would totally agree with him.
Well, maybe not on that last one.
“Chris,” Dustin says, just the slightest hint of chiding in his tone, and Mark watches with interest because this is, well, new. “What do you need me to do?”
“Can you take over? Mark needs to be at the shareholders’ meeting as soon as he’s fit for human consumption, and I need to be at the office explaining to the shareholders why their CEO picked last night to go on a binge-drinking bender and have an epiphany.”
“Got it, but try to not actually use those words, okay?” Dustin squeezes Chris’s arm, lingers. Chris leans into the touch, and Mark watches them have what looks like an entire conversation with their eyes before Chris nods, and then goes.
Mark doesn’t get a chance to ask Dustin what that’s about, though, because as soon as Chris is gone Dustin has Mark by the arm and is tugging him up from the bed. “Come on,” he says cheerfully, sliding an arm around Mark’s waist when he stumbles, unsteady on his feet. “We need to get you showered.”
“What are you going to be doing?” Mark grumbles, because showering involves both standing up and being somewhere other than his bed, which means it is arguably the worst idea Dustin has ever had. Including the Poke feature.
“Sitting outside the door listening to make sure you don’t fall in the shower and die,” Dustin says practically. “Also, finding you something to wear that doesn’t look like you stole it from a homeless person.”
“I like this shirt,” Mark says petulantly.
“I like it too,” Dustin assures him, “when it isn’t covered in liquor stains and drool.”
“You’re a really good friend, Dustin. I was thinking that last night.”
“Sounds like you had a hell of a night.” Dustin attempts to steer Mark in the direction of the bathroom. “You’ll definitely have to fill me in on the rest of your little Jameson-induced vision quest later, okay?”
“Dustin?”
“Yeah?”
“Why are you always so nice to me?” Mark cocks his head thoughtfully. “I’m kind of an asshole.”
Dustin looks sideways at Mark, considers this for a second, then shrugs. “Because I love you,” he says, like it’s the easiest thing in the world.
“You do? Really?”
“Really really.”
“I guess someone has to,” Mark says, feeling morose all of a sudden. “Wardo did, I think, but now I think he hates me.”
“Mark, hey.” Dustin’s arm tightens around him just the slightest bit. “No, he doesn’t. He doesn’t hate you, okay?”
Mark ignores this, because in leaning against Dustin, he’s picked up on something out of place, and now he frowns in confusion. “You smell weird.”
Dustin laughs. “Look who’s talking.”
“No,” Mark insists, burying his nose in Dustin’s shoulder, trying to place the scent. It’s really familiar and conjures up a vague sense of annoyance, like he’s spent time trying to-
Trying to clear it out of his office every time Chris leaves.
“You smell like Chris,” Mark says, too pleased with himself for having figured it out to bother with noticing Dustin’s reaction. “That Burberry shit he’s always wearing.”
“And you smell like somebody’s drunk uncle,” Dustin informs him. “Please get in the shower.”
Mark is too drunk to persist, and suddenly despondent again. “Chris hates me, too.”
“Only a little, and only sometimes.” Dustin pushes him gently through the bathroom door. “You should probably give him a raise.”
*
Mark had fumbles his way through a shower, needs help to button his shirt, and goes through half a bottle of mouthwash with Dustin standing over his shoulder, critically sniffing Mark’s breath after each wash and finally shaking his head on defeat. His last-ditch effort is to douse Mark with an unopened bottle of cologne they find in Mark’s medicine cabinet, after which Dustin waits a beat, then takes a cautious whiff.
“Better?” Mark asks hopefully, but Dustin wrinkles his nose.
“Where the hell did you get that cologne? Now you smell like a drunk male prostitute.”
“Is that worse than just drunk?” Mark inquires, considering it.
“Depends on your point of view, I guess.”
“I don’t think I’d make a very good prostitute.”
“I’m not going to touch that one.” Dustin shakes his head helplessly. “Do me a favor and try not to talk too much in the meeting, okay?”
They get to the Facebook offices just after 11:00, by which point Mark completely understands why most people prefer to be passed out for the end stages of drunkenness. His head is pounding, he’s dizzy and sweaty and exhausted, colors and sounds keep shifting in weird ways, and Dustin has to pull over twice on the way to the office so Mark can get out of the car and throw up. Mark is pretty sure the bright lights and busy hum of the office are, with one notable exception, the worst things ever to happen to him.
When they get in the building, Dustin texts Chris, who meets them in one of the smaller conference rooms. Chris is strangely nice, which would normally be enough to clue Mark in that something is not right, but Mark’s sort of preoccupied with trying not to throw up all over the conference table at the moment.
“You actually don’t look too bad,” Chris comments, assessing Mark as they sit down.
“You, on the other hand, look like shit,” Dustin notes, staring at Chris. “What’s wrong?”
Chris ignores him, directing his words at Mark. “If I didn’t know you’d crawled out of a bottle of cheap whiskey this morning, I don’t think I’d-well, I might guess, but I could buy that you’re just sick. How do you feel?”
“Like shit.” Mark massages his temples, which helps basically not at all. “How’s the meeting?”
“Off to a relatively smooth start, thank you for asking, but there’s something-”
“What did you tell them?”
“I said you weren’t feeling well and advised everyone to steer clear of you in case it’s contagious.” Chris leans in and sniffs the air gingerly. “Which I guess is good, because if anyone gets too close they’re going to want to take you to an AA meeting.”
This with an accusatory glance at Dustin, who just shrugs. “Not a lot I can do about the fact that alcohol is basically coming out of his pores, Chris. You want to tell us what’s going on?”
Chris bites his lip, and Mark’s stomach twists in a new way. “Chris?”
“All right, look.” Chris leans forward, looks Mark in the eye. “I realize you had a rough night, it brought a lot of shit up for you and you feel like hell on top of everything, but there’s not a lot I can do right now so I really, really need you to handle this.”
“Oh, Jesus,” says Dustin, apparently having figured out whatever it is Mark is supposed to handle.
“Chris.” There is, like, buzzing in Mark’s ears. “Handle what?”
“Eduardo’s here,” Chris says, and everything sort of grinds to a halt.
Mark can’t process it, can’t translate the words to reality.
“No,” he says slowly. “No, he isn’t. He cancelled. He’s not coming.”
“He changed his mind and caught a last-minute flight. His assistant e-mailed me early this morning, but by the time I got back to the office and saw it...” Chris shrugs helplessly. “Anyway, he’s here.”
“Has he-did you-?” Mark hesitates, not sure what he wants to ask, not sure if he wants to know. “How is he?”
“I talked to him for a few minutes right when he got here. He’s-well, he’s jet-lagged, mostly. A little nervous. I think he’s as freaked out about seeing you as you are about seeing him.”
“I doubt that,” Dustin interjects. “Chris, do we really have to do this to him?” This with a gesture at Mark, who is unreasonably grateful for the sentiment.
Chris sighs. “I wasn’t wild about them being in a room together even with the assumption that Mark would be stone-cold sober, but I don’t think we really have a choice at this point. If it were anything other than the pre-IPO meeting, maybe, but under the circumstances… Mark’s a founder, he’s CEO, and he has the biggest stake in the company. He needs to be there.”
“I don’t know if I can,” Mark says, honestly.
“As Vice President in charge of Covering Ass and Fixing Shit, I’m telling you that you have to,” Chris says, not unkindly, and Mark manages a weak smile at their old joke. “For what it’s worth, though? As your friend, I wish you didn’t. As your friend, I wish you could go home, sleep this off, and see Eduardo when you’re really ready. Just-that’s not an option that we have, okay?”
“Okay,” Mark agrees, although it isn’t.
“Okay,” Chris echoes, getting to his feet. “Let’s go. I told them I had to brief you on the first hour, but we need to get you in there before people start wondering.”
“Hang in there,” Dustin says in an undertone, squeezing Mark’s shoulder as they follow Chris out into the hall. “We’ll get through it, okay?”
Mark is not so sure. “How do you know?”
“Because we don’t really have a choice,” Dustin says practically, as Chris swings the door of the conference room open.
“Dustin?” Mark is suddenly trying very, very hard not to panic. “What am I supposed to do?”
“Sit still, don’t talk unless you have to, and try not to stare at Wardo.” Dustin manages to crack a grin. “And like we always tell the interns: if you have to puke, go outside.”
*
Sitting still is not an issue.
Ditto not talking.
Ditto not puking, even, which is sort of a surprise.
Not staring at Eduardo, though?
That is seriously turning out to be a problem.
Mark sort of can’t believe that after five years, Eduardo is actually sitting less than twenty feet away from him. He keeps stealing glances, just to reassure himself that Eduardo is actually here and is not going to disappear again, at least not right away. The thing is, though-the thing is, even once Mark’s basically convinced that Eduardo is here in the flesh, not a figment of their collective imagination and not planning to evaporate into thin air any time soon, Mark still can’t seem to stop looking at him.
Eduardo is not exactly difficult to look at, to be fair.
He’s always been sort of stupidly attractive.
It’s not that Mark never noticed, before. He is maybe a little bit oblivious some of the time-a lot of the time, even, but he is not blind. It was just that he noticed in the way you notice the beauty of a painting after you’ve bought it and it’s been hanging on your wall for a while. He noticed in the off-handed way that you do when you take something for granted, because it’s always going to be there. He noticed from a place that was certain, and more possessive than he’d like to admit, even now.
After the past five years, though, and particularly after last night, Mark is pretty sure he’ll never take Eduardo’s presence for granted again. Not even if he were to see him every day for the rest of his life.
Which doesn’t sound half bad, actually, but Mark thinks he should maybe rein in those thoughts until they actually have a conversation.
It’s a weird juxtaposition: Eduardo’s expressions and mannerisms are impossibly familiar. His straight posture, the line of his jaw, way his hair falls across his forehead, even the stretch of a tailored jacket over his shoulders-Mark memorized these things years ago without ever realizing it, and it feels too intimate now, like he shouldn’t recognize these things in someone who is essentially a stranger.
He has no idea what’s going on in Eduardo’s head, is the thing. He doesn’t know how Eduardo feels about being here, about seeing him, and he can’t begin to guess at the thought process that led to Eduardo’s decision to attend the meeting after all. Mark generally doesn’t spend a whole lot of time obsessing over other people’s feelings and motivations, but he finds himself wanting to know these things. He wants to know everything, really-every single detail of what Eduardo’s done and where he’s gone and what he’s thought about for the past five years. There is not a lot Mark wouldn’t give to have Eduardo talk to him, to sit back and just listen.
Admittedly, he’s hoping they can hold off on that until he’s sober, which he is still not, although the drunkenness is slowly beginning to fade into a truly fucking horrific hangover.
In the meantime, Mark is busy noticing every smile, every grimace, every knit of Eduardo’s brow, every absent motion-a flick of the wrist, a stretch of the fingers, a shift in his seat. He stares so hard that Dustin finally kicks him lightly under the table, and Mark snaps out of it enough to look away, to try to look like he’s paying attention to whatever it is that Chris is saying.
When they break for lunch, Eduardo disappears through the glass doors immediately, cell phone pressed to his ear. Mark doesn’t know whether to be disappointed or relieved.
“Do you think he’ll come back?” he asks Dustin, a little anxiously.
“He’ll come back,” Dustin says, sounding certain but also sort of anxious, for reasons Mark is too tired and sick-feeling to possibly guess.
“Are you sure?” he asks instead.
“Positive.”
“Why?”
“Because as soon as you stopped looking at him, he started looking at you.”
*
Dustin is totally right, as it turns out. Eduardo doesn’t stare, not the way Mark keeps catching himself doing, but when Mark is not staring, Eduardo glances. He doesn’t linger, but he is definitely looking.
Like, a lot.
Mark watches from the very edge of his peripheral vision, tuned in to the conversation just enough that he could come up with a passably intelligent response if he had to, but it’s a fraction of his attention (the minimum amount, he thinks wryly, remembering). The rest is focused squarely on Eduardo, despite the fact that Mark cannot actually look directly at him, because the second he does that Eduardo will look away, will break the tenuous connection between them.
A message notification pops up in the bottom corner of Mark’s laptop screen, and he reluctantly looks down, opening his email client and quickly clicking through to his inbox.
To: Mark Zuckerberg
From: Dustin Moskovitz
Subject: exhibitionist
people are watching you two eyefuck each other.
Mark makes a choked-off noise that’s sort of embarrassingly high-pitched, and Dustin is only about halfway successful in suppressing a snort, causing several glances in their direction and more than a few raised eyebrows. Chris looks daggers at both of them, but Mark’s too busy noticing Eduardo’s reaction, which is to glance quickly between Mark and Dustin before he clicks on his own screen and begins to type.
Ten seconds later, there’s another new message in Mark’s inbox.
To: Mark Zuckerberg
From: Eduardo Saverin
Subject: ?
Care to fill me in on the joke?
Dustin glances over Mark’s shoulder and his eyes go wide, but Mark is already typing, because he knows that if he thinks about this too hard he won’t be able to formulate a response at all.
To: Eduardo Saverin
From: Mark Zuckerberg
Subject: RE: ?
dustin says we’re eyefucking.
This time it’s Eduardo’s turn to splutter, which earns him an angry look from Chris, but his fingers are already flying over the keys.
To: Mark Zuckerberg
From: Eduardo Saverin
Subject: RE: ?
Extremely sorry I asked.
No, you’re not, Mark thinks.
To: Eduardo Saverin
From: Mark Zuckerberg
Subject: RE: ?
no, you’re not.
To: Mark Zuckerberg
From: Eduardo Saverin
Subject: RE: ?
We’re not even looking at each other.
To: Eduardo Saverin
From: Mark Zuckerberg
Subject: RE: ?
you seriously want to argue the semantics of eyefucking?
Dustin, still reading over Mark’s shoulder, laughs and tries unsuccessfully to cover it up with a cough. Chris looks like he’s seriously contemplating the ethics of strangling co-workers, but Mark could frankly care less because he can’t help glancing at Eduardo to catch his reaction, and that’s when he sees it: the tiny upturn of Eduardo’s mouth. The faintest hint of a smile.
Dustin sees it too, and Mark watches in unmitigated delight as he catches Eduardo’s eye and pulls a completely ridiculous face. Eduardo looks away quickly, but Mark doesn’t miss the bitten-off grin, the tiny shake of his shoulders. There’s a short video playing on the projection screen, which gives Chris the opportunity to glare furiously at all three of them, then pull out his phone and dash off a quick e-mail.
To: Mark Zuckerberg, Dustin Moskovitz, Eduardo Saverin
From: Chris Hughes
Subject: I am going to kill you all.
I’m glad this is apparently turning out to be less painful than any of us expected, but could you please hold your shit until I’m finished ensuring the direction of our billion-dollar company?
Dustin shrugs apologetically and mouths sorry at Chris, who just rolls his eyes. Mark is not sorry in the least, not that he would be saying so even if he were. He’s too busy watching Eduardo, whose mouth twitches ever so slightly as he scans the e-mail, and that’s all the encouragement Mark needs. He opens up a new message before he can second-guess himself.
To: Eduardo Saverin
From: Mark Zuckerberg
Subject: can we talk?
?
He hovers over the Send button for just a second, clicks it, and holds his breath.
Eduardo reads the message, and Mark watches him suck in a slow breath, bite his lip.
After a minute that feels longer than the whole of the past five years, Eduardo begins to type, slower now than before.
Backspaces, begins again.
And again.
Stops typing, fingers stilling over the keys, uncertainty all over his face.
He looks a lot younger, all of a sudden.
Mark sighs, and opens another message.
To: Eduardo Saverin
From: Mark Zuckerberg
Subject: it’s a simple question, wardo.
it’s ok if the answer is no.
Mark can’t decide if that’s entirely true or not, but it must have been the right thing to say, because Eduardo’s expression seems to relax when he reads it. He hesitates for just a beat, then begins to type, and Mark can’t do anything but sit there and hope.
To: Mark Zuckerberg
From: Eduardo Saverin
Subject: (no subject)
I have another meeting after this. Late dinner? 8?
To: Eduardo Saverin
From: Mark Zuckerberg
Subject: ok
there’s a restaurant called pampas on the corner of palm & alma. meet there?
To: Mark Zuckerberg
From: Eduardo Saverin
Subject: I have two conditions.
1. Sober up.
2. I never want to hear the word “eyefucking” again.
Mark bites his lip hard to keep back a laugh and looks up to see Eduardo gazing right back at him, meeting his eyes for the first time all day.
The first time in five years, really.
He’s smiling.
*
continued here.