The Social Network - "Pangaea" - Mark/Eduardo 1/3
Title: Pangaea (Jurassic Park AU)
Fandom: The Social Network (Mark Zuckerberg/Eduardo Saverin)
25,000 words | NC-17 |
Notes: Shit gets pretty ~primeval~ at the end hohoho. ALSO, DINOSAURS. This is pretty much a dinosaur kidfic. Awkward. There are also super awkward background circumstances to me writing and finishing this fic, so sorry if they have any bizzarro effect on the story. Originally posted to answer this prompt at the kinkmeme.
Planning the budget for a fucking dinosaur park is a nightmare.
Eduardo spends weeks alternately poring over lists and list and spreadsheets and memos and order sheets, and then dramatically groaning and screaming into his hands, breaking only to continue noting down outrageous figures in his scratchy handwriting. It’s never “two bales of hay”, it’s always “twelve hundred tons”, or fucking “one hundred thousand units” next to listings like “herbivore feed” and “hormone replacement for carnivorous embryos” and what the fuck, Chris?
He calls Chris into his tiny paper-strewn campus office exactly six times to try to explain exactly what the hell it is that Chris desperately needs, rather than wants in some ideal world, and why do all the chemicals cost a thousand dollars a litre? Most of these items are not real words. No word deserves to be twenty-six letters long with three hyphens. Chris assures him that he is incorrect, and threatens to complain to Mark that his resources are being unduly restricted.
Eduardo deals with this kind of insubordination by frowning for about twenty seconds longer than Chris can handle, “Okay, no, Wardo, I can do it with five hundred litres instead, but that is the very least, okay?”
Wardo sighs and jots down the numbers, painstakingly multiplying the prices, carrying the tenths, and hundredths and thousandths, and finally underlining all the totals so hard the pen scores through the paper.
Eduardo is a soft touch when it comes to Mark’s plans, but he is determined to at least pretend to be a hard ass about it.
Chris feels bad about neglecting to divulge that he can probably easily synthesize the compound he wants from natural resources on the island. This way is faster, though, and he figures that what Eduardo’s technically bottomless (despite the way Wardo non-verbally threatens to strangle anyone who requests backup equipment) budget doesn’t know probably won’t hurt him.
Besides, Mark is hassling him day and night, sending him terse emails that generally read something along the lines of:
CHRIS, YOU PROMISED ME DINOSAURS BY NOW, I
HAVE THE EQUATIONS, I NEED MY GENETICS NOW.
CHRIS. DON’T THINK I WON’T OUTSOURCE.
Eduardo would probably spontaneously give birth to an actual baby brontosaurus if Mark carried out that threat, because if there was anything Eduardo would hate more than having to construct a new budget, it would be having to construct a new budget around the introduction of Sean Parker, rock star geneticist extraordinaire.
They have the island, the enclosures and labs and hotels and gift shops and all the little monetizing pieces that Eduardo bullied Mark into letting him get away with. They even have the first of the population: tiny baby stegosaurus that Dustin insists on carrying around and nursing to the point that even he, their so-called reptile specialist, has to admit they’re getting a little on the chubby side for three month old herbivores.
Mark has somehow managed to charm a trio of their velociraptors -
(Chris is frankly worried at this, and he’s made a note to himself to check on Mark’s programming for anomalies in their genetics, because nothing in his chemical work indicates that the dinosaurs in the park should be hailing Mark as a god. Plus, Eduardo has a minor coronary whenever Mark comes back from their glass pen with more than a nip to his ankles. )
- and now that the pack is reaching dinosaur adolescence, Dustin spends about 50% of his limited time with them muttering David Attenborough-style lines about the pack following their leader and strategically hunting, entrapping and devouring the young of his enemies.
Eduardo demands a halt to the jokes about how Mark should take his dinosaur friends and infiltrate the nearby Winklevoss Island Resort with their combination of wits and razor sharp teeth (and that’s just Eduardo’s description of Mark, Chris is disturbed to hear).
Dustin just won’t drop the idea of leading them into battle on the back of a brontosaurus (Dustin’s ideas boggle the mind, honestly, as if a brontosaurus would reliably walk in an actual direction rather than just devour the nearest forest for six days - and shouldn’t Dustin know this kind of thing?).
However, the more journals that pile up on Chris’s desk (Paleontology Today, Biology Magazine, Genetics Quarterly, DINOSAURS DINOSAURS DINOSAURS, Popular Science, fucking Time magazine), all of them plastered with Sean Parker’s fluorescent white smile and groundbreaking contributions to the field - well, the less inclined Chris is to sit on the fence.
Sean Parker is just a dick who is temporarily outclassing Chris (which is utter bullshit, Chris was in his EvoBio class in second year and he had WASTED Sean’s exam score by a full five percent, so take that, dickhead). If Chris could be the face on the magazine that recounts Sean being devoured by velociraptors, as long as those raptors are a Hughes production, well, it would be enough for him. He wouldn’t say that he is fame hungry, but the competition does push ten new species into production within a week. Like Mark, he wants the island to go online as soon as possible.
“Did you pack?”
Mark mutters noncommittally from the other side of his laptop. Eduardo stares at the sky in despair, apparently counting.
Dustin dumps an assortment of his own luggage in the back of their hired SUV, and grins at Chris from behind Eduardo’s back. He staggers about, silently miming a throttling movement, finishing on his knees in the dust, hands in the air, mouthing numbers at the same rate that Eduardo appears to be.
“I can see you, Dustin.” Mark says.
Eduardo whips around, “Did you fall over, Dustin?” he asks genuinely, and Dustin has to disguise a snort with an incredibly fake sneeze.
“No, no. I just brought my stuff. I’m heading out with the kids now.”
Eduardo looks at him blankly.
“The...first generation population?” He tries again.
Eduardo nods his assent to that, “Be careful. According to the itinery, we should arrive at about the same time.”
Dustin beams, and claps Eduardo on the shoulder fondly, “Loosen up, Wardo, the hard part is over. Daddy Mark and Uncle Chris are down with their science. Now we just have to raise them right.”
“I have the utmost confidence in your mothering abilities, Wardo,” Mark contributes unexpectedly, shutting his laptop with a click.
Eduardo shoots him a warning glance with a hint of a soft smile to it. He takes Mark’s bag from him, stowing it in the front passenger seat. “Let’s start this park then.”
Dustin gives Chris a quick fist bump, and waves to the crew of the seaplane they’ve commissioned especially for the final shift onto the island. They hear the engine roar into life faintly.
“Don’t waste time on the scenic route,” he shouts, jogging backwards towards his own ride, “Helicopters cost money, right, mom?”
“Shut up, Dustin.” Eduardo says good-naturedly, herding Mark into the car. He can’t deny that he feels the galvanizing prickle of dino magic that has pushed them all to this point.
---
Eduardo drives them to the helicoptor hire in silence. They're all keyed up, but no-one wants to break the tension until they're climbing into the chopper, bags crammed around them like lumpy cushions.
The pilot signals the lift off and his co-pilot slammed the door shut. It cuts out the roar of the wind and Wardo feels his stomach drop as they leave the ground. He stares resolutely at the grilled floor, digging around in his pocket for the last minute list of tasks he'd penned the night before. They're all crossed out, some of them twice. The post office had started hanging up on him after the third time he'd called to check they knew to direct all their mail to the PO Box for the Park.
A hand covers his suddenly, crumpling the list, and tossing it aside. Eduardo bites back the urge to snap. Mark squeezes his fingers tight around Eduardo's for a moment, warm and reassuring, before withdrawing them without a word.
Eduardo smiles. He figures that Mark knows where to go from here. It is his park, after all. They are in the air now, planning finished, shipments lodged and most of them already delivered. Dustin is minding the last of the prototypes they’ve been raising in Cambridge (he’s probably spoiling them stupid in the hull of that seaplane).
A snore alerts him to the fact that Chris had finally succumbed to sleep. He figures it is fair enough. Their friend has engineered them an island full of dinosaurs in under twenty-four months, which is more than anyone Eduardo knows can boast.
“Sleep, Wardo.” Mark says, quietly. He kicks some of Dustin’s bags around, making space for Eduardo’s ridiculously long legs.
His colleague has been awake almost as long as Mark has, and even Mark can recognise that this isn’t a healthy move when you are expected to start co-running a park filled with carnivorous animals and reptiles in less than ten hours.
Eduardo shrugs and shut his eyes. “Are you going to rest as well?” he murmurs.
“Maybe.” Mark says simply. He straightens Eduardo’s jacket, smoothing out the way the fabric lays over his chest. Eduardo makes a soft noise of surprise and huffs, settling into a deeper sleep.
Mark nods, and stands carefully, stepping over to tap the co-pilot on the shoulder.
“I’d like you to make an unscheduled stop. Winklevoss Island Resort. Land on the beach front, please. At least try to be discreet.”
---
To say that Chris is upset to wake up to find Sean Parker nudging him excitedly is the understatement of the century.
"Is this a nightmare?" He asks, blurrily. "Did we crash and get dumped in hell? I always wondered what God's stance on genetic engineering is. I guess we know now."
Sean is laughing, as if he thinks Chris is joking.
"Chris! You were always so funny. Hey, where's that ginger who was always following you round? The circus animal trainer or whatever?"
Chris refuses to dignify that with a response.
"Oh, sorry, I'll keep it down. The wife's sleeping, right?" He wriggles his eyebrows in Eduardo's direction, and then at Mark, who is instructing the irritated looking pilot on exactly where to land.
Chris feels suddenly very homesick for the ground, which is out of character for him. He usually loves flying. This has all changed, seeing as the sky has turned out not so great for hiding from massive douche bags.
"Mark," Chris says. "Mark."
Mark half turns on the spot, indicating that he is listening.
"Mark, why is Parker in our helicopter?"
"Because it was cheaper to just pick him up," Mark says, reasonably. He points out the front windscreen for the benefit of the co-pilot.
"It was that or swim," Sean says cheerily.
Chris slides as far away from Parker as is practical in a small aircraft, wishing he'd bothered to engineer those pterosaur-shark hybrids Dustin had wanted so much.
"Mark," he says again, meanly, making up his mind to pull his ace card. "Does Eduardo know?"
"Do I know what?"
The helicopter touches down, and the co-pilot springs out the side door at once. He looks pleased to have something to do, and takes to fetching and carrying the luggage onto the tarmac. Chris has never seen anyone this eager to do heavy lifting.
“Hey, guys!”
Dustin is sprinting through the shallows of the waterfall that pools picturesquely around the helipad. He looks positively delirious to be back on the island. He is clutching something tiny and reptilian. Too bad his good mood won’t last long, Chris thinks gloomily.
Eduardo has managed to untangle himself from the straps and bags he was sleeping on. It sounds like he has caught sight of Parker.
“What,” he starts, throwing one of Dustin’s rucksacks across the cabin, “the fuck is going on?”
“I would like to point out that I am an innocent party,” Chris cuts in hastily, before throwing himself out the door.
Dustin catches him awkwardly with one arm. “I’m going to take a wild guess and ask you, what did Mark do this time?”
They dodge a small avalanche of luggage, apparently victims of Eduardo’s anger.
“Believe it or not, he snuck Sean Parker into our helicopter.”
---
Sean is playing it cool. It isn’t everyday that an opportunity like this presents itself. Or rather, re-represents itself. The genius Mark Zuckerberg, fully bankrolled, no controlling interests, total freedom of research, and apparently not all that mad about the whole defecting thing.
He’d skipped out on the Winklevosses without notice almost as soon as the Zuck had txted him. Actually, they probably think he is still in the lab working on their Tyrannosaurus. Fat chance. He has the half finished embryo in his carry on. All it needs is some certified perfect Zuckerberg DNA code.
Traitor?
Sean prefers the term opportunist.
Eduardo Saverin, on the other hand, appears to be losing his shit. He has his hands buried in his hair, and he is pacing, despite having to bend himself almost in half to clear the ceiling of the cabin on every circuit.
“You do remember that he sold you out once, right?” Eduardo doesn’t seem able to control his pitch. His voice breaks girlishly on the last word, and Sean has to stifle his chuckle.
Eduardo turns on him, “Who the fuck do you think you are, Parker? You left, that’s it. Is it just me or do neither of you seem aware of a little place called Winklevoss Park Resort, barely ten miles away from us? Founded, oh right, a month after you,” he pauses to make some agonised faces of rage and a couple of aborted hand movements, “after you defected to the guys who are now our direct competitors, you asshole.”
Sean shrugged, “Hey, that’s business, Wardo. And if I remember rightly, you-”
“You do not call me that.” Eduardo screams across the cabin.
“Wardo-“ Mark says, finally.
“What can you possibly say to explain this, Mark?”
Mark rubs his cheek with his hand, sighing. “Sean, get out.”
Sean steps out, smirking. It looks like he is on the ins again.
“Hello, boys,” he says, waving brightly at Moscovitz and Hughes. “Oh, now, that is a lovely Compy you have there...” he says, reaching out for Dustin’s little Procompsognathus friend.
“Hands off, Parker.”
---
“Wardo-“ Mark tries again. “It’s business. They poached him, we poached him back. They’re years behind us, and their sponsors are demanding that they open immediately, monetize their half coded dinosaurs. We’re the better choice, that’s all.”
“He’ll go back. They’ll offer him more; he’ll take Chris’s research back with him this time. You can’t risk it, Mark.”
“They won’t take him back.” Mark smiles in that peculiar way that always means that he is certain he’s won the game before it has even ended. He steps in close, curls his fingers in Eduardo’s shirt front. He leans in to whisper the sentence, breathing it into Wardo’s lips, like he can’t believe in the fact well enough yet to say it in his usual forthright manner. “He brought me their t-rex, Wardo.”
At this distance Eduardo can see that Mark's pupils are dilated. He is clearly excited about his coup against the Winklevoss Resort, holding Eduardo's gaze effortlessly, still breathing softly against his mouth.
Wardo's lips part of their own accord, the intensity of the moment urging him down a road he isn't too certain about. He registers vaguely that it would be rather nice if Mark would just lean into him a little more and-
"Oh, wow, awkward," Dustin says, throwing his hands over his eyes in horror.
Eduardo wrenches his body away from Mark on reflex. "It's not what-" he starts lamely.
Mark drops his hands to his sides, suddenly all business, kneeling and reaching into his laptop bag to rummage for one of his three jailbroken smartphones.
"Uh, anyway," Dustin says, peeking through the gaps between his fingers. "Would you guys come out of the helicopter? Myrtle bit Sean, and Wardo is the only person I know who carries around a first aid kit. As big a dick as he is, I don't need any Jurassic Park flavoured guilt on my conscience."
"I've warned you about the Spielberg cracks, Moscovitz. Expendable. Keep this word in your vocabulary."
"Sure, whatever. Come watch Sean squirt blood all over the place."
"Is Myrtle one of our interns?" Eduardo asks hopefully, slinging his bag over a shoulder. He takes the opportunity to tuck the bottom of his dress shirt back into his pants too.
"Myrtle is one of the tamer Compy," Mark explains, shedding no greater light on the subject, despite Eduardo's 'aaaand?' hand gesture.
"You'll see her in a second, Wardo, you'll love her. She's Chris's answer to the rat infestation."
“Then it sounds like she’s got the right idea already,” Eduardo mutters.
---
Eduardo somehow ends up not only facilitating Sean's patch up job, but also actually bandaging the bite. Apparently his first aid training qualifies him as the only person around able to wrap a glorified band aid around Sean Parker's mildly punctured index finger. Dustin is snapping pxts with his iPhone as if it is some kind of occasion, and Sean is being uncharacteristically irritable about the photo opportunity.
"Is it really necessary to use this much iodine?" Sean complains bitterly.
"Yes." Wardo tells him, cruelly up-ending the bottle over the wound.
"Could you maybe tie the bandage a little looser?" He says, eying the purplish tip of his finger.
"Absolutely not," Dustin says. He has given Myrtle free range of his shoulders, and she is clinging to his shirt, her litle talons hooked into the cotton, utterly fascinated with his ears.
"Why doesn't she bite you?" Eduardo asks, squeezing Sean's finger through the bandage.
"Fucking - ow, Saverin!"
"Shut up, Parker." Dustin says, happily, offering his fingers up to Myrtle. She ignores them and sticks her tiny thin tongue into his ear for a second. "She knows who her mommies are, that's all. Mark did program her DNA, if you remember. She'll probably like you too, Wardo."
Eduardo reaches out a balled up hand, figuring he can risk his knuckles. "I thought you said in the reports that this species is out of control, breeding like crazy?"
"Attacking other species in groups? Yeah. They're vicious little bastards when they're in a pack."
"So where is her pack?"
Dustin shrugs. "They get on fine on their own too. They only gather when they hunt big game or when they feel distressed, and start squealing for back up."
He gives Sean a look, "You should know better than to touch other people's dinosaurs, Parker. Didn't you take Rearing 588? With Professor Sandberg?"
"Sorry," Sean mutters, nursing his hand. "I was somewhat preoccupied in that lab. Maybe you didn't notice our professor's insanely fabulous booty."
"I am going to pretend I didn't hear that," Chris says pleasantly, turning up out of the blue, startling Sean. He hands Wardo a roll of US bills, tightly bound in a rubber band. "I gave them a tip. I hope you don't mind. I think they needed it."
Wardo nods, embarrassed, "No, I agree. Thanks, man." He tucks the money into his inner jacket pocket, ignoring Sean's hopefully quirked eyebrows.
Chris untangles Myrtle from her perch on Dustin's shoulder with practiced hands.
"Trust me," he says, nodding at Wardo's hands, "I made her. Well, half of her, anyway."
Sean makes vomiting noises into his folded arms.
Eduardo hold his hands out obediently, tucking his thumbs in nervously, and Chris drops the fledgling dinosaur into them like it's nothing out of the ordinary. To his wonder, the Procompsognathus rolls in his palms, tail thrashing and head swaying as if it is having a fit.
"Shit, is it okay?"
"She's so happy that she's freaking out!" Dustin sounds unbearably proud.
"That's not...a normal dinosaur behaviour, but Mark wrote her, so you have to expect the odd anomaly, I guess." Chris allows, shaking his head. He pulls out his blackberry and makes a couple of notes.
"That is wack," Sean says, staring at the compy. "You guys remember fifteen minutes ago when she tried to rip my fingers off, right?"
Myrtle discovers Eduardo's suit sleeves, and accepts the challenge, scaling them in seconds. She loses her grip at his shoulder and Eduardo reflexively catches her against his neck with both hands.
Mark somehow chooses this moment to finally step out of the helicopter, sliding his phone into the pocket of his sweatpants. He looks at Wardo's armful of affectionate carnivore and nods approvingly.
"The mother clause should definitely go into all the species from now," he tells Chris, "Wardo should probably help you hatch them in the lab whenever he can spare the time, too."
Mark insists that Eduardo be allowed to carry Myrtle back to the labs. He has little interest in touching his creations beyond a brief examination once Chris has given them form. Mark’s passion lies in the act of creation itself, and the observation of interactions forthwith. He’s not into cuddling the animals.
“Are they all like this?” Wardo asks, rubbing the base of Myrtle’s tail as she chirps happily.
“Tiny? Cuddly? Weak for tall, dark, Brazilian men?” Dustin jokes, leading their little group across the freshly planted grounds, hands stuffed contentedly in his pockets.
“No.” Mark answers. “I wrote the mother clause-“ Sean laughs again, ”-into every species, but Compy are already naturally playful. The velociraptors, for example, will give you more respect than they’d afford most of their prey, but you obviously shouldn’t approach them expecting to be friends.”
Eduardo knows this is a fact, rather than a challenge, but it’s hard to remember to apply Mark-logic when most people would say the same things out of spite. He gives into jealously momentarily, picking up on the same fact they’ve all been musing over:
“But you play with the raptors,” Eduardo says.
Chris has to admire the way that he manages to eradicate almost all traits of bitterness from his speech.
Mark shrugs, stepping off the beaten path for a moment to crouch by the nearest flowerbed. “I hand reared them from birth,” he says, stepping back quickly, “I taught them some traditional hunting algorithms as children. They see that I come and go as I like. They can sense that I hold some power over their existence.”
Mark reaches for Eduardo’s free hand. Eduardo mutely allows him to take it up. He rubs his fingers over Eduardo’s knuckles, tracing the hard edges of his family ring, his face carefully devoid of emotion.
“Feed her,” he says, showing Eduardo the live cricket in his other hand, “Compy show affection by giving gifts, and feeding one another.”
“I hate bugs,” Wardo complains, but he accepts the cricket with the hand Mark has been holding, pinching it gingerly between forefinger and thumb.
They reach the grand entrance as a group, and Chris and Dustin (well, Chris mostly) have the good sense to hustle Sean into the building ahead of the others.
In the lobby, Sean whistles and exclaims over the life-sized replica of a tyrannosaurus skeleton, and predictably homes in on the complimentary buffet laid out for staff benefit. This is one of the outrageous expenses that Eduardo has managed to agree on with Mark and Dustin.
“Bring them food, and they will come,” Wardo had said under his breath, salvaging dishes from their offices, all of which he could remember personally preparing for Mark at some point or another. He’d signed off on the outrageous catering bill, thinking that even if Mark managed to scavenge a single meal a day from the lobby the staff could justify the waste by all eating from the same table, and then distributing the waste amongst the appropriate species in their charge.
Dustin is unashamedly spying on Mark and Eduardo. “They were totally about to get their shit together before,” he informs Chris, craning his neck as if it will help him see through the stone wall that is blocking all but Mark’s elbow from sight.
Chris looks doubtful, but he squints down Dustin’s line of sight nonetheless.
“This is weird,” he says, finally, after they’ve watched Mark’s elbow jiggle for about thirty seconds.
Sean comes to stand just behind them, obnoxiously licking his fingers clean of the cream cake he has just decimated. “What’s with the spying, kids? I thought they were already fucking?” he says, wiping his mouth.
“Hey, Chris, could you spot me? Have I got anything on my face?”
Chris waves a middle finger in his general direction. “Just, shut up, Sean,” he says.
“Jesus, you guys are so uptight. I know it’s hard to accept that your parents have sex, but this is getting weird.”
Dustin turns to fix him with a dirty look. “Can I-?”
“Not until Mark has his t-rex.” Chris reminds him sorrowfully.
---
Eduardo has fed animals before. Usually farm animals, and usually stuff like hay and disgusting smelling pellets or lettuce. He figures it could be worse with dinosaurs. His first experience of feeding time could have been tossing chunks of flesh to a Spinosaurus or something equally horrifying. Holding the cricket still as Myrtle gnaws on its head is hardly the stuff of nightmares.
“So these guys hunt bugs most of the time?” Eduardo asks, smiling as the compy manages to tear her half of the cricket loose. She swallows it greedily, and Eduardo offers her the rest. Myrtle takes it from his fingers delicately and crouches in the crook of his elbow to pull it apart.
Mark takes the end of his hoodie drawstring out of his mouth, shrugging. “They eat everything. Chris has been tracking the packs via CCTV and microchips, and they seem to be fairly indiscriminate in their habits. Insects, rodents, sometimes fish around the river. Dustin said he caught some in the botanist’s garden out back, eating fallen fruit.”
“Wow,” Eduardo says, lacking anything else to say.
“Do you prefer the compy?” Mark asks, incongruously. “They were good starters, but I’ve programmed a number of superior species since their initial synthesis. There should be a few good hatchlings today.”
“Uh, I’ve never actually met any of the others,” Eduardo admits. “Dustin would come and tell me about them, and I saw the progress reports, but I never...” He trails off, uncomfortable under Mark’s incredulous stare.
“I thought you liked dinosaurs.” Mark says.
“I do! I mean, I really liked the idea of dinosaurs.” Eduardo says defensively. Myrtle chirps, done with her cricket. Eduardo absently rests his free hand over her, and she nuzzles it, settling into the loose folds of his sleeve.
“The idea of dinosaurs,” Mark repeats.
Eduardo wishes he could kick himself without waking Myrtle. “What I mean is...your idea was amazing. I believed in it. I believed in you.”
“Like how you believe in it turning a profit.” Mark says quietly.
“No!”
Myrtle chirrups softly.
Eduardo covers her with his hand again. “No,” he says. “I didn’t do this to make money, Mark. I did this so you could have this.” He jerks his head at the surroundings. “This was your dream. I wanted to make it real. And I have.” Eduardo stares at Mark’s sneakers, praying that his face isn’t as pink as he feels it might be. “So, would you please show me your dinosaurs?”
The scuffed sneakers remain in place for a few seconds before they finally shuffle away. Eduardo looks up to find that Mark is holding the front entrance open for him, the hint of a smile around his lips. “I’ll give you the grand tour.” Mark says magnanimously. “But you’ll have to surrender that compy to Dustin’s department. And Sean needs to come with us.”
Sean sidles over as they step in. “Just us three? That sounds cozy.”
Eduardo makes a visible effort to pretend he doesn’t resent Sean Parker with every fibre of his being. “Dustin, can you take Myrtle?”
“Yup.”
“Is she going back to her herd?”
“Pack.” Mark and Sean say in unison.
“Okay, pack. Her pack?”
“Chris can track her down for you again later.” Dustin smirks. “If you’re worried about her.”
“And if he can’t, one compy isn’t too different from the next.” Sean interjects; turning to wink at Chris like he’d made a super secret geneticist injoke.
“She’s micro-chipped.” Chris tells Eduardo, ignoring Sean. “See you in the labs.”
Eduardo nods and follows Mark, who has already crossed the room and is holding open a door for them.
“I’ll show you your office, and then we can go see some hatchlings.” Mark says.
The three of them walk through as a group, Sean struggling to insinuate himself alongside Mark as they walk down the hall. The walls are glass, occasionally punctuated with steel panels that Eduardo remembers vaguely from blueprints as housing mostly refrigeration units. He also remembers the glass costing an absolute fortune. Mark had wanted transparency though, a free and open academic space where he can see every aspect of his park in progress. Eduardo can understand that desire for control.
So many people assume that Mark is a misanthrope - that he likes to be alone above all else - when in fact this isn’t true at all. Mark loves to be surrounded by people; preferably people of his own choosing who understand that being with someone didn’t necessarily mean talking to them. If Mark wants that kind of quiet company, Eduardo is willing to supply it, whether in person, or at the rate of four thousand US dollars per pane.
They walk past pane after pane, scientists and interns that Eduardo vaguely recognised busily at work behind the glass. Most of them look intent on their instruments. Others look happy, to Eduardo’s pleasure. Some are women Eduardo recognises from Chris’s numerous study groups at Harvard. They glance up through their glass walls as they pass and most smile or wave at him.
“Ohhhh, yeah.” Sean waves back at every single one. Eduardo makes a note to warn as many of his former classmates as possible.
“This is your office.” Mark says, pressing his hand against a semi-transparent panel on the wall.
Eduardo lifts an eyebrow. He doesn’t remember requisitioning a private office space. He’d assumed he’d just clear some space in the clerical or admin sectors. The glass sectors. Not this...
“I set up your new computer. The network is fully operational, and all your files should be in order.”
Mark shrugs, holding the door open for Eduardo to enter. “The panel will only respond to your print. Your intern’s. And mine. Unless you change that.”
Eduardo looks up from the top of the line desk, already stocked with pens and accounting books, inbox already stacked with a small sheath of dog-eared, and chemical-stained requisition forms.
Mark is staring at him, something expectant in his gaze.
Eduardo face feels warm. “Thanks, Mark. It’s- It’s great.”
Mark nods, walking out of the office. Eduardo gives his perfectly ergonomic desk chair a gentle push before he follows.
Sean is leaning against the glass panel adjacent to the office, doing his best to communicate pick up lines through exuberant sign language. There are two chemists and an assortment of interns on the other side, most of them studiously ignoring him. Eduardo sees that one of the senior scientists is Christy Lee, formerly head of Harvard’s Membrane Biology Club and lauded host of a number of infamous Virology Dinner Club parties. She looks up, as if feeling Eduardo’s eyes on her, and smiles at him in recognition.
Sean redoubles his efforts, waving at Christy and making the international gesture for ‘call me’. She lifts an
eyebrow in bemusement, looking at least slightly interested. Sean is encouraged. “How do I open the doors, Mark?”
“You don’t.” Mark says wryly.
He puts his hand on Eduardo’s arm, pulling gently. Eduardo waves at Christy briefly and follows Mark. His grip on his forearm is firm, but Eduardo finds he doesn’t mind being personally guided through the labs. They only pass one more storage lockup -
(“Stationery is in there, apparently.” Mark says casually, glancing at Eduardo with an almost nervous tic to his movements.
“How would you know?” Eduardo laughs.
“I memorised the blueprints weeks ago,” Mark says.
“Huh.”)
- and they’re suddenly in front of a vast glass wall. There are at least thirty people inside, notably Chris and a small entourage grouped around him and a low oval shaped table that is glowing a warm friendly yellow. He appears to be instructing the group, from the way he is pointing at them and then to the table.
“Perfect timing.” Mark says. His fingers squeeze Eduardo’s wrist momentarily. “Press the panel.”
Eduardo does, unsure of the pressure it requires - apparently barely a brush, judging by the speed at which the glass slides open before them.
Sean just manages to catch up. He’s slipping his iPhone into the pocket of his sports coat, looking a little more smug than usual. Eduardo supposes he has managed to get Christy’s number. He is impressed, if a little frightened by Sean’s tenacity. He’d heard most guys who had approached Christy Lee at Harvard had been scathingly rejected. Sean must have something going for him after all.
“The hatchery!” Sean says. He sounds awed.
Mark half-smirks at that. “So, how does it compare to the Winklevoss setup?”
“Oh, baby, baby.” Sean says, stepping over the threshold and slowly spinning in place. “Zuckerberg, I am going to build you a pack of Tyrannosaurus in here.”
“Good.” Mark says, as if that settles everything. “That’s your workbench.” He nods down the length of the room.
Sean hums happily, and starts untangling himself from his sidebag.
Eduardo watches for a few moments as Sean starts plonking down weird stoppered test tubes the size of his fist, all with curly little creatures inside. They are perfectly still, suspended in yellow fluid, and it takes Eduardo a moment to realise that these are Sean Parker’s ultimate contribution - the price he was paying to buy into their as-yet-unnamed park.
(“Jurassic Park.” Dustin says stubbornly, for about the hundredth time.
“No,” sighs Chris. His hand holding the uncapped marker poised droops a little - obviously there is nothing better coming forthwith.
Mark frowns, still typing. “That’s not even accurate. I don’t want it to sound stupid.” He says, not even having to look at Dustin to project the barb perfectly.
“Prehistoric Park?” Chris suggests, off hand.
Mark hmms, unimpressed. He hits the return key a couple of times. “Wardo.” Mark says.
Eduardo looks up from his lapful of paperwork. He is chewing the nib of a red pen in between tightly circling the digits that flow endlessly down the pages. When he looks up his lips are stained red from the ink. “Sorry, what?” he frowns, looking expectantly at Chris.
Chris taps the whiteboard. “Names. What do you want to call this place? Please do not say ‘Fantasy Island’, no matter what Dustin promises to do for you.”
Dustin drops back into his (Chris’s) desk chair with a melodramatic sigh. The force of his drop propels him halfway across the slick linoleum floor.
“Uh,” Eduardo glances back down at his figures, “Um, I don’t know, guys. I guess something to do with dinosaurs. Mark should--” he grimaces, and scrubs out a misplaced circle, “yeah, whatever Mark thinks is good.”
“Are you kidding?” Chris deadpans at the same time as Dustin howls in frustration -
“Whatever Mark thinks up will suck, Wardo, come on!”
“I don’t know,” Eduardo mumbles, jotting something down the margins, “just let me get this done first.”
Dustin spins around the workbench towards the collection of dinosaur figurines he gave Chris for his birthday (to this date Dustin has played with them so often that the interns pretty much assume they are his, so in a fit of good will Chris surrendered them in all but name and storage space).
Chris caps his marker and watches Mark, who hasn’t typed a stroke since Eduardo started to speak. He isn’t great at Mark!expressions (at least not as good as Eduardo. When Eduardo is looking for them), but he knows that this one is mostly made up of sadness, and maybe a little resentment.
Chris hasn’t seen this face since the day Mark came back to their dorm halfway through the hour he would usually be at 744 DNA PROGRAMMING: Animals and Reptiles (Wardo says it is creepy how Chris always seems to remember everyone’s schedules. Chris says it is weirder that Mark can get away with handing in a DNA profile of Reptar for 60% of his grade) clutching a wad of notepaper before promptly locking Billy out of their shared bedroom.
Billy lost three hours of valuable study time (more like bong-time, Chris pointed out, trying to prevent them losing any more of their bond on replacing doors) until Eduardo manages to coax his way in with the aid of a six pack and forty minutes on the phone talking about how many financiers he’d mentioned Mark to at his Harvard Investment Association’s black tie event.
Chris watches Mark watch Wardo.
Then Mark looks down, types a lone bracket, pauses, and clatters out a line of code. Then another, and another. His lips ease back into their perfectly straight line of absolute concentration. Chris thinks Mark is probably writing something that will turn out amazing on an unprecedented level. This is what Mark tends to do when he gets upset.
Once Eduardo went out on a date instead of attending weekly Mario Cart night, and Mark locked himself in for sixteen hours and wrote CourseMatch.
This is how they end up running an unnamed park. And why every single creature Mark manages to breathe life into lives for one reason, and one reason only - to get the attention of Eduardo Saverin.
Chris figures that Mark would scowl at his explanation, but he can’t deny that this is what the script does.
Chris watches the first hatchlings weep and wither and die, longing for their pre-programmed mother. It doesn’t matter what he feeds them, it doesn’t matter how long Dustin pets and plays with them. They can’t figure it out until Chris calls Mark, desperate for some explanation, and Mark admits that he needs to alter one of the scripts.
He flies in personally the next day, lines their artificially warmed pen with a shirt Dustin does a double take at. It doesn’t do much - they stop cheeping so desperately all the time, and nestle into the fabric instead. They still refuse to feed, and every last compy in the set perishes, pining.
Chris feels sick, physically sick, carrying them out to the garden for burial. There is no way Dustin can handle destroying the little bodies in the industrial furnace that has just been finished. It was better for him to dig for a couple of hours.
“I’m sorry.” Mark says, back in the labs, so quiet that Chris barely hears him.
No one tells Eduardo about that batch. Chris over-projects the prices of some of his own resources to hide the costs.
He walks in on Dustin on the phone a week later, hunched up at the back of the hatchery, his voice low, darker than he can ever remember Dustin sounding. “----Mark. Yeah- I know. No.” A pause, a grunt of grudging agreement. “They’re only babies, Mark, they don’t know how to deal with that kind of - that depth - fuck--”.
Chris walks out as silently as he enters. He slides the door panel shut and sits down in front of it to ward off the skeleton crew of interns. He has enough capability on his smart phone to work on a couple of chemical problems without his lab instruments.
Things are touch and go for a couple of weeks as the new eggs form and Mark transmits his rewritten DNA sequences. They hatch, and they instinctively nest in the same ragged old shirt. Dustin looks grim for a few days, and the interns (just Alice, Natalie and Viktor at that point) have so much trouble feeding them that Chris has to pitch in and run four hour feeding cycles with Dustin. But they stop pining by the sixth day and before they knew it, the compy are alert and just about capable of hunting on their own. Alice literally weeps in relief. Chris can’t deny he has to wipe at his own face too.
Mark immediately sends them more ambitious sequences. And a hoodie, one Chris has seen a lot of at Harvard. The hatchlings aren’t dying. He can turn a blind eye to the complexes Mark is instilling in what Dustin is almost unironically referring to as Mark’s children.
It isn’t fair to Wardo, Chris, thinks. But he thinks it quietly, because they are making dinosaurs and Mark is doing amazing things, and he is with his best friends every day, and all they all want now was for Eduardo to look up from his saintliness for five damn minutes and see that Mark is trying to build him an Eden for his very own.)
“Wardo.”
Eduardo looks up from Sean’s arrangements. Chris is standing right in front of him. He has donned a stained and spotted white coat, and he is looking more mad scientist than Eduardo has ever seen him look before. Also tired - and incongruously - happy. Like he has reached the end of a long journey.
“Come and see the eggs.” Chris says. He nods at the group around the glowing table.
They (interns and a couple of biochemists, like Chris -Eduardo guesses) look expectant, and happy, faces glowing as bright as their hatching table.
He walks over, and sees Mark behind the scientists, leaning against the glass wall that separates the hatchery from some other lab, watching his approach. Eduardo averts his eyes, looks at the eggs instead.
They are clustered together, each one big enough to fill his open hands. They are creamy blue, although Eduardo doesn’t know if this is something he should attribute to Chris’s department. They are nestled in down and some kind of fleece -
“Is that my hoodie?” Eduardo asks, incredulous.
“Mr. Saverin, we haven’t met but it’s a real honour-” Eduardo finds himself shaking hands with Natalie, who is smiling really really hard, and sneaking glances at Mark for some reason.
“Seriously, you have no idea how pleased we are to finally have you here.” Natalie continues, smile beginning to turn into a manic grimace as she steers him towards the table. Eduardo can’t help but note that she has dark circles under her eyes. He thinks of Chris’s face, and peers at Viktor and Alice. They look deathly once he gets past the ecstatically happy expressions.
Obviously Natalie is distracting him from confronting Mark over the inexplicable sweater theft, but he files the team’s exhaustion away as something to look into as well.
Eduardo also doesn’t miss the way Chris is side eying Mark as he comes over to slap Eduardo on the back.
“You can touch them, Wardo.”
Eduardo slots away his suspicions for now, and instead takes in the eggs, memorising the way some of them are so translucent he can see the shapes of the hatchlings inside. Some of them are wriggling. They shake a little. He looks at Chris, gaze questioning.
Chris shakes his head, “They won’t hatch for a couple of days, I think. They’re not active enough yet.” He hesitates for a second. “Please touch them, Wardo.”
Eduardo frowns at the crack in his voice.
“Okay,” he says, reaching out hesitantly. He brushes the nearest egg with his fingertips. He is surprised to find that it is warm - smooth - but warm. It’s disconcerting. It vibrates as his fingers leave its surface, and everyone around the table makes a sound of pleasure. Natalie actually claps. Mark is smirking. Dustin has crept in and he is smiling fit to burst on Chris’s right.
Eduardo isn’t sure what he’s done to make everyone so glad. The afternoon has been very confusing. Someone has pulled out a lone bottle of beer and it is making its way around the lab. Even Chris takes a swig, wiping condensation onto his lab coat self-consciously as he passes it to Viktor.
Dustin is spinning all the interns in turn, warbling “Big momma has arrived!”
“No, no, no.” Chris says, fruitlessly attempting to escape from Dustin’s creative dance moves.
Eduardo accepts the beer bottle offered to him numbly, sips from it and shakes it when he finds only a mouthful left.
“Sorry.”
Eduardo looks up. Mark is next to him, one hand stuffed in his pocket, the other outstretched to take back the empty.
“Thought there was more.” Mark says. “In the bottle.” He ends up pulling the beer out of Eduardo’s hands.
Lost for where to put it now, he offers it to Dustin as he sweeps past. Dustin snatches it, his grin swiftly transforming into a pout as he juggles the diminished weight of the bottle.
“Mark is a meanie,” he accuses, from across the room, trading Viktor to Natalie for Alice.
Mark just shrugs. “Wardo,” he says instead.
Eduardo looks at him expectantly.
Mark is staring at the hatching table. “Touch that one.” He says. He nods at one egg in particular.
Eduardo hadn’t spotted it before. But now that he’s looking at them, he realises that not all the eggs are identical. Most of them are fairly big, blue spheres. No one is exactly the same as the next. However, there is a truly odd one out in the midst. All the other eggs lean against it gently, as if keeping it company with their proximity. The fleece and down is heaped high here too, wrapped close around the base and topping the egg like a little feathered snow cap.
“The little one?” Eduardo asks, drawn down Mark’s sightline immediately. He finds himself hovering over the edge of the table. Mark, he finds, is at his elbow, approval glinting in his eyes.
Eduardo reaches for it, having to lean. He picks it up gently. It fits his palm easily, tiny like a chicken egg, only blue. He stands upright quickly, quick enough to catch Mark’s eyes lingering on his back, on his-
Eduardo flushes and concentrates on the egg in his palm. He cups it nervously, wondering if maybe he should blow on it to keep it warm. It vibrates gently, not so much spooking him as sending a nervous thrill down his spine. There is a tiny unborn dinosaur in his hands. Totally dependent on him not fumbling or dropping him.
Or her, he amends, thinking of Myrtle fondly.
“That one’s special.” Mark says.
Eduardo looks up, offering him the egg carefully.
Mark shakes his head but puts a hand over the top of it for a moment, long pale fingers brushing over Eduardo’s.
Eduardo thinks of Harvard, struck and embarrassed within a split second by - just how often he’d touched Mark over their years there. He’d - Mark hadn’t touched him back then.
Why did it feel so different now that he is?
“Why?” He manages to say, letting Mark guide his hands back to the warm hatching table.
They tuck the egg back into the nest, Eduardo scratching up down and patting it over the top of the egg, Mark pulling the fleece from Eduardo’s hoodie around the shell.
Mark shrugs. “You’ll see.”
Eduardo stares.
“You should get some sleep.” Mark says. He plucks a feather out of the gelled hair behind Eduardo’s ear. He lets it float to the floor. “Chris will show you to your quarters.” He is stroking the shell of Eduardo’s ear with one sure finger.
“Oh.” Eduardo says. It is barely six. “Goodnight?”
“Night, Wardo.” Mark says. He folds both his hands into his hoodie pocket and leaves through a door at the far end of the lab.
Eduardo stares after him, hand going up to touch his ear.
“Okay,” he says. “Okay.”
Part 2 || Part 3
Fandom: The Social Network (Mark Zuckerberg/Eduardo Saverin)
25,000 words | NC-17 |
Notes: Shit gets pretty ~primeval~ at the end hohoho. ALSO, DINOSAURS. This is pretty much a dinosaur kidfic. Awkward. There are also super awkward background circumstances to me writing and finishing this fic, so sorry if they have any bizzarro effect on the story. Originally posted to answer this prompt at the kinkmeme.
Planning the budget for a fucking dinosaur park is a nightmare.
Eduardo spends weeks alternately poring over lists and list and spreadsheets and memos and order sheets, and then dramatically groaning and screaming into his hands, breaking only to continue noting down outrageous figures in his scratchy handwriting. It’s never “two bales of hay”, it’s always “twelve hundred tons”, or fucking “one hundred thousand units” next to listings like “herbivore feed” and “hormone replacement for carnivorous embryos” and what the fuck, Chris?
He calls Chris into his tiny paper-strewn campus office exactly six times to try to explain exactly what the hell it is that Chris desperately needs, rather than wants in some ideal world, and why do all the chemicals cost a thousand dollars a litre? Most of these items are not real words. No word deserves to be twenty-six letters long with three hyphens. Chris assures him that he is incorrect, and threatens to complain to Mark that his resources are being unduly restricted.
Eduardo deals with this kind of insubordination by frowning for about twenty seconds longer than Chris can handle, “Okay, no, Wardo, I can do it with five hundred litres instead, but that is the very least, okay?”
Wardo sighs and jots down the numbers, painstakingly multiplying the prices, carrying the tenths, and hundredths and thousandths, and finally underlining all the totals so hard the pen scores through the paper.
Eduardo is a soft touch when it comes to Mark’s plans, but he is determined to at least pretend to be a hard ass about it.
Chris feels bad about neglecting to divulge that he can probably easily synthesize the compound he wants from natural resources on the island. This way is faster, though, and he figures that what Eduardo’s technically bottomless (despite the way Wardo non-verbally threatens to strangle anyone who requests backup equipment) budget doesn’t know probably won’t hurt him.
Besides, Mark is hassling him day and night, sending him terse emails that generally read something along the lines of:
CHRIS, YOU PROMISED ME DINOSAURS BY NOW, I
HAVE THE EQUATIONS, I NEED MY GENETICS NOW.
CHRIS. DON’T THINK I WON’T OUTSOURCE.
Eduardo would probably spontaneously give birth to an actual baby brontosaurus if Mark carried out that threat, because if there was anything Eduardo would hate more than having to construct a new budget, it would be having to construct a new budget around the introduction of Sean Parker, rock star geneticist extraordinaire.
They have the island, the enclosures and labs and hotels and gift shops and all the little monetizing pieces that Eduardo bullied Mark into letting him get away with. They even have the first of the population: tiny baby stegosaurus that Dustin insists on carrying around and nursing to the point that even he, their so-called reptile specialist, has to admit they’re getting a little on the chubby side for three month old herbivores.
Mark has somehow managed to charm a trio of their velociraptors -
(Chris is frankly worried at this, and he’s made a note to himself to check on Mark’s programming for anomalies in their genetics, because nothing in his chemical work indicates that the dinosaurs in the park should be hailing Mark as a god. Plus, Eduardo has a minor coronary whenever Mark comes back from their glass pen with more than a nip to his ankles. )
- and now that the pack is reaching dinosaur adolescence, Dustin spends about 50% of his limited time with them muttering David Attenborough-style lines about the pack following their leader and strategically hunting, entrapping and devouring the young of his enemies.
Eduardo demands a halt to the jokes about how Mark should take his dinosaur friends and infiltrate the nearby Winklevoss Island Resort with their combination of wits and razor sharp teeth (and that’s just Eduardo’s description of Mark, Chris is disturbed to hear).
Dustin just won’t drop the idea of leading them into battle on the back of a brontosaurus (Dustin’s ideas boggle the mind, honestly, as if a brontosaurus would reliably walk in an actual direction rather than just devour the nearest forest for six days - and shouldn’t Dustin know this kind of thing?).
However, the more journals that pile up on Chris’s desk (Paleontology Today, Biology Magazine, Genetics Quarterly, DINOSAURS DINOSAURS DINOSAURS, Popular Science, fucking Time magazine), all of them plastered with Sean Parker’s fluorescent white smile and groundbreaking contributions to the field - well, the less inclined Chris is to sit on the fence.
Sean Parker is just a dick who is temporarily outclassing Chris (which is utter bullshit, Chris was in his EvoBio class in second year and he had WASTED Sean’s exam score by a full five percent, so take that, dickhead). If Chris could be the face on the magazine that recounts Sean being devoured by velociraptors, as long as those raptors are a Hughes production, well, it would be enough for him. He wouldn’t say that he is fame hungry, but the competition does push ten new species into production within a week. Like Mark, he wants the island to go online as soon as possible.
“Did you pack?”
Mark mutters noncommittally from the other side of his laptop. Eduardo stares at the sky in despair, apparently counting.
Dustin dumps an assortment of his own luggage in the back of their hired SUV, and grins at Chris from behind Eduardo’s back. He staggers about, silently miming a throttling movement, finishing on his knees in the dust, hands in the air, mouthing numbers at the same rate that Eduardo appears to be.
“I can see you, Dustin.” Mark says.
Eduardo whips around, “Did you fall over, Dustin?” he asks genuinely, and Dustin has to disguise a snort with an incredibly fake sneeze.
“No, no. I just brought my stuff. I’m heading out with the kids now.”
Eduardo looks at him blankly.
“The...first generation population?” He tries again.
Eduardo nods his assent to that, “Be careful. According to the itinery, we should arrive at about the same time.”
Dustin beams, and claps Eduardo on the shoulder fondly, “Loosen up, Wardo, the hard part is over. Daddy Mark and Uncle Chris are down with their science. Now we just have to raise them right.”
“I have the utmost confidence in your mothering abilities, Wardo,” Mark contributes unexpectedly, shutting his laptop with a click.
Eduardo shoots him a warning glance with a hint of a soft smile to it. He takes Mark’s bag from him, stowing it in the front passenger seat. “Let’s start this park then.”
Dustin gives Chris a quick fist bump, and waves to the crew of the seaplane they’ve commissioned especially for the final shift onto the island. They hear the engine roar into life faintly.
“Don’t waste time on the scenic route,” he shouts, jogging backwards towards his own ride, “Helicopters cost money, right, mom?”
“Shut up, Dustin.” Eduardo says good-naturedly, herding Mark into the car. He can’t deny that he feels the galvanizing prickle of dino magic that has pushed them all to this point.
---
Eduardo drives them to the helicoptor hire in silence. They're all keyed up, but no-one wants to break the tension until they're climbing into the chopper, bags crammed around them like lumpy cushions.
The pilot signals the lift off and his co-pilot slammed the door shut. It cuts out the roar of the wind and Wardo feels his stomach drop as they leave the ground. He stares resolutely at the grilled floor, digging around in his pocket for the last minute list of tasks he'd penned the night before. They're all crossed out, some of them twice. The post office had started hanging up on him after the third time he'd called to check they knew to direct all their mail to the PO Box for the Park.
A hand covers his suddenly, crumpling the list, and tossing it aside. Eduardo bites back the urge to snap. Mark squeezes his fingers tight around Eduardo's for a moment, warm and reassuring, before withdrawing them without a word.
Eduardo smiles. He figures that Mark knows where to go from here. It is his park, after all. They are in the air now, planning finished, shipments lodged and most of them already delivered. Dustin is minding the last of the prototypes they’ve been raising in Cambridge (he’s probably spoiling them stupid in the hull of that seaplane).
A snore alerts him to the fact that Chris had finally succumbed to sleep. He figures it is fair enough. Their friend has engineered them an island full of dinosaurs in under twenty-four months, which is more than anyone Eduardo knows can boast.
“Sleep, Wardo.” Mark says, quietly. He kicks some of Dustin’s bags around, making space for Eduardo’s ridiculously long legs.
His colleague has been awake almost as long as Mark has, and even Mark can recognise that this isn’t a healthy move when you are expected to start co-running a park filled with carnivorous animals and reptiles in less than ten hours.
Eduardo shrugs and shut his eyes. “Are you going to rest as well?” he murmurs.
“Maybe.” Mark says simply. He straightens Eduardo’s jacket, smoothing out the way the fabric lays over his chest. Eduardo makes a soft noise of surprise and huffs, settling into a deeper sleep.
Mark nods, and stands carefully, stepping over to tap the co-pilot on the shoulder.
“I’d like you to make an unscheduled stop. Winklevoss Island Resort. Land on the beach front, please. At least try to be discreet.”
---
To say that Chris is upset to wake up to find Sean Parker nudging him excitedly is the understatement of the century.
"Is this a nightmare?" He asks, blurrily. "Did we crash and get dumped in hell? I always wondered what God's stance on genetic engineering is. I guess we know now."
Sean is laughing, as if he thinks Chris is joking.
"Chris! You were always so funny. Hey, where's that ginger who was always following you round? The circus animal trainer or whatever?"
Chris refuses to dignify that with a response.
"Oh, sorry, I'll keep it down. The wife's sleeping, right?" He wriggles his eyebrows in Eduardo's direction, and then at Mark, who is instructing the irritated looking pilot on exactly where to land.
Chris feels suddenly very homesick for the ground, which is out of character for him. He usually loves flying. This has all changed, seeing as the sky has turned out not so great for hiding from massive douche bags.
"Mark," Chris says. "Mark."
Mark half turns on the spot, indicating that he is listening.
"Mark, why is Parker in our helicopter?"
"Because it was cheaper to just pick him up," Mark says, reasonably. He points out the front windscreen for the benefit of the co-pilot.
"It was that or swim," Sean says cheerily.
Chris slides as far away from Parker as is practical in a small aircraft, wishing he'd bothered to engineer those pterosaur-shark hybrids Dustin had wanted so much.
"Mark," he says again, meanly, making up his mind to pull his ace card. "Does Eduardo know?"
"Do I know what?"
The helicopter touches down, and the co-pilot springs out the side door at once. He looks pleased to have something to do, and takes to fetching and carrying the luggage onto the tarmac. Chris has never seen anyone this eager to do heavy lifting.
“Hey, guys!”
Dustin is sprinting through the shallows of the waterfall that pools picturesquely around the helipad. He looks positively delirious to be back on the island. He is clutching something tiny and reptilian. Too bad his good mood won’t last long, Chris thinks gloomily.
Eduardo has managed to untangle himself from the straps and bags he was sleeping on. It sounds like he has caught sight of Parker.
“What,” he starts, throwing one of Dustin’s rucksacks across the cabin, “the fuck is going on?”
“I would like to point out that I am an innocent party,” Chris cuts in hastily, before throwing himself out the door.
Dustin catches him awkwardly with one arm. “I’m going to take a wild guess and ask you, what did Mark do this time?”
They dodge a small avalanche of luggage, apparently victims of Eduardo’s anger.
“Believe it or not, he snuck Sean Parker into our helicopter.”
---
Sean is playing it cool. It isn’t everyday that an opportunity like this presents itself. Or rather, re-represents itself. The genius Mark Zuckerberg, fully bankrolled, no controlling interests, total freedom of research, and apparently not all that mad about the whole defecting thing.
He’d skipped out on the Winklevosses without notice almost as soon as the Zuck had txted him. Actually, they probably think he is still in the lab working on their Tyrannosaurus. Fat chance. He has the half finished embryo in his carry on. All it needs is some certified perfect Zuckerberg DNA code.
Traitor?
Sean prefers the term opportunist.
Eduardo Saverin, on the other hand, appears to be losing his shit. He has his hands buried in his hair, and he is pacing, despite having to bend himself almost in half to clear the ceiling of the cabin on every circuit.
“You do remember that he sold you out once, right?” Eduardo doesn’t seem able to control his pitch. His voice breaks girlishly on the last word, and Sean has to stifle his chuckle.
Eduardo turns on him, “Who the fuck do you think you are, Parker? You left, that’s it. Is it just me or do neither of you seem aware of a little place called Winklevoss Park Resort, barely ten miles away from us? Founded, oh right, a month after you,” he pauses to make some agonised faces of rage and a couple of aborted hand movements, “after you defected to the guys who are now our direct competitors, you asshole.”
Sean shrugged, “Hey, that’s business, Wardo. And if I remember rightly, you-”
“You do not call me that.” Eduardo screams across the cabin.
“Wardo-“ Mark says, finally.
“What can you possibly say to explain this, Mark?”
Mark rubs his cheek with his hand, sighing. “Sean, get out.”
Sean steps out, smirking. It looks like he is on the ins again.
“Hello, boys,” he says, waving brightly at Moscovitz and Hughes. “Oh, now, that is a lovely Compy you have there...” he says, reaching out for Dustin’s little Procompsognathus friend.
“Hands off, Parker.”
---
“Wardo-“ Mark tries again. “It’s business. They poached him, we poached him back. They’re years behind us, and their sponsors are demanding that they open immediately, monetize their half coded dinosaurs. We’re the better choice, that’s all.”
“He’ll go back. They’ll offer him more; he’ll take Chris’s research back with him this time. You can’t risk it, Mark.”
“They won’t take him back.” Mark smiles in that peculiar way that always means that he is certain he’s won the game before it has even ended. He steps in close, curls his fingers in Eduardo’s shirt front. He leans in to whisper the sentence, breathing it into Wardo’s lips, like he can’t believe in the fact well enough yet to say it in his usual forthright manner. “He brought me their t-rex, Wardo.”
At this distance Eduardo can see that Mark's pupils are dilated. He is clearly excited about his coup against the Winklevoss Resort, holding Eduardo's gaze effortlessly, still breathing softly against his mouth.
Wardo's lips part of their own accord, the intensity of the moment urging him down a road he isn't too certain about. He registers vaguely that it would be rather nice if Mark would just lean into him a little more and-
"Oh, wow, awkward," Dustin says, throwing his hands over his eyes in horror.
Eduardo wrenches his body away from Mark on reflex. "It's not what-" he starts lamely.
Mark drops his hands to his sides, suddenly all business, kneeling and reaching into his laptop bag to rummage for one of his three jailbroken smartphones.
"Uh, anyway," Dustin says, peeking through the gaps between his fingers. "Would you guys come out of the helicopter? Myrtle bit Sean, and Wardo is the only person I know who carries around a first aid kit. As big a dick as he is, I don't need any Jurassic Park flavoured guilt on my conscience."
"I've warned you about the Spielberg cracks, Moscovitz. Expendable. Keep this word in your vocabulary."
"Sure, whatever. Come watch Sean squirt blood all over the place."
"Is Myrtle one of our interns?" Eduardo asks hopefully, slinging his bag over a shoulder. He takes the opportunity to tuck the bottom of his dress shirt back into his pants too.
"Myrtle is one of the tamer Compy," Mark explains, shedding no greater light on the subject, despite Eduardo's 'aaaand?' hand gesture.
"You'll see her in a second, Wardo, you'll love her. She's Chris's answer to the rat infestation."
“Then it sounds like she’s got the right idea already,” Eduardo mutters.
---
Eduardo somehow ends up not only facilitating Sean's patch up job, but also actually bandaging the bite. Apparently his first aid training qualifies him as the only person around able to wrap a glorified band aid around Sean Parker's mildly punctured index finger. Dustin is snapping pxts with his iPhone as if it is some kind of occasion, and Sean is being uncharacteristically irritable about the photo opportunity.
"Is it really necessary to use this much iodine?" Sean complains bitterly.
"Yes." Wardo tells him, cruelly up-ending the bottle over the wound.
"Could you maybe tie the bandage a little looser?" He says, eying the purplish tip of his finger.
"Absolutely not," Dustin says. He has given Myrtle free range of his shoulders, and she is clinging to his shirt, her litle talons hooked into the cotton, utterly fascinated with his ears.
"Why doesn't she bite you?" Eduardo asks, squeezing Sean's finger through the bandage.
"Fucking - ow, Saverin!"
"Shut up, Parker." Dustin says, happily, offering his fingers up to Myrtle. She ignores them and sticks her tiny thin tongue into his ear for a second. "She knows who her mommies are, that's all. Mark did program her DNA, if you remember. She'll probably like you too, Wardo."
Eduardo reaches out a balled up hand, figuring he can risk his knuckles. "I thought you said in the reports that this species is out of control, breeding like crazy?"
"Attacking other species in groups? Yeah. They're vicious little bastards when they're in a pack."
"So where is her pack?"
Dustin shrugs. "They get on fine on their own too. They only gather when they hunt big game or when they feel distressed, and start squealing for back up."
He gives Sean a look, "You should know better than to touch other people's dinosaurs, Parker. Didn't you take Rearing 588? With Professor Sandberg?"
"Sorry," Sean mutters, nursing his hand. "I was somewhat preoccupied in that lab. Maybe you didn't notice our professor's insanely fabulous booty."
"I am going to pretend I didn't hear that," Chris says pleasantly, turning up out of the blue, startling Sean. He hands Wardo a roll of US bills, tightly bound in a rubber band. "I gave them a tip. I hope you don't mind. I think they needed it."
Wardo nods, embarrassed, "No, I agree. Thanks, man." He tucks the money into his inner jacket pocket, ignoring Sean's hopefully quirked eyebrows.
Chris untangles Myrtle from her perch on Dustin's shoulder with practiced hands.
"Trust me," he says, nodding at Wardo's hands, "I made her. Well, half of her, anyway."
Sean makes vomiting noises into his folded arms.
Eduardo hold his hands out obediently, tucking his thumbs in nervously, and Chris drops the fledgling dinosaur into them like it's nothing out of the ordinary. To his wonder, the Procompsognathus rolls in his palms, tail thrashing and head swaying as if it is having a fit.
"Shit, is it okay?"
"She's so happy that she's freaking out!" Dustin sounds unbearably proud.
"That's not...a normal dinosaur behaviour, but Mark wrote her, so you have to expect the odd anomaly, I guess." Chris allows, shaking his head. He pulls out his blackberry and makes a couple of notes.
"That is wack," Sean says, staring at the compy. "You guys remember fifteen minutes ago when she tried to rip my fingers off, right?"
Myrtle discovers Eduardo's suit sleeves, and accepts the challenge, scaling them in seconds. She loses her grip at his shoulder and Eduardo reflexively catches her against his neck with both hands.
Mark somehow chooses this moment to finally step out of the helicopter, sliding his phone into the pocket of his sweatpants. He looks at Wardo's armful of affectionate carnivore and nods approvingly.
"The mother clause should definitely go into all the species from now," he tells Chris, "Wardo should probably help you hatch them in the lab whenever he can spare the time, too."
Mark insists that Eduardo be allowed to carry Myrtle back to the labs. He has little interest in touching his creations beyond a brief examination once Chris has given them form. Mark’s passion lies in the act of creation itself, and the observation of interactions forthwith. He’s not into cuddling the animals.
“Are they all like this?” Wardo asks, rubbing the base of Myrtle’s tail as she chirps happily.
“Tiny? Cuddly? Weak for tall, dark, Brazilian men?” Dustin jokes, leading their little group across the freshly planted grounds, hands stuffed contentedly in his pockets.
“No.” Mark answers. “I wrote the mother clause-“ Sean laughs again, ”-into every species, but Compy are already naturally playful. The velociraptors, for example, will give you more respect than they’d afford most of their prey, but you obviously shouldn’t approach them expecting to be friends.”
Eduardo knows this is a fact, rather than a challenge, but it’s hard to remember to apply Mark-logic when most people would say the same things out of spite. He gives into jealously momentarily, picking up on the same fact they’ve all been musing over:
“But you play with the raptors,” Eduardo says.
Chris has to admire the way that he manages to eradicate almost all traits of bitterness from his speech.
Mark shrugs, stepping off the beaten path for a moment to crouch by the nearest flowerbed. “I hand reared them from birth,” he says, stepping back quickly, “I taught them some traditional hunting algorithms as children. They see that I come and go as I like. They can sense that I hold some power over their existence.”
Mark reaches for Eduardo’s free hand. Eduardo mutely allows him to take it up. He rubs his fingers over Eduardo’s knuckles, tracing the hard edges of his family ring, his face carefully devoid of emotion.
“Feed her,” he says, showing Eduardo the live cricket in his other hand, “Compy show affection by giving gifts, and feeding one another.”
“I hate bugs,” Wardo complains, but he accepts the cricket with the hand Mark has been holding, pinching it gingerly between forefinger and thumb.
They reach the grand entrance as a group, and Chris and Dustin (well, Chris mostly) have the good sense to hustle Sean into the building ahead of the others.
In the lobby, Sean whistles and exclaims over the life-sized replica of a tyrannosaurus skeleton, and predictably homes in on the complimentary buffet laid out for staff benefit. This is one of the outrageous expenses that Eduardo has managed to agree on with Mark and Dustin.
“Bring them food, and they will come,” Wardo had said under his breath, salvaging dishes from their offices, all of which he could remember personally preparing for Mark at some point or another. He’d signed off on the outrageous catering bill, thinking that even if Mark managed to scavenge a single meal a day from the lobby the staff could justify the waste by all eating from the same table, and then distributing the waste amongst the appropriate species in their charge.
Dustin is unashamedly spying on Mark and Eduardo. “They were totally about to get their shit together before,” he informs Chris, craning his neck as if it will help him see through the stone wall that is blocking all but Mark’s elbow from sight.
Chris looks doubtful, but he squints down Dustin’s line of sight nonetheless.
“This is weird,” he says, finally, after they’ve watched Mark’s elbow jiggle for about thirty seconds.
Sean comes to stand just behind them, obnoxiously licking his fingers clean of the cream cake he has just decimated. “What’s with the spying, kids? I thought they were already fucking?” he says, wiping his mouth.
“Hey, Chris, could you spot me? Have I got anything on my face?”
Chris waves a middle finger in his general direction. “Just, shut up, Sean,” he says.
“Jesus, you guys are so uptight. I know it’s hard to accept that your parents have sex, but this is getting weird.”
Dustin turns to fix him with a dirty look. “Can I-?”
“Not until Mark has his t-rex.” Chris reminds him sorrowfully.
---
Eduardo has fed animals before. Usually farm animals, and usually stuff like hay and disgusting smelling pellets or lettuce. He figures it could be worse with dinosaurs. His first experience of feeding time could have been tossing chunks of flesh to a Spinosaurus or something equally horrifying. Holding the cricket still as Myrtle gnaws on its head is hardly the stuff of nightmares.
“So these guys hunt bugs most of the time?” Eduardo asks, smiling as the compy manages to tear her half of the cricket loose. She swallows it greedily, and Eduardo offers her the rest. Myrtle takes it from his fingers delicately and crouches in the crook of his elbow to pull it apart.
Mark takes the end of his hoodie drawstring out of his mouth, shrugging. “They eat everything. Chris has been tracking the packs via CCTV and microchips, and they seem to be fairly indiscriminate in their habits. Insects, rodents, sometimes fish around the river. Dustin said he caught some in the botanist’s garden out back, eating fallen fruit.”
“Wow,” Eduardo says, lacking anything else to say.
“Do you prefer the compy?” Mark asks, incongruously. “They were good starters, but I’ve programmed a number of superior species since their initial synthesis. There should be a few good hatchlings today.”
“Uh, I’ve never actually met any of the others,” Eduardo admits. “Dustin would come and tell me about them, and I saw the progress reports, but I never...” He trails off, uncomfortable under Mark’s incredulous stare.
“I thought you liked dinosaurs.” Mark says.
“I do! I mean, I really liked the idea of dinosaurs.” Eduardo says defensively. Myrtle chirps, done with her cricket. Eduardo absently rests his free hand over her, and she nuzzles it, settling into the loose folds of his sleeve.
“The idea of dinosaurs,” Mark repeats.
Eduardo wishes he could kick himself without waking Myrtle. “What I mean is...your idea was amazing. I believed in it. I believed in you.”
“Like how you believe in it turning a profit.” Mark says quietly.
“No!”
Myrtle chirrups softly.
Eduardo covers her with his hand again. “No,” he says. “I didn’t do this to make money, Mark. I did this so you could have this.” He jerks his head at the surroundings. “This was your dream. I wanted to make it real. And I have.” Eduardo stares at Mark’s sneakers, praying that his face isn’t as pink as he feels it might be. “So, would you please show me your dinosaurs?”
The scuffed sneakers remain in place for a few seconds before they finally shuffle away. Eduardo looks up to find that Mark is holding the front entrance open for him, the hint of a smile around his lips. “I’ll give you the grand tour.” Mark says magnanimously. “But you’ll have to surrender that compy to Dustin’s department. And Sean needs to come with us.”
Sean sidles over as they step in. “Just us three? That sounds cozy.”
Eduardo makes a visible effort to pretend he doesn’t resent Sean Parker with every fibre of his being. “Dustin, can you take Myrtle?”
“Yup.”
“Is she going back to her herd?”
“Pack.” Mark and Sean say in unison.
“Okay, pack. Her pack?”
“Chris can track her down for you again later.” Dustin smirks. “If you’re worried about her.”
“And if he can’t, one compy isn’t too different from the next.” Sean interjects; turning to wink at Chris like he’d made a super secret geneticist injoke.
“She’s micro-chipped.” Chris tells Eduardo, ignoring Sean. “See you in the labs.”
Eduardo nods and follows Mark, who has already crossed the room and is holding open a door for them.
“I’ll show you your office, and then we can go see some hatchlings.” Mark says.
The three of them walk through as a group, Sean struggling to insinuate himself alongside Mark as they walk down the hall. The walls are glass, occasionally punctuated with steel panels that Eduardo remembers vaguely from blueprints as housing mostly refrigeration units. He also remembers the glass costing an absolute fortune. Mark had wanted transparency though, a free and open academic space where he can see every aspect of his park in progress. Eduardo can understand that desire for control.
So many people assume that Mark is a misanthrope - that he likes to be alone above all else - when in fact this isn’t true at all. Mark loves to be surrounded by people; preferably people of his own choosing who understand that being with someone didn’t necessarily mean talking to them. If Mark wants that kind of quiet company, Eduardo is willing to supply it, whether in person, or at the rate of four thousand US dollars per pane.
They walk past pane after pane, scientists and interns that Eduardo vaguely recognised busily at work behind the glass. Most of them look intent on their instruments. Others look happy, to Eduardo’s pleasure. Some are women Eduardo recognises from Chris’s numerous study groups at Harvard. They glance up through their glass walls as they pass and most smile or wave at him.
“Ohhhh, yeah.” Sean waves back at every single one. Eduardo makes a note to warn as many of his former classmates as possible.
“This is your office.” Mark says, pressing his hand against a semi-transparent panel on the wall.
Eduardo lifts an eyebrow. He doesn’t remember requisitioning a private office space. He’d assumed he’d just clear some space in the clerical or admin sectors. The glass sectors. Not this...
“I set up your new computer. The network is fully operational, and all your files should be in order.”
Mark shrugs, holding the door open for Eduardo to enter. “The panel will only respond to your print. Your intern’s. And mine. Unless you change that.”
Eduardo looks up from the top of the line desk, already stocked with pens and accounting books, inbox already stacked with a small sheath of dog-eared, and chemical-stained requisition forms.
Mark is staring at him, something expectant in his gaze.
Eduardo face feels warm. “Thanks, Mark. It’s- It’s great.”
Mark nods, walking out of the office. Eduardo gives his perfectly ergonomic desk chair a gentle push before he follows.
Sean is leaning against the glass panel adjacent to the office, doing his best to communicate pick up lines through exuberant sign language. There are two chemists and an assortment of interns on the other side, most of them studiously ignoring him. Eduardo sees that one of the senior scientists is Christy Lee, formerly head of Harvard’s Membrane Biology Club and lauded host of a number of infamous Virology Dinner Club parties. She looks up, as if feeling Eduardo’s eyes on her, and smiles at him in recognition.
Sean redoubles his efforts, waving at Christy and making the international gesture for ‘call me’. She lifts an
eyebrow in bemusement, looking at least slightly interested. Sean is encouraged. “How do I open the doors, Mark?”
“You don’t.” Mark says wryly.
He puts his hand on Eduardo’s arm, pulling gently. Eduardo waves at Christy briefly and follows Mark. His grip on his forearm is firm, but Eduardo finds he doesn’t mind being personally guided through the labs. They only pass one more storage lockup -
(“Stationery is in there, apparently.” Mark says casually, glancing at Eduardo with an almost nervous tic to his movements.
“How would you know?” Eduardo laughs.
“I memorised the blueprints weeks ago,” Mark says.
“Huh.”)
- and they’re suddenly in front of a vast glass wall. There are at least thirty people inside, notably Chris and a small entourage grouped around him and a low oval shaped table that is glowing a warm friendly yellow. He appears to be instructing the group, from the way he is pointing at them and then to the table.
“Perfect timing.” Mark says. His fingers squeeze Eduardo’s wrist momentarily. “Press the panel.”
Eduardo does, unsure of the pressure it requires - apparently barely a brush, judging by the speed at which the glass slides open before them.
Sean just manages to catch up. He’s slipping his iPhone into the pocket of his sports coat, looking a little more smug than usual. Eduardo supposes he has managed to get Christy’s number. He is impressed, if a little frightened by Sean’s tenacity. He’d heard most guys who had approached Christy Lee at Harvard had been scathingly rejected. Sean must have something going for him after all.
“The hatchery!” Sean says. He sounds awed.
Mark half-smirks at that. “So, how does it compare to the Winklevoss setup?”
“Oh, baby, baby.” Sean says, stepping over the threshold and slowly spinning in place. “Zuckerberg, I am going to build you a pack of Tyrannosaurus in here.”
“Good.” Mark says, as if that settles everything. “That’s your workbench.” He nods down the length of the room.
Sean hums happily, and starts untangling himself from his sidebag.
Eduardo watches for a few moments as Sean starts plonking down weird stoppered test tubes the size of his fist, all with curly little creatures inside. They are perfectly still, suspended in yellow fluid, and it takes Eduardo a moment to realise that these are Sean Parker’s ultimate contribution - the price he was paying to buy into their as-yet-unnamed park.
(“Jurassic Park.” Dustin says stubbornly, for about the hundredth time.
“No,” sighs Chris. His hand holding the uncapped marker poised droops a little - obviously there is nothing better coming forthwith.
Mark frowns, still typing. “That’s not even accurate. I don’t want it to sound stupid.” He says, not even having to look at Dustin to project the barb perfectly.
“Prehistoric Park?” Chris suggests, off hand.
Mark hmms, unimpressed. He hits the return key a couple of times. “Wardo.” Mark says.
Eduardo looks up from his lapful of paperwork. He is chewing the nib of a red pen in between tightly circling the digits that flow endlessly down the pages. When he looks up his lips are stained red from the ink. “Sorry, what?” he frowns, looking expectantly at Chris.
Chris taps the whiteboard. “Names. What do you want to call this place? Please do not say ‘Fantasy Island’, no matter what Dustin promises to do for you.”
Dustin drops back into his (Chris’s) desk chair with a melodramatic sigh. The force of his drop propels him halfway across the slick linoleum floor.
“Uh,” Eduardo glances back down at his figures, “Um, I don’t know, guys. I guess something to do with dinosaurs. Mark should--” he grimaces, and scrubs out a misplaced circle, “yeah, whatever Mark thinks is good.”
“Are you kidding?” Chris deadpans at the same time as Dustin howls in frustration -
“Whatever Mark thinks up will suck, Wardo, come on!”
“I don’t know,” Eduardo mumbles, jotting something down the margins, “just let me get this done first.”
Dustin spins around the workbench towards the collection of dinosaur figurines he gave Chris for his birthday (to this date Dustin has played with them so often that the interns pretty much assume they are his, so in a fit of good will Chris surrendered them in all but name and storage space).
Chris caps his marker and watches Mark, who hasn’t typed a stroke since Eduardo started to speak. He isn’t great at Mark!expressions (at least not as good as Eduardo. When Eduardo is looking for them), but he knows that this one is mostly made up of sadness, and maybe a little resentment.
Chris hasn’t seen this face since the day Mark came back to their dorm halfway through the hour he would usually be at 744 DNA PROGRAMMING: Animals and Reptiles (Wardo says it is creepy how Chris always seems to remember everyone’s schedules. Chris says it is weirder that Mark can get away with handing in a DNA profile of Reptar for 60% of his grade) clutching a wad of notepaper before promptly locking Billy out of their shared bedroom.
Billy lost three hours of valuable study time (more like bong-time, Chris pointed out, trying to prevent them losing any more of their bond on replacing doors) until Eduardo manages to coax his way in with the aid of a six pack and forty minutes on the phone talking about how many financiers he’d mentioned Mark to at his Harvard Investment Association’s black tie event.
Chris watches Mark watch Wardo.
Then Mark looks down, types a lone bracket, pauses, and clatters out a line of code. Then another, and another. His lips ease back into their perfectly straight line of absolute concentration. Chris thinks Mark is probably writing something that will turn out amazing on an unprecedented level. This is what Mark tends to do when he gets upset.
Once Eduardo went out on a date instead of attending weekly Mario Cart night, and Mark locked himself in for sixteen hours and wrote CourseMatch.
This is how they end up running an unnamed park. And why every single creature Mark manages to breathe life into lives for one reason, and one reason only - to get the attention of Eduardo Saverin.
Chris figures that Mark would scowl at his explanation, but he can’t deny that this is what the script does.
Chris watches the first hatchlings weep and wither and die, longing for their pre-programmed mother. It doesn’t matter what he feeds them, it doesn’t matter how long Dustin pets and plays with them. They can’t figure it out until Chris calls Mark, desperate for some explanation, and Mark admits that he needs to alter one of the scripts.
He flies in personally the next day, lines their artificially warmed pen with a shirt Dustin does a double take at. It doesn’t do much - they stop cheeping so desperately all the time, and nestle into the fabric instead. They still refuse to feed, and every last compy in the set perishes, pining.
Chris feels sick, physically sick, carrying them out to the garden for burial. There is no way Dustin can handle destroying the little bodies in the industrial furnace that has just been finished. It was better for him to dig for a couple of hours.
“I’m sorry.” Mark says, back in the labs, so quiet that Chris barely hears him.
No one tells Eduardo about that batch. Chris over-projects the prices of some of his own resources to hide the costs.
He walks in on Dustin on the phone a week later, hunched up at the back of the hatchery, his voice low, darker than he can ever remember Dustin sounding. “----Mark. Yeah- I know. No.” A pause, a grunt of grudging agreement. “They’re only babies, Mark, they don’t know how to deal with that kind of - that depth - fuck--”.
Chris walks out as silently as he enters. He slides the door panel shut and sits down in front of it to ward off the skeleton crew of interns. He has enough capability on his smart phone to work on a couple of chemical problems without his lab instruments.
Things are touch and go for a couple of weeks as the new eggs form and Mark transmits his rewritten DNA sequences. They hatch, and they instinctively nest in the same ragged old shirt. Dustin looks grim for a few days, and the interns (just Alice, Natalie and Viktor at that point) have so much trouble feeding them that Chris has to pitch in and run four hour feeding cycles with Dustin. But they stop pining by the sixth day and before they knew it, the compy are alert and just about capable of hunting on their own. Alice literally weeps in relief. Chris can’t deny he has to wipe at his own face too.
Mark immediately sends them more ambitious sequences. And a hoodie, one Chris has seen a lot of at Harvard. The hatchlings aren’t dying. He can turn a blind eye to the complexes Mark is instilling in what Dustin is almost unironically referring to as Mark’s children.
It isn’t fair to Wardo, Chris, thinks. But he thinks it quietly, because they are making dinosaurs and Mark is doing amazing things, and he is with his best friends every day, and all they all want now was for Eduardo to look up from his saintliness for five damn minutes and see that Mark is trying to build him an Eden for his very own.)
“Wardo.”
Eduardo looks up from Sean’s arrangements. Chris is standing right in front of him. He has donned a stained and spotted white coat, and he is looking more mad scientist than Eduardo has ever seen him look before. Also tired - and incongruously - happy. Like he has reached the end of a long journey.
“Come and see the eggs.” Chris says. He nods at the group around the glowing table.
They (interns and a couple of biochemists, like Chris -Eduardo guesses) look expectant, and happy, faces glowing as bright as their hatching table.
He walks over, and sees Mark behind the scientists, leaning against the glass wall that separates the hatchery from some other lab, watching his approach. Eduardo averts his eyes, looks at the eggs instead.
They are clustered together, each one big enough to fill his open hands. They are creamy blue, although Eduardo doesn’t know if this is something he should attribute to Chris’s department. They are nestled in down and some kind of fleece -
“Is that my hoodie?” Eduardo asks, incredulous.
“Mr. Saverin, we haven’t met but it’s a real honour-” Eduardo finds himself shaking hands with Natalie, who is smiling really really hard, and sneaking glances at Mark for some reason.
“Seriously, you have no idea how pleased we are to finally have you here.” Natalie continues, smile beginning to turn into a manic grimace as she steers him towards the table. Eduardo can’t help but note that she has dark circles under her eyes. He thinks of Chris’s face, and peers at Viktor and Alice. They look deathly once he gets past the ecstatically happy expressions.
Obviously Natalie is distracting him from confronting Mark over the inexplicable sweater theft, but he files the team’s exhaustion away as something to look into as well.
Eduardo also doesn’t miss the way Chris is side eying Mark as he comes over to slap Eduardo on the back.
“You can touch them, Wardo.”
Eduardo slots away his suspicions for now, and instead takes in the eggs, memorising the way some of them are so translucent he can see the shapes of the hatchlings inside. Some of them are wriggling. They shake a little. He looks at Chris, gaze questioning.
Chris shakes his head, “They won’t hatch for a couple of days, I think. They’re not active enough yet.” He hesitates for a second. “Please touch them, Wardo.”
Eduardo frowns at the crack in his voice.
“Okay,” he says, reaching out hesitantly. He brushes the nearest egg with his fingertips. He is surprised to find that it is warm - smooth - but warm. It’s disconcerting. It vibrates as his fingers leave its surface, and everyone around the table makes a sound of pleasure. Natalie actually claps. Mark is smirking. Dustin has crept in and he is smiling fit to burst on Chris’s right.
Eduardo isn’t sure what he’s done to make everyone so glad. The afternoon has been very confusing. Someone has pulled out a lone bottle of beer and it is making its way around the lab. Even Chris takes a swig, wiping condensation onto his lab coat self-consciously as he passes it to Viktor.
Dustin is spinning all the interns in turn, warbling “Big momma has arrived!”
“No, no, no.” Chris says, fruitlessly attempting to escape from Dustin’s creative dance moves.
Eduardo accepts the beer bottle offered to him numbly, sips from it and shakes it when he finds only a mouthful left.
“Sorry.”
Eduardo looks up. Mark is next to him, one hand stuffed in his pocket, the other outstretched to take back the empty.
“Thought there was more.” Mark says. “In the bottle.” He ends up pulling the beer out of Eduardo’s hands.
Lost for where to put it now, he offers it to Dustin as he sweeps past. Dustin snatches it, his grin swiftly transforming into a pout as he juggles the diminished weight of the bottle.
“Mark is a meanie,” he accuses, from across the room, trading Viktor to Natalie for Alice.
Mark just shrugs. “Wardo,” he says instead.
Eduardo looks at him expectantly.
Mark is staring at the hatching table. “Touch that one.” He says. He nods at one egg in particular.
Eduardo hadn’t spotted it before. But now that he’s looking at them, he realises that not all the eggs are identical. Most of them are fairly big, blue spheres. No one is exactly the same as the next. However, there is a truly odd one out in the midst. All the other eggs lean against it gently, as if keeping it company with their proximity. The fleece and down is heaped high here too, wrapped close around the base and topping the egg like a little feathered snow cap.
“The little one?” Eduardo asks, drawn down Mark’s sightline immediately. He finds himself hovering over the edge of the table. Mark, he finds, is at his elbow, approval glinting in his eyes.
Eduardo reaches for it, having to lean. He picks it up gently. It fits his palm easily, tiny like a chicken egg, only blue. He stands upright quickly, quick enough to catch Mark’s eyes lingering on his back, on his-
Eduardo flushes and concentrates on the egg in his palm. He cups it nervously, wondering if maybe he should blow on it to keep it warm. It vibrates gently, not so much spooking him as sending a nervous thrill down his spine. There is a tiny unborn dinosaur in his hands. Totally dependent on him not fumbling or dropping him.
Or her, he amends, thinking of Myrtle fondly.
“That one’s special.” Mark says.
Eduardo looks up, offering him the egg carefully.
Mark shakes his head but puts a hand over the top of it for a moment, long pale fingers brushing over Eduardo’s.
Eduardo thinks of Harvard, struck and embarrassed within a split second by - just how often he’d touched Mark over their years there. He’d - Mark hadn’t touched him back then.
Why did it feel so different now that he is?
“Why?” He manages to say, letting Mark guide his hands back to the warm hatching table.
They tuck the egg back into the nest, Eduardo scratching up down and patting it over the top of the egg, Mark pulling the fleece from Eduardo’s hoodie around the shell.
Mark shrugs. “You’ll see.”
Eduardo stares.
“You should get some sleep.” Mark says. He plucks a feather out of the gelled hair behind Eduardo’s ear. He lets it float to the floor. “Chris will show you to your quarters.” He is stroking the shell of Eduardo’s ear with one sure finger.
“Oh.” Eduardo says. It is barely six. “Goodnight?”
“Night, Wardo.” Mark says. He folds both his hands into his hoodie pocket and leaves through a door at the far end of the lab.
Eduardo stares after him, hand going up to touch his ear.
“Okay,” he says. “Okay.”
Part 2 || Part 3