Fic: Elliptic Integral (Part III)
viii. {the ancients did not know everything}
Mark has to admit that if there is one thing Lisbeth knows way better than he does (something that isn't math, at any rate) it's how to find someone's underbelly.
His own vulnerable spot just happens to be that time between five and seven in the morning, when the body still thinks it ought to be asleep (and in his case often hasn't been) and the brain is perfectly capable of functioning all on its own, without any help from common sense or the ability to filter what the mouth should be doing.
So when she wakes him up from a rare but incredibly deep sleep, he doesn't have the ability to even say 'go away', or, more essentially, 'no', or possibly even a 'no, fuck no, and also no, whatever it is, no, and go away while there is a world of no to live in.'
What he says, whatever his body really wants, is,
"Mrrwha?" followed by an approximation of 'Are you okay?' which probably sounds nothing like that but is apparently what, for some unknown to him and completely obscure reason, his brain thinks is appropriate as a sort of, almost, response.
"I am," Lisbeth says, too serious for either the time of day or his ability to cope with anything at all when it is that time of day.
Which it definitely is.
He manages to get his eyes completely open and to focus on her, and yes, yes she is okay, she's more than okay, she's not wearing the stupid not-her wig, and she's wearing a tank top that shows her tattoos, and all of this is being done without the weird exhilaration she gets at times (which is really gorgeous to watch but so very exhausting to participate in) and she's perfectly fine, and that's all good.
She's herself, Mark thinks blearily, and then when did she stop thinking hiding was better? and then he just stops caring about any of it, because oh God, sleep, and his body isn't feeling co-operative at all towards being talked at, even though his brain is apparently being all obliging.
He lets his eyes close again.
"Mark," Lisbeth insists, right in his ear, and ow, noise hurts when it's that close. "You need to wake up."
"Ugh. Can I have a choice? Because. No. Don't want."
"No, don't care, yes you must," Lisbeth says in a kind of chant, still right in his ear and still very painful. "You need to see what I have done."
Which is not a statement Mark needs to hear, not at this time of day or night and not, really, at any other time, thank you, coming out of the mouth of anyone who isn't him.
In his long and often frightening experience, the equivalent to 'look what I did!' is always a Really Bad Thing.
Especially when someone wants him to genuinely look at it, as opposed to making the right sort of noises and making it very much somebody else's problem.
Being as it's Lisbeth, there's no-one else whose problem he can make this, except possibly Dustin, and Dustin is being weird right now and is also an unappreciative person of anything at all happening at this time of the morning, particularly when it's Mark, and right now, Mark suspects, even though he has no evidence to base this suspicion on, pretty much exclusively when it's Mark.
Nothing's been the same since the night he and Lisbeth sort-of talked, and maybe it shouldn't be, but still. In vino veritas can take a flying leap off the nearest high rooftop, as far as Mark's concerned, because he never needed to be understood and he never wanted Dustin to know about any of it, and somehow both those things have happened and it's been of no help or benefit at all.
"Look," Lisbeth insists. She's holding her laptop up, right in his face, so it's kind of impossible not to. "This is why you found me, isn't it? This is why. He is why. Yes?"
And quite suddenly, Mark is all the way awake, body and mind together, and for one surprisingly alarming second he thinks he may never have to worry about sleep again, because whatever is happening to his heart quite possibly means imminent death.
"I've done this before, you know I have," Lisbeth says, which does absolutely nothing to stop Mark's incipient heart failure. "You know I have. That all of us have. You didn't find us to talk about Fermat. I was the one who changed the rules. And I enjoyed talking to you. I've enjoyed being here - no, truly," she adds, when Mark manages to get his eyebrows to co-operate with his current state of being, and demonstrate his complete skepticism, "I have. You know this. You know that I would not have stayed if it weren't true. But I am running, and you know that. You know that because you are the one who stayed. You look at me and you see why you could have run. When I look at you, I see why someone stays."
"Because it's easy to find them," Mark replies, and sits up with a faint groan. "Look, none of this is news, everyone knows I'm not going anywhere."
After all, hadn't that been the reason he'd even bothered to attend the depositions, day after day, when he could probably have made it all unnecessary by settling before it started? He'd needed to say it, somehow.
He still wants to say it, some days, although it's easier now to be satisfied with just thinking it.
I win because I get to stay where I belong. I win no matter how many times you tell me I'm losing. And the money might add up to a parking ticket, in the overall scheme of things, and not matter to me in any case, but it matters to me that I get to keep what I've made, I get to stay with it, I get to stay who I am even if no-one likes that person, and you can say what you like and demand whatever you want, but I'm here, and I win every time because I don't leave and I don't run and I don't demand anything except acknowledgement.
That last is always what he's wanted, as far back as he can remember, further back than the Ad Board, when he did say it out loud.
Acknowledgement of his worth. Acknowledgement by others, however much they openly didn't like him and thought (still think) that he was some kind of thief and betrayer and said that's what he was and is, said it for posterity and made him into the villain whether he meant for it to happen or not.
So much that's been done, so much that he's done, and he still only wants to see that look in people's eyes, the one that recognizes his value as a creator even while it discounts him as a man.
He sees it too often for comfort now, too often to pretend he doesn't know what it means, both the recognition and the discounting in all their layers, too often to pretend he doesn't care and can't be made to.
He never really understood before that to have what he'd made, to hold on to the things that were his and only his, he'd have to give up everything else.
Until the depositions, until Marylin's clear-eyed assessment of his situation and his nature, he hadn't known what price he was paying. He'd known what other people would feel, of course he had, but he hadn't allowed for how he would end up feeling. He hadn't calculated the cost for a second, however clearly he tells himself he'd been seeing things.
It frightens him a little that even now, he'd still pay it.
"None of this is news," he repeats, and Lisbeth's still, calm expression doesn't change. He almost wishes it would, that she could be among the people who feel they have the right to judge him. He's never asked for someone to understand the why of what he does and what he once did, he's never asked for anything but a simple acceptance of the facts.
He doesn't know why that's so hard for everyone, to accept without necessarily understanding, only that it is.
"No," Lisbeth agrees. "And I'm not trying to change that. I'm just doing what I've always known how to do, I'm in someone's files and in their mail and in their head, and if you don't want to know any more, I don't mind. But I think you should still know I've done it."
"And you found out what?"
"Nothing interesting," Lisbeth says, and shrugs. "He isn't very interesting, this man. Why do you care?"
"I -" Mark starts, and has no idea what he can say. I don't would be a lie, and anything else might not be actually lying, but it would be so far from the truth that he might as well be lying outright.
What can he say?
I know he's not interesting?
No, because that's not true, at least not for him, though to a hacker like Lisbeth, Wardo's files and mail and what he chooses to put on his computer that even vaguely resembles how he thinks can't be interesting at all.
Lisbeth brings down empires, after all. She could have brought him down, if she'd been approached back then, and Mark's grateful no-one thought of it.
He's more interesting than you think?
No, because Lisbeth knows what she thinks, and for her it's nothing but truth. She will never be brought to a point where she ever doubts her conclusions.
I wish you hadn't done this?
Yes. And no. And yes.
I wish you hadn't done this because now you feel you've got the right to know him?
Oh yes, and a thousand times yes, but what right does he have, to say he does know Wardo, any more? How can he say he knows someone who can tell him coldly, after everything Mark thought they'd shared and everything he assumed was implicitly understood, that everything is finished, that nothing matters but a parking ticket, that his life's work is irrelevant, that it boils down to nothing but a darkened hallway and a single sentence that was not what he intended to be heard?
Eduardo had heard intent -
you're going to be left behind -
and not the truth -
I'm afraid -
and no hacking into Eduardo's computer will tell Lisbeth any of that.
"Mikael's computer isn't interesting either," Lisbeth says, and that does get Mark's attention. "What he was working on. When I first helped him. That was interesting. But his computer - no. It was not his reflection."
"Yours is," Mark says, beginning to understand what she's saying.
"Yes," she says, and repeats, "and yours is. Because of who we are. What we are. To lose what we keep there would mean a kind of destruction. When I was first thinking of working with Mikael, I lost - I thought I would lose - everything. It was broken, my computer was broken, they - it got smashed, and I thought for a while I would never recover any of it. It hurt," she finishes simply, as if that little statement can possibly encapsulate all she's trying to say.
"What did you do?" Mark asks. His mouth feels dry. He never wants to talk about this side of it, and he's woefully under-equipped to talk at all after so little sleep and a very sudden and unpleasant wakefulness.
"I think there was a broken bottle," Lisbeth says, frowning. "I don't quite remember. I made them go away, though."
Mark hadn't been that brave, on the day Eduardo brought his laptop crashing down into annihilation and information loss and a jolting awareness of what he had done that was far, far worse than all of that. He had let Sean do his worst, too stunned at what he had unleashed to even begin to protest - and yes, too viciously, terribly glad that Eduardo, too, was experiencing that sense of disorientating loss to want to try.
At first.
Just at first.
And that was all it had taken, and then it was too late to make anyone take anything back, or even to ask if it was possible.
You didn't have to be so hard on him, he had said, still shaking a little and hoping no-one could see.
And it hadn't mattered, in the end, what Sean's reply was, because Mark had read what Sean really wanted to answer in his eyes.
Yeah I did. He was on you. So I did have to be.
Sean would have been kinder, perhaps, more conciliatory certainly, if he hadn't been so aware of what Eduardo's gesture had meant to Mark. Sean is by nature a disturber, but he likes to make things break under their own weight, not be the destroyer himself.
Sean, Mark thinks randomly, would like Lisbeth a lot. He could watch her bring things crashing down around everyone's ears and delight in the destruction from a safe distance; he would never have to be involved with her actions, and would appreciate them for what they are.
You had one friend, Eduardo had said later, but that wasn't true then and it still isn't. Mark's fault has never been that he puts everything in one place, makes it all irretrievable if one thing is lost.
That's Eduardo, not him.
Friendship did, does, mean so much of what Eduardo gave him, but it's also Sean, who will get directly involved for the sake of a person, never mind what he says in public about companies; it's Dustin, who stays around even though he probably won't be with the company for much longer, because he's as much of a creator as Mark is and needs to be somewhere where he can be just that; it's Chris, who says in interviews that he prefers being Mark's friend to working with him, and makes people revise how they look at the situation.
Chris, changing the world and always fighting to make people see the things that are right and true and good in it; Dustin, showing Mark how to live in it, more patient than Mark deserves and his loyalty more steadfast than anything Mark can ever earn; Sean, destroying the status quo because he can and because sometimes people matter more to him than his image does.
Mark has never only had one friend. He knows this.
What he's never understood is why Eduardo was the one who mattered the most, even before he lost him.
"We get to choose so much," Lisbeth says. "We are lucky, you and I, because we know what we should choose and what we must pay for that choice. But I think sometimes we forget that love is no choice at all. If it were, we wouldn't."
"Because it hurts," Mark says, and Lisbeth nods.
"And who would choose hurt? No-one. No-one else would. We do. I run, and you stay, and Mikael stays where I can always find him, and your Eduardo has sent himself where he thinks no-one could be troubled to find him. And we are wrong and they, I think, are wrong too."
Mark blinks at her, because this is in no way what he was expecting to hear.
"They are?"
"But of course," Lisbeth says. "Mikael could find me, follow me if he wanted. Eduardo could come back. What would it cost them?"
"Their right to choose," Mark says dully, but Lisbeth is smiling for the first time.
"Yes. But you and I know it isn't a right. Because love -"
"- isn't a choice," Mark finishes.
"And we know that and they do not," says Lisbeth, and dumps her laptop on his knees. "I have found him for you. Now it's up to you. It's not a choice until you force it to become one."
"Yeah, you're kind of doing the forcing bit, here," Mark says, but he doesn't have the energy to point this out with any sort of emphasis.
"But that is what I do," Lisbeth says. "I see you, Mark. I know you because you are like me. And someone has to tell you what everyone knows, before you can see it too."
"Right, great, so I miss the obvious, I knew that already. Your point?"
Lisbeth shrugs. "Now you know. You have no excuse not to make a decision, because you have been told there is one you can make. It does not matter what you decide, not to me. But once you know something ¬-"
"You have to act on it."
"Yes."
Mark stares at the laptop screen, and looks back up at Lisbeth.
"I don't know what to do," he says eventually.
"Yes," Lisbeth says, "and no. You know what you want to do."
"And that counts?" Mark means his words to sting, because out of everyone, Lisbeth knows all the things that counting can stand for.
"Yes," Lisbeth says, unaffected as ever, and she is still calm, and still smiling. "Of course it does."
She leaves him alone with his thoughts, and her work, and his last chance to even try to know what Eduardo is thinking, what he is doing, what he feels.
The chance is at his fingertips.
Lisbeth has given him the lines to read between.
All he needs now is the courage to do just that.
And when he makes his decision, it is hours later, and he hasn't moved, and he knows, coming back to himself, that Lisbeth has gone, perhaps back to where she came from in order to meet him, perhaps further afield, perhaps nearer to where she calls home. There's no way for him to know.
He hopes that one day he finds out what her decision was.
He hopes that she's wrong, and that Mikael is trying to find her.
He hopes that if she is right, she still finds the courage to go to Mikael of her own free will, and ask her question.
Mark hopes and wishes the best for her, because he is no longer sure (he has never been sure, not really) that he has the right to do this for himself.
For now, he has a decision to act upon. And that has to be enough.
ix. [y2 = x (x - a^p)(x + b^p)] {in the realm of things which do not claim actuality} [y^2 = x^3 + Ax + B] {the point at infinity}
The first property of miracles, Mark says sometimes, and smiles as though he knows some secret that he's trying to share, is that they shouldn't exist.
Eduardo, who has his own secrets, and wants more than anything to relearn the language that once enabled him to share them, always disagrees, because that way he can make Mark talk, and he can listen, and he can pick up the words he once had no difficulty in using.
He still believes in gremlins, and the strange nameless power of a sleepless dark.
But now he knows that there is such a thing as hope, and that maybe it really is a thing with feathers, and that wishing for something to be true doesn't make him a fool, and that waking isn't something to despise, and that his very own gremlin had a name, and it's one he's learning to love and not resent; and never be afraid of, any more.
Her name is Lisbeth. Her name is Wasp.
She is a hacker, and a killer, and a savior, and a survivor, and somewhere in the world, she exists and lives and breathes and proves a theorem to which no-one has ever found a satisfactory solution.
She created the Mark who came to find him, created him out of shadowy supposition and half-known fact; she knew it was possible, that unimaginable moment; she knew from the first time she met him in person, and saw her mirror image, that she could create him; she knew it could be done because he was always there, waiting to be made into all he is capable of being.
She created something neither he nor Mark had dared believe in, and brought it into being not out of the infinite possibilities of some nebulous perhaps, but from the things that were always there. She could do it because she had more courage than any of them, a strange easy courage that she didn't need for herself and so could spend quite freely.
She created the Mark he now knows, more than any experience or loss or self-understanding could have ever managed to do if left to their own sad progress. She could do it, Eduardo thinks, because she had the strength to give an understanding of reality and all the choices of living to a man who had chosen self-exile far more than Eduardo's flight could ever have achieved, far more than he ever believed he had forced upon himself.
She did it for no-one but herself. She did it for no-one but her reflection. She did it for nothing but the chance of seeing what should be become a fact. She did it because (Eduardo thinks) she believes that the answer is yes, that all proof is absolute, that nothing which exists can be called impossible.
Eduardo's very own gremlin, his shadow in the dark.
Mark's vision made real, appearing in the form of a tattooed girl with an infinite capacity for destruction and creation both, a living action-reaction who, not unaware, but too aware of what love could and can do, made herself walk through their lives, not as a proof or a result, but as a longed-for and much-needed catalyst.
There can be no creation without the knowledge of existence. Eduardo, who has found out he believes in souls, knows this to be true.
"The first property of miracles," he says, "isn't that they shouldn't exist. It's that they do. Or they wouldn't be a miracle."
Sometimes Mark laughs at that, and sometimes he disputes it, and sometimes he just groans and says that talking to Dustin would be easier.
Dustin, who has taken longer than anyone else to convince that this decided-upon reality is a good thing, because he is the only one who was able to find the strength to relinquish all that could have been and should have been into the past, and not hope, and to mourn.
Their absorption into the wrongs they have endured and perpetrated has cost everyone. And that, too, is part of belief.
And always, always, no matter the circumstances, no matter what else is taking his attention and needs more than Eduardo thought he could ever bear to see given elsewhere daily, Mark's answer to the question Eduardo never knew he was asking is yes.
The question is and was am I enough?
Not for you. Not even for myself. Never for the world. Only am I?
The answer is yes. The answer is I love you.
The answer and the question belong to them both, they are their own antiphony.
The answer is contained in the way nights are sometimes shared, now, and the fact of Mark's sleeping furnace-heat beside him, wherever and whenever they decide it is time for that bed to be laid down upon.
Somewhere, it is always raining, and there is always glass for that falling water to beat against, and there will always be the capacity for destruction as well as creation for them to quantify.
Sometimes the question transmutes and translates into Can this last?
And the answer to that, Eduardo now knows, is not something that can be expressed in words, much though he loves to hear and return them.
The answer is to live, and be alive within that living.
x. {not by human reason for human reason}
Lisbeth proves Fermat's theorem, and has it taken from her mind by the trajectory, not of an elliptic curve, but a bullet.
Lisbeth is found by Mikael, and is saved and is still the savior, and survives and lives and is alive.
Lisbeth finds the courage that she once longed to use upon herself, and instead turned towards others, and she comes to Mikael's door, and asks her question.
And she stands still, and hears him answer her aloud at last.
Yes, he says.
But then, she has always known that will be his answer.
**
...no three positive integers (a, b, and c) can satisfy the equation [a^n + b^n= c^n] for any integer value of (n) greater than two.