Fic: The Mezzotint, for laenix
Title: The Mezzotint
Pairing(s): Mark/Eduardo
Rating: PG-13 (if that!)
Warnings: ghosts, hotels, au, fixit, reference to M.R. James's story of the same name
Word Count: c. 5100
Summary: Eduardo buys an old print at an auction. Mark thinks he's an idiot. Mark is pretty much right. But not, strangely, about everything else.
Notes: My deepest, deepest apologies to my poor recipient, who has waited so long and patiently for this! My only excuse is that I am in a different country to usual, and just as I got hooked up with internet, LJ decided it disliked my ISP intensely.
Mark thinks sometimes - when he thinks about it at all - that he and Eduardo didn't so much start talking again as come back to a long-running conversation, after a pause. It's just that easy for them and just that inexplicable to everyone else, and exactly no-one's business but theirs, so explanations aren't likely to happen anyway (not that they were going to come from him in the first place, but it's weirdly reassuring to know they aren't going to be attempted by Eduardo, either) even if they're politely requested, outright demanded, or endlessly pestered for. Which saves time all round.
It wasn't really even a pause, anyway, even while it was going on. It was more as if they'd got out of touch, somehow, gone out of reach in some weird shouldn't-happen-these-days kind of communications breakdown, and got out of the habit of talking, during that time. When they started again, it was strangely without bitterness or anger or even faintly-remembered grievance, just a kind of huh, that happened, that was odd moment of recognition, and then nothing had changed.
Nothing has changed.
Outwardly.
As far as people know, anyway.
But of course that's the lie, that's the real lie, because what happened might be a past they've decided to well and truly call another country, and say how they, they did things differently there
(and Mark, at least, has quietly promised himself a very firm different and never again)
but it still is the past, their past, a shared past which ensures that everything's changed.
Everything's changed, everything's completely changed, because there was bitterness, and there was anger, and the grievances had been - no, Mark's honest, he can admit this much - had felt - very very real, on both sides. And neither of them wants to go back to that.
So they stick with the new things and make new in-jokes and base what they're not scared to keep trying out on what's happening now, not on what they used to have
(could maybe have had, should have had)
and what people assume is still unchanged.
People, as Mark's learned to his cost, are unfailingly stupid.
At least when Eduardo's just as stupid it's usually pretty funny. He's got a badly hidden taste for the melodramatic and the ludicrously expensive and the overtly showy, and when he can combine all three in one grand mistake of a purchase, he thinks it's just perfect.
He then tends to call and tell Mark about it, mostly so he can not even pretend he's not feeling self-congratulatory and be justified in his self-congratulation, because Mark sure as hell won't do it for him, and, as he invariably says, someone has to.
This time is no exception.
"You bought a what?" Mark asks, not even trying to hide the fact he's laughing so hard he's had to sit down. "What are you calling this now?"
"I'm not calling it anything." Eduardo's completely failing at sounding offended, mostly, Mark knows (and takes full and merciless advantage of on a regular basis) because he can't resist joining in with any overt display of emotion from someone else. He's like a litmus test, Eduardo is. Show him something genuine in your voice or your eyes or your actions, and man, you get it back ten times as strongly.
(It's taken Mark a long time and a fuck-load of mistakes to work that one out, but never let anyone say he doesn't learn how to turn his own stupid-ass behavior to his own advantage - eventually. He sure as hell doesn't get within even a phone's distance of Eduardo when he's angry at something, any more, and he doesn't much care to think about why, either.)
"I'm not calling it anything," he repeats. "It's called a mezzo-tint."
"Okay," Mark says, slowly and deliberately blankly, "and you need to tell me this because -?"
Eduardo sighs, not particularly annoyed, but not particularly impressed with Mark's deliberate ignorance, either.
"Because when it came up in auction it had the same number on it as the one in that ghost story I -"
"Oh fuck no," Mark says, and his protest is genuine. Eduardo and Victorian ghost stories, that unholy match devised in the ninth circle of hell; Eduardo the only person Mark knew of alive who could creep himself out on over-written and overdone and not really very frightening stories; who would try to creep everyone else out by relating them (extremely badly) secondhand, and fail; and who was probably still fucking terrified by the stupid things. "Come on, Wardo, that's ridiculous even for you. You bought a stupidly overpriced example of an outdated printing process because it had the same auction number as something in a ghost story?"
"Yeah," Eduardo says, and for the first time he sounds a bit hesitant. Maybe Mark overdid the laughing-at-him thing - but no, no, it's because there's something even more stupid to come, isn't it, it's because Mark's life wouldn't be complete without Eduardo making it totally and utterly fantastical in the heights of what-the-everliving-fuck he can induce it to reach. "Yeah, but - not just that."
"No?" Mark asks. Warily. He feels wariness is entirely justified. It's something like a sixth sense, only it's more a Wardo-has-done-something-really-fucking-stupid sense, and while it rarely kicks in, it's never, ever wrong when it does.
"No," Eduardo says, and laughs a bit, but not with amusement. It's the breathe-out-quickly, hide-all-embarrassment-very-badly kind of laugh that Mark always hopes he's heard for the last time, because never hearing it again would mean Eduardo's given up thinking he has to apologize for being who he is. And while Mark might think Eduardo's an idiot, he also doesn't think he should apologize for being an idiot, because that's self-defeating.
And honestly? He's had more than enough of Eduardo managing to sabotage himself through thinking he's doing it all wrong by virtue of not being enough, not doing it in the right way, not making the right choice, not meeting the what-the-fuck-ever perfect standard he's got glued up to his mind's wall and keeps checking on - to his own detriment.
"Okaaaay," Mark says slowly, "so what else was there about this amazing piece of work?"
"It -" Eduardo breaks off, and sighs, then mumbles something very quickly.
"What?" Mark's almost tempted to laugh, except that would be a bit meaner, right now, than he actually wants to be, and even if he does find this pretty funny, he's got a feeling Eduardo's usual litmus-paper-like behavior wouldn't kick in here. He's too ready to be mocked, and that, Mark knows from experience, is a prickly and uncomfortable place to be. "No, hey, listen, it's got to be something, I don't believe you'd just go by a number..."
"Yeah, no, no, I didn't." Eduardo gives another of those pseudo-laughs, and Mark winces. "See, the mezzo-tint?"
"Yeah?" Mark tries his best to sound encouraging.
"It's exactly the same as the one described in the story."
Which is, of course, when Mark has to admit he has no fucking clue what the story is, and has to sit through one of Eduardo's godawful retellings.
Funnily enough, when Eduardo's done, Mark doesn't feel even slightly better about this, or even vaguely inclined to dismiss it.
Because that weird feeling at the back of his neck, the prickly new sense that only ever seems to kick in when Eduardo's involved (and how's that for completely useless as a superpower, thanks, world) hasn't gone away.
Maybe it's just the thought of a print that changes to show different times of day and night, and the progress of a murder.
Maybe Eduardo's storytelling has gotten better, after all.
Maybe it's the thought that someone deliberately created this print, or saw the print and made up a story about it, or whichever way round it was, and made it about a murder.
Or maybe it's the fact that the mezzo-tint and the murder aren't the ghost part of the story.
It's the final scene that the print apparently changes to, right at the end.
The scene where the mezzo-tint's owner can see the murderer's face.
And it's the face of a rotting corpse.
Mark doesn't believe in ghosts. But he thinks Eduardo probably does, and that's why those crazy-ass Victorian melodramas freaked him out so much, back when he'd admit to it (and probably still do now, when he'd never confess to such a thing). And he can't say -
"Look, are you sure this kind of exposure to phobias is the right way of going about curing them?" because oh hey, assuming, and insulting, and one of those things that he really has learned not to say any more, and he can't say -
"Don't be stupid, what are you trying to do, make yourself have bad dreams?" because knowing that sort of thing about each other is one of the unspokens, the things they leave in the past and don't mention or presume on, no matter how much their old familiarity seems to have returned, and he really, really can't say -
"Wardo, burn the fucking thing, it's going to make you insane," because, well, yeah. He can't say things like that any more.
Everything they have is contingent upon the fact that he doesn't say things like that any more, any of it, he doesn't tell Eduardo what to do and Eduardo doesn't worry about him overtly, and it's all very civilized and they're good friends, in the way that you are when you've got a lifetime of shared experience behind you.
And Mark's never felt more strongly than now, with his own ridiculous extra sense telling him that this is a terrible, awful idea that Eduardo's had, and the carefully cultivated warning voice of their remaining friendship telling him to shut the fuck up, that it's all complete bullshit.
"That sounds - pretty cool," he admits instead, with just the right amount of grudging acceptance to come across as genuine. "Maybe I can see it sometime?"
And it may be his imagination, but Eduardo sounds just a bit too relieved when he agrees, and lets the subject drop, and they go on to talk about other, less worryingly stupid, things.
**
A bit too relieved is apparently the understatement of the decade - well, if you count the decade as having started post-depositions, which Mark is really good at doing when he wants to describe any sort of excess. You just can't beat that whole time out for sheer horror.
A bit too relieved means, in this brave new world, 'see, I think this is the actual, real mezzo-tint that James was going on about,' and it means 'I think I'm starting to see the ghosts in it,' and it means 'I am scared out of my fucking mind, but I'm damned if I'm going to ask for help,' which, not cool, seriously.
It is - because of course, isn't that how all these stupid things end up working? - well after midnight and in some random, generically pleasant and well-equipped hotel, ideally set up for conferences
(thankfully, because that is in fact what it's being used for, although Mark's pretty sure another party is using it for some kind of wedding or christening or something that involved cake and a lot of ridiculous-colored and far too shiny decorations, since some of whatever they'd demanded seems to have got mixed up with the conference stuff. Either that or the hotel's gone insane, which is also possible, but Mark's clinging pretty hard to 'things that are likely' right now, just because he's being confronted with something that's pretty fucking unlikely, and he's going to hold onto his rapidly sideways-slipping reality for as long as he can, thanks so much)
and with all the power-outlets any company could desire.
Mark's currently hoping that they've also got a magically restocking mini-bar, because pleased as he initially was to be catching up with Eduardo in person, he was seriously not expecting this, and he now knows it was actually at the top of his 'do not want, ever, okay, thanks' list.
Or it would have been, if he'd even considered it before Eduardo showed up at the door to his hotel room, holding a paper-wrapped square and looking a horrible mixture of humiliated and terrified.
Now they're both staring at the incontrovertible evidence of the mezzo-tint, getting steadily drunker, and really not catching up on anything at all much, other than a sort of shared feeling of 'please make this stop and go away or just not be happening', all of which is unobligingly failing to happen.
"I... read the story," Mark admits, eventually.
Eduardo just nods. "And?"
"You told it better," Mark says gloomily, "but then I think it was kind of hard to tell it worse."
Eduardo barks out a laugh, and chokes it off just as abruptly, staring at the print as though it's going to do something awful to him for showing anything other than stunned horror.
"The window's open," he says at last. He sounds completely miserable. He looks completely miserable, which is doing funny things to Mark's chest, because how the hell is he supposed to fix this? He can't apologize, because seriously, for once? So not his fault - and he can't offer to burn the damn thing like he should have insisted Eduardo did in the beginning, because - well, all the reasons he couldn't even suggest it, in the beginning, which still suck and he still hates, and are actually worse now he has to look at Eduardo and see that all the things he was worried about have happened.
Eduardo looks like he's been living through nightmares, or not sleeping at all, and Mark can guess that he's been checking the nasty little print like a mania, every time he thinks about it - and that's got to be most of the time.
"Yeah," he agrees a bit harshly. "Yeah, so - you saw the figure on the lawn?"
Eduardo nods. "That's how I knew I wasn't seeing things. I mean - a head in a corner? Could just be a mark on the paper I'd missed, it was so small and dark... and hey, I knew the story, so part of me thought I needed to shut up, that I was borrowing trouble, making it up, needed some sleep - fuck, I don't know, Mark, I was either going crazy or making myself crazy, and the second choice seemed mostly preferable."
Mark nods. "So the order is..."
"Head in corner, figure on lawn, open window, and -" Eduardo stops, closes his eyes. Swallows. He's caught in his own nightmare, and he knows that even if he says the rest of it, he's not going to wake himself up with the sound of his own voice.
Mark doesn't ever remember his dreams. He can finish this. He can say this and not be afraid of what the words might call up. He doesn't believe in ghosts and he doesn't believe that even a fucked-up print can harm the living. "Rotting corpse carrying a child," he says, his voice flat and matter-of-fact. "Wardo, listen, maybe it's some weird kind of technology, something no-one thought to look into back then, simple stuff like - the equivalent of lemon juice on paper, or something."
"In the eighteen-hundreds?" Eduardo isn't even smiling at him, let alone looking for some kind of hope or even explanation.
"You don't know," Mark persists. "We don't know all the things people could do. Maybe this happens to this series of prints, on a cycle or something, and no-one notices half the time because any time someone sees them, they get rid of them, maybe you just got -"
"Really, really lucky?" Eduardo says wryly, and Mark cringes a little, because he didn't mean it to sound like that, but hell, it still sounds better than the thought that an ancient horrible ghost story -
which isn't fucking true, thank you -
is playing out on a piece of paper that came off a scratched and smoothed copper sheet, nearly two hundred years ago.
"Yeah, no, even I'm not that mean," he says instead, aiming for vaguely apologetic, since he didn't want to make Eduardo feel even more on his own about this than he obviously does. "Just... you know. I don't believe in this kind of thing, you know that!"
"Yeah," Eduardo says, looking down at the nice, inoffensive, generically expensive carpeting. "Yeah. I think I was kind of hoping that you not believing -"
Mark tilts his head, trying to get a good look at his face. What he can see of it isn't encouraging. Eduardo looks completely, thoroughly miserable.
He looks defeated, and Mark promised himself once that he'd never even be in the same room as Eduardo again, and see anything remotely close to that kind of look on his face, and either fail to do something about it or, even worse, be the one to have put it there.
And he's not sure which this is, but he's pretty damn certain it's one of them, and that's just not acceptable.
(Not least because it isn't easing up how painful and tight his chest feels right now, like if he doesn't do something or say something or help in some way, he might just stop breathing, because making his lungs compress and expand is starting to feel that little bit too hard and too painful when he's staying quiet as well.)
"Wardo, what?" he asks, feeling out of his depth, and as stupid as he's always accused everyone else of being, and not really very sure of what his hands want to do, other than that they keep twitching, reaching for something they haven't got, and it's got nothing to do with his mental control over them. "What did you hope - what can I do?"
But Eduardo shakes his head, not looking up, and it's unbearable.
"Please," Mark says, and he didn't mean to let the desperation he's feeling show through, but somehow that was the right thing to do, must have been, even though he didn't intend it, even though he's always promised himself he won't be weak like that any more, ever again, never show that he's still clinging on to needing to fix things, deep down, that he's still someone who can need and want and push too hard. It must have been the right thing to do, because Eduardo's looking up at him again, and saying very quietly -
"I thought you not believing, I thought, I thought it might, might make it go away, but -"
Mark's hands have got more sense than him, it would seem, because they're reaching out for Eduardo before he's thought of it as an obvious thing to do; reaching out and pulling Eduardo in, and holding on tight, until Eduardo is clinging on to the back of his shirt, hard and painful and digging in with clenched knuckles into Mark's ribs, meeting against his spine, and it still hurts less than his chest did, only seconds before.
"I'm sorry it didn't," he says, very quietly, and that, that's the right thing to say too, because Eduardo shakes his head, short and hard and fast, his forehead moving across Mark's shoulder until it's resting against his neck; too hot and dry, and his breath too fast, but somehow better than the weird braced anguish of moments before, when he seemed to expect Mark to have got closer to deliver some kind of blow he needed to prepare for.
"No," he says after a bit, sounding wobbly but very much less resigned and not defeated at all. "No, it's - it's okay. I mean. If it didn't go away, at least - I mean I'm not crazy. Because you wouldn't lie about being able to see it -"
"No," Mark agrees, fervently, and rubs one very awkward hand, now back under his brain's volition, up and down the tense curve of Eduardo's back. Lying isn't something that would have occurred to him then, since it never does when it would be useful.
Come to think of it, he really, really wishes he hadn't been able to see it, let alone been able to say immediately 'Yes?' when Eduardo'd asked him about whether the window was open.
And he really fucking wishes Eduardo hadn't been so thoughtful as to take photos of all the other stages the print had shown, and that he hadn't been able to see those, either.
"- and you aren't laughing, and you haven't -"
There's very few things in this world that make Eduardo sound like this. Mark really wishes he didn't need to add himself to the list, but fuck, he wishes even more that he didn't now have to add possible-ghosts to it, too.
Mostly because anything that makes him sound like this are things Mark's learned the hard way he hates, and isn't going to stop hating, and actually has no reason to stop hating.
At least he's got the small, dubious benefit of being real, and therefore able to change himself. Hating past-himself is okay, because past is the operative term, and he can live with that. But hating possible-ghosts that are right in front of him on a highly-polished hotel table is just ridiculous and annoying and -
Hateful, in fact.
"What do I do?" Eduardo asks, the words vibrating a little unpleasantly against Mark's neck. There's an underlying shake to them that's jarring, not least because it means Eduardo's still very far from okay, and Mark still has no fucking clue what he's doing.
"I'd say burn it," Mark admits, because he's sick of not saying things, and he's sick of pretending he's okay with things, and he's in the world's blandest hotel with a possibly-haunted mezzo-tint and the man who used to be his best friend and was nearly a damn sight more than that, and who seems perfectly happy - and more than that, downright panicked at the idea of not - to be in the world's least dignified or comfortable hug. "I wanted to when you bought it. Come on, Wardo, those stories freaked you out back in college, I don't remember you having a single nightmare that didn't somehow involve someone or something not having a face or hiding a face or you waking up just before you could see how horrible their face was -"
"You remember that -" Eduardo sounds completely stunned, and Mark loses what little patience he has remaining to him in one grandly suicidal blaze of frustration.
"Of course I remember it! What am I supposed to do, pretend I didn't know you before, pretend you never fell asleep on my bed, never told me those fucking stories when they got inside your head in the worst way, that you never told me anything? I've tried that, okay? I've really tried, because hey, I don't want to lose what we've got now on top of everything else, of course I don't - but I do remember, I remember everything, there wasn't a single point when I didn't!"
"But -" Eduardo's pulled a back a bit, is staring at him now, and Mark thinks he preferred the worrying, abrasive tremors, to this unrelenting scrutiny.
"But what," he says, flat and tired, and trying not to notice that Eduardo might be looking at him, might have lifted his head enough for that, but he hasn't let go of Mark's shirt and he hasn't slackened his arms, and Mark hasn't let go either, and he thinks distantly that he might have to be forced to physically, if it comes down to it.
"You never said," Eduardo says wonderingly, shaking his head a little. "All those times, all those times when I was pushing you, and you never once said..."
"I didn't want to lose what we have now," Mark repeats, feeling tired and heavy-headed - heavy-hearted - and dull.
"I don't,"Eduardo says with emphasis, "I don't either. But Mark, I didn't realize you thought that meant losing everything we had before as some kind of payment! I'd never have asked that of you, I'd never have asked that of me, God, why would you think -" He stops, and the unholy expression of understanding, of realization, the old look that meant he'd got something about Mark that no-one was supposed to be able to even hint at seeing, crosses his face.
"What?" Mark says uneasily.
"You thought that was what you deserved," Eduardo says slowly. "You thought that was what you deserved, better than you deserved, so you never even questioned it, you never once let yourself even think too loudly that if that was what I was asking, it was completely unfair. You would have let me get away with - fuck, Mark, just what were you going to let me get away with?"
Mark bites his lip, hard; tries not to answer; tries to think of a lie; tries to think of a plausible evasion, and fails at it all.
"Anything you wanted to," he says, and his voice cracks, humiliatingly, in the middle of that damning word wanted, needlessly emphasizing how much it's come to mean to him. "Anything you needed to."
"And you say I'm an idiot," Eduardo mutters in disbelief, loosening his grip on Mark's shirt. Mark, even knowing this had to be coming, cannot stop himself from making an involuntary sound of protest, his own arms tightening around Eduardo completely without his brain's say-so - but Eduardo's not moving away, he's moving in, his hands moving up to Mark's shoulders, skimming over them and up the sides of his neck, cupping his jaw with a strange, careful kind of intensity that Mark never wants to lessen.
"Wardo -" he starts, with no clear idea of where he's going with this or even where he wants to go, and Eduardo shakes his head, still looking at him, still making Mark look back, his hands steady and somehow resolved where they hold Mark's face still.
"Anything," he says, as though it's a vow, a decision, a statement, and nods to himself, smiling a little. "Okay then."
Kissing Eduardo is nothing like coming home.
But it's everything like dreaming of falling - and finding instead that it's become flight.
**
They miss the walking corpse, and the dead child - if they were ever there to be seen, which Mark will never - quite - stop doubting.
"But the rest -" Eduardo says.
They have the photographs, still. The dark shape that could be a head in the corner of the picture; the figure crawling across the lawn in the moonlight, with the white cross painted on its back; the open window.
The closed window that the innocent, daylight-shaded mezzo-tint now shows.
"Yeah," Mark says, and skeptic though he is, skeptic though he proudly is under these circumstances, he's pretty sure it won't only be Eduardo who has bad dreams, heavily involving shrouded figures or rotting faces, for a while.
"Maybe it'll start again," Eduardo says. "Maybe if this time we saw the whole thing -"
"Maybe we could just fucking burn it," Mark says with some venom. He really hates it when his original idea is the best idea and still gets dismissed, even when ensuing events have proved it was the best idea all along.
Eduardo looks at him, and his mouth opens slightly on a kind of incredulous half-laugh. "Are you telling me that it scares -"
"I'm telling you," Mark says, and leans up to kiss him, because he can, now, and because he's learned it's the best way of silencing Eduardo, even if he's pretty sure he's going to stop anyone else from using it as a proven method from now on, and because it's one of his new favorite pastimes on top of all that, so why the hell shouldn't he? - "I'm telling you we shouldn't tempt fate."
Eduardo's face softens, in the way that Mark has always pretended to despise, and which actually never fails to make him feel correspondingly like giving in to whatever might be said next - which is something he's learned to be wary of, when it's the unknown - and he says, "Yeah, I think we've done enough of that for one lifetime."
They burn the photograph in the fireplace.
In retrospect, they should have checked first if the fireplace was real.
"Still," Eduardo says, with a fair attempt at being philosophical, considering they've set off all the fire alarms and the ceiling sprinklers, "at least it's, you know, burned."
"And drowned," Mark agrees, feeling way too cheerful, considering how big the hotel bill is and how much everyone's going to yell at him when they find out just what caused this.
"And gone," Eduardo concludes happily, looking at the small, sad, greyish pile of soggy ash. "Completely gone."
He's kissing Mark, uncaring of forthcoming yelling and descending water and shrieking alarms, and Mark is thoroughly enjoying the chance to respond, when the inevitable onslaught of frantic hotel staff arrive, and seem even more annoyed by the fact that the instigators of the disaster that was once a perfectly good hotel room are standing in the middle of their deliberately-engineered chaos and kissing, than they are about the noise, the water, and the smell of old burned mezzo-tint that's still hanging pretty heavily in the air.
That's the point when the shouting starts.
"Worth it," Mark says, feeling Eduardo's delighted, surprised laughter at his attitude run through them both, warming him more than any dry clothes or a heater could manage. "So very worth it."
Eduardo leans his head against Mark's, and keeps laughing; and if part of that is the slight hysteria of relief, Mark finds it hard to blame him.
As the hotel manager enters, and begins his own tirade, Eduardo says, very quietly, and laughter still shimmering under his voice -
"Can we go home now?'
- and his eyes are wide, and dark, and hold a promise that he means what he's asking on every level, he means the we of it, and the home of it, and the together, us, that's implied by it, and Mark, in wonder and something very close to perfect joy, says -
"Yeah. Yeah, we can."
He doesn't realize how hard he's smiling until it starts to almost hurt.
But he doesn't stop, he can't, and Eduardo's hand is warm around his, and the sprinklers are still going off, and there are no such things, Mark is quite certain, as ghosts.
Pairing(s): Mark/Eduardo
Rating: PG-13 (if that!)
Warnings: ghosts, hotels, au, fixit, reference to M.R. James's story of the same name
Word Count: c. 5100
Summary: Eduardo buys an old print at an auction. Mark thinks he's an idiot. Mark is pretty much right. But not, strangely, about everything else.
Notes: My deepest, deepest apologies to my poor recipient, who has waited so long and patiently for this! My only excuse is that I am in a different country to usual, and just as I got hooked up with internet, LJ decided it disliked my ISP intensely.
Mark thinks sometimes - when he thinks about it at all - that he and Eduardo didn't so much start talking again as come back to a long-running conversation, after a pause. It's just that easy for them and just that inexplicable to everyone else, and exactly no-one's business but theirs, so explanations aren't likely to happen anyway (not that they were going to come from him in the first place, but it's weirdly reassuring to know they aren't going to be attempted by Eduardo, either) even if they're politely requested, outright demanded, or endlessly pestered for. Which saves time all round.
It wasn't really even a pause, anyway, even while it was going on. It was more as if they'd got out of touch, somehow, gone out of reach in some weird shouldn't-happen-these-days kind of communications breakdown, and got out of the habit of talking, during that time. When they started again, it was strangely without bitterness or anger or even faintly-remembered grievance, just a kind of huh, that happened, that was odd moment of recognition, and then nothing had changed.
Nothing has changed.
Outwardly.
As far as people know, anyway.
But of course that's the lie, that's the real lie, because what happened might be a past they've decided to well and truly call another country, and say how they, they did things differently there
(and Mark, at least, has quietly promised himself a very firm different and never again)
but it still is the past, their past, a shared past which ensures that everything's changed.
Everything's changed, everything's completely changed, because there was bitterness, and there was anger, and the grievances had been - no, Mark's honest, he can admit this much - had felt - very very real, on both sides. And neither of them wants to go back to that.
So they stick with the new things and make new in-jokes and base what they're not scared to keep trying out on what's happening now, not on what they used to have
(could maybe have had, should have had)
and what people assume is still unchanged.
People, as Mark's learned to his cost, are unfailingly stupid.
At least when Eduardo's just as stupid it's usually pretty funny. He's got a badly hidden taste for the melodramatic and the ludicrously expensive and the overtly showy, and when he can combine all three in one grand mistake of a purchase, he thinks it's just perfect.
He then tends to call and tell Mark about it, mostly so he can not even pretend he's not feeling self-congratulatory and be justified in his self-congratulation, because Mark sure as hell won't do it for him, and, as he invariably says, someone has to.
This time is no exception.
"You bought a what?" Mark asks, not even trying to hide the fact he's laughing so hard he's had to sit down. "What are you calling this now?"
"I'm not calling it anything." Eduardo's completely failing at sounding offended, mostly, Mark knows (and takes full and merciless advantage of on a regular basis) because he can't resist joining in with any overt display of emotion from someone else. He's like a litmus test, Eduardo is. Show him something genuine in your voice or your eyes or your actions, and man, you get it back ten times as strongly.
(It's taken Mark a long time and a fuck-load of mistakes to work that one out, but never let anyone say he doesn't learn how to turn his own stupid-ass behavior to his own advantage - eventually. He sure as hell doesn't get within even a phone's distance of Eduardo when he's angry at something, any more, and he doesn't much care to think about why, either.)
"I'm not calling it anything," he repeats. "It's called a mezzo-tint."
"Okay," Mark says, slowly and deliberately blankly, "and you need to tell me this because -?"
Eduardo sighs, not particularly annoyed, but not particularly impressed with Mark's deliberate ignorance, either.
"Because when it came up in auction it had the same number on it as the one in that ghost story I -"
"Oh fuck no," Mark says, and his protest is genuine. Eduardo and Victorian ghost stories, that unholy match devised in the ninth circle of hell; Eduardo the only person Mark knew of alive who could creep himself out on over-written and overdone and not really very frightening stories; who would try to creep everyone else out by relating them (extremely badly) secondhand, and fail; and who was probably still fucking terrified by the stupid things. "Come on, Wardo, that's ridiculous even for you. You bought a stupidly overpriced example of an outdated printing process because it had the same auction number as something in a ghost story?"
"Yeah," Eduardo says, and for the first time he sounds a bit hesitant. Maybe Mark overdid the laughing-at-him thing - but no, no, it's because there's something even more stupid to come, isn't it, it's because Mark's life wouldn't be complete without Eduardo making it totally and utterly fantastical in the heights of what-the-everliving-fuck he can induce it to reach. "Yeah, but - not just that."
"No?" Mark asks. Warily. He feels wariness is entirely justified. It's something like a sixth sense, only it's more a Wardo-has-done-something-really-fucking-stupid sense, and while it rarely kicks in, it's never, ever wrong when it does.
"No," Eduardo says, and laughs a bit, but not with amusement. It's the breathe-out-quickly, hide-all-embarrassment-very-badly kind of laugh that Mark always hopes he's heard for the last time, because never hearing it again would mean Eduardo's given up thinking he has to apologize for being who he is. And while Mark might think Eduardo's an idiot, he also doesn't think he should apologize for being an idiot, because that's self-defeating.
And honestly? He's had more than enough of Eduardo managing to sabotage himself through thinking he's doing it all wrong by virtue of not being enough, not doing it in the right way, not making the right choice, not meeting the what-the-fuck-ever perfect standard he's got glued up to his mind's wall and keeps checking on - to his own detriment.
"Okaaaay," Mark says slowly, "so what else was there about this amazing piece of work?"
"It -" Eduardo breaks off, and sighs, then mumbles something very quickly.
"What?" Mark's almost tempted to laugh, except that would be a bit meaner, right now, than he actually wants to be, and even if he does find this pretty funny, he's got a feeling Eduardo's usual litmus-paper-like behavior wouldn't kick in here. He's too ready to be mocked, and that, Mark knows from experience, is a prickly and uncomfortable place to be. "No, hey, listen, it's got to be something, I don't believe you'd just go by a number..."
"Yeah, no, no, I didn't." Eduardo gives another of those pseudo-laughs, and Mark winces. "See, the mezzo-tint?"
"Yeah?" Mark tries his best to sound encouraging.
"It's exactly the same as the one described in the story."
Which is, of course, when Mark has to admit he has no fucking clue what the story is, and has to sit through one of Eduardo's godawful retellings.
Funnily enough, when Eduardo's done, Mark doesn't feel even slightly better about this, or even vaguely inclined to dismiss it.
Because that weird feeling at the back of his neck, the prickly new sense that only ever seems to kick in when Eduardo's involved (and how's that for completely useless as a superpower, thanks, world) hasn't gone away.
Maybe it's just the thought of a print that changes to show different times of day and night, and the progress of a murder.
Maybe Eduardo's storytelling has gotten better, after all.
Maybe it's the thought that someone deliberately created this print, or saw the print and made up a story about it, or whichever way round it was, and made it about a murder.
Or maybe it's the fact that the mezzo-tint and the murder aren't the ghost part of the story.
It's the final scene that the print apparently changes to, right at the end.
The scene where the mezzo-tint's owner can see the murderer's face.
And it's the face of a rotting corpse.
Mark doesn't believe in ghosts. But he thinks Eduardo probably does, and that's why those crazy-ass Victorian melodramas freaked him out so much, back when he'd admit to it (and probably still do now, when he'd never confess to such a thing). And he can't say -
"Look, are you sure this kind of exposure to phobias is the right way of going about curing them?" because oh hey, assuming, and insulting, and one of those things that he really has learned not to say any more, and he can't say -
"Don't be stupid, what are you trying to do, make yourself have bad dreams?" because knowing that sort of thing about each other is one of the unspokens, the things they leave in the past and don't mention or presume on, no matter how much their old familiarity seems to have returned, and he really, really can't say -
"Wardo, burn the fucking thing, it's going to make you insane," because, well, yeah. He can't say things like that any more.
Everything they have is contingent upon the fact that he doesn't say things like that any more, any of it, he doesn't tell Eduardo what to do and Eduardo doesn't worry about him overtly, and it's all very civilized and they're good friends, in the way that you are when you've got a lifetime of shared experience behind you.
And Mark's never felt more strongly than now, with his own ridiculous extra sense telling him that this is a terrible, awful idea that Eduardo's had, and the carefully cultivated warning voice of their remaining friendship telling him to shut the fuck up, that it's all complete bullshit.
"That sounds - pretty cool," he admits instead, with just the right amount of grudging acceptance to come across as genuine. "Maybe I can see it sometime?"
And it may be his imagination, but Eduardo sounds just a bit too relieved when he agrees, and lets the subject drop, and they go on to talk about other, less worryingly stupid, things.
**
A bit too relieved is apparently the understatement of the decade - well, if you count the decade as having started post-depositions, which Mark is really good at doing when he wants to describe any sort of excess. You just can't beat that whole time out for sheer horror.
A bit too relieved means, in this brave new world, 'see, I think this is the actual, real mezzo-tint that James was going on about,' and it means 'I think I'm starting to see the ghosts in it,' and it means 'I am scared out of my fucking mind, but I'm damned if I'm going to ask for help,' which, not cool, seriously.
It is - because of course, isn't that how all these stupid things end up working? - well after midnight and in some random, generically pleasant and well-equipped hotel, ideally set up for conferences
(thankfully, because that is in fact what it's being used for, although Mark's pretty sure another party is using it for some kind of wedding or christening or something that involved cake and a lot of ridiculous-colored and far too shiny decorations, since some of whatever they'd demanded seems to have got mixed up with the conference stuff. Either that or the hotel's gone insane, which is also possible, but Mark's clinging pretty hard to 'things that are likely' right now, just because he's being confronted with something that's pretty fucking unlikely, and he's going to hold onto his rapidly sideways-slipping reality for as long as he can, thanks so much)
and with all the power-outlets any company could desire.
Mark's currently hoping that they've also got a magically restocking mini-bar, because pleased as he initially was to be catching up with Eduardo in person, he was seriously not expecting this, and he now knows it was actually at the top of his 'do not want, ever, okay, thanks' list.
Or it would have been, if he'd even considered it before Eduardo showed up at the door to his hotel room, holding a paper-wrapped square and looking a horrible mixture of humiliated and terrified.
Now they're both staring at the incontrovertible evidence of the mezzo-tint, getting steadily drunker, and really not catching up on anything at all much, other than a sort of shared feeling of 'please make this stop and go away or just not be happening', all of which is unobligingly failing to happen.
"I... read the story," Mark admits, eventually.
Eduardo just nods. "And?"
"You told it better," Mark says gloomily, "but then I think it was kind of hard to tell it worse."
Eduardo barks out a laugh, and chokes it off just as abruptly, staring at the print as though it's going to do something awful to him for showing anything other than stunned horror.
"The window's open," he says at last. He sounds completely miserable. He looks completely miserable, which is doing funny things to Mark's chest, because how the hell is he supposed to fix this? He can't apologize, because seriously, for once? So not his fault - and he can't offer to burn the damn thing like he should have insisted Eduardo did in the beginning, because - well, all the reasons he couldn't even suggest it, in the beginning, which still suck and he still hates, and are actually worse now he has to look at Eduardo and see that all the things he was worried about have happened.
Eduardo looks like he's been living through nightmares, or not sleeping at all, and Mark can guess that he's been checking the nasty little print like a mania, every time he thinks about it - and that's got to be most of the time.
"Yeah," he agrees a bit harshly. "Yeah, so - you saw the figure on the lawn?"
Eduardo nods. "That's how I knew I wasn't seeing things. I mean - a head in a corner? Could just be a mark on the paper I'd missed, it was so small and dark... and hey, I knew the story, so part of me thought I needed to shut up, that I was borrowing trouble, making it up, needed some sleep - fuck, I don't know, Mark, I was either going crazy or making myself crazy, and the second choice seemed mostly preferable."
Mark nods. "So the order is..."
"Head in corner, figure on lawn, open window, and -" Eduardo stops, closes his eyes. Swallows. He's caught in his own nightmare, and he knows that even if he says the rest of it, he's not going to wake himself up with the sound of his own voice.
Mark doesn't ever remember his dreams. He can finish this. He can say this and not be afraid of what the words might call up. He doesn't believe in ghosts and he doesn't believe that even a fucked-up print can harm the living. "Rotting corpse carrying a child," he says, his voice flat and matter-of-fact. "Wardo, listen, maybe it's some weird kind of technology, something no-one thought to look into back then, simple stuff like - the equivalent of lemon juice on paper, or something."
"In the eighteen-hundreds?" Eduardo isn't even smiling at him, let alone looking for some kind of hope or even explanation.
"You don't know," Mark persists. "We don't know all the things people could do. Maybe this happens to this series of prints, on a cycle or something, and no-one notices half the time because any time someone sees them, they get rid of them, maybe you just got -"
"Really, really lucky?" Eduardo says wryly, and Mark cringes a little, because he didn't mean it to sound like that, but hell, it still sounds better than the thought that an ancient horrible ghost story -
which isn't fucking true, thank you -
is playing out on a piece of paper that came off a scratched and smoothed copper sheet, nearly two hundred years ago.
"Yeah, no, even I'm not that mean," he says instead, aiming for vaguely apologetic, since he didn't want to make Eduardo feel even more on his own about this than he obviously does. "Just... you know. I don't believe in this kind of thing, you know that!"
"Yeah," Eduardo says, looking down at the nice, inoffensive, generically expensive carpeting. "Yeah. I think I was kind of hoping that you not believing -"
Mark tilts his head, trying to get a good look at his face. What he can see of it isn't encouraging. Eduardo looks completely, thoroughly miserable.
He looks defeated, and Mark promised himself once that he'd never even be in the same room as Eduardo again, and see anything remotely close to that kind of look on his face, and either fail to do something about it or, even worse, be the one to have put it there.
And he's not sure which this is, but he's pretty damn certain it's one of them, and that's just not acceptable.
(Not least because it isn't easing up how painful and tight his chest feels right now, like if he doesn't do something or say something or help in some way, he might just stop breathing, because making his lungs compress and expand is starting to feel that little bit too hard and too painful when he's staying quiet as well.)
"Wardo, what?" he asks, feeling out of his depth, and as stupid as he's always accused everyone else of being, and not really very sure of what his hands want to do, other than that they keep twitching, reaching for something they haven't got, and it's got nothing to do with his mental control over them. "What did you hope - what can I do?"
But Eduardo shakes his head, not looking up, and it's unbearable.
"Please," Mark says, and he didn't mean to let the desperation he's feeling show through, but somehow that was the right thing to do, must have been, even though he didn't intend it, even though he's always promised himself he won't be weak like that any more, ever again, never show that he's still clinging on to needing to fix things, deep down, that he's still someone who can need and want and push too hard. It must have been the right thing to do, because Eduardo's looking up at him again, and saying very quietly -
"I thought you not believing, I thought, I thought it might, might make it go away, but -"
Mark's hands have got more sense than him, it would seem, because they're reaching out for Eduardo before he's thought of it as an obvious thing to do; reaching out and pulling Eduardo in, and holding on tight, until Eduardo is clinging on to the back of his shirt, hard and painful and digging in with clenched knuckles into Mark's ribs, meeting against his spine, and it still hurts less than his chest did, only seconds before.
"I'm sorry it didn't," he says, very quietly, and that, that's the right thing to say too, because Eduardo shakes his head, short and hard and fast, his forehead moving across Mark's shoulder until it's resting against his neck; too hot and dry, and his breath too fast, but somehow better than the weird braced anguish of moments before, when he seemed to expect Mark to have got closer to deliver some kind of blow he needed to prepare for.
"No," he says after a bit, sounding wobbly but very much less resigned and not defeated at all. "No, it's - it's okay. I mean. If it didn't go away, at least - I mean I'm not crazy. Because you wouldn't lie about being able to see it -"
"No," Mark agrees, fervently, and rubs one very awkward hand, now back under his brain's volition, up and down the tense curve of Eduardo's back. Lying isn't something that would have occurred to him then, since it never does when it would be useful.
Come to think of it, he really, really wishes he hadn't been able to see it, let alone been able to say immediately 'Yes?' when Eduardo'd asked him about whether the window was open.
And he really fucking wishes Eduardo hadn't been so thoughtful as to take photos of all the other stages the print had shown, and that he hadn't been able to see those, either.
"- and you aren't laughing, and you haven't -"
There's very few things in this world that make Eduardo sound like this. Mark really wishes he didn't need to add himself to the list, but fuck, he wishes even more that he didn't now have to add possible-ghosts to it, too.
Mostly because anything that makes him sound like this are things Mark's learned the hard way he hates, and isn't going to stop hating, and actually has no reason to stop hating.
At least he's got the small, dubious benefit of being real, and therefore able to change himself. Hating past-himself is okay, because past is the operative term, and he can live with that. But hating possible-ghosts that are right in front of him on a highly-polished hotel table is just ridiculous and annoying and -
Hateful, in fact.
"What do I do?" Eduardo asks, the words vibrating a little unpleasantly against Mark's neck. There's an underlying shake to them that's jarring, not least because it means Eduardo's still very far from okay, and Mark still has no fucking clue what he's doing.
"I'd say burn it," Mark admits, because he's sick of not saying things, and he's sick of pretending he's okay with things, and he's in the world's blandest hotel with a possibly-haunted mezzo-tint and the man who used to be his best friend and was nearly a damn sight more than that, and who seems perfectly happy - and more than that, downright panicked at the idea of not - to be in the world's least dignified or comfortable hug. "I wanted to when you bought it. Come on, Wardo, those stories freaked you out back in college, I don't remember you having a single nightmare that didn't somehow involve someone or something not having a face or hiding a face or you waking up just before you could see how horrible their face was -"
"You remember that -" Eduardo sounds completely stunned, and Mark loses what little patience he has remaining to him in one grandly suicidal blaze of frustration.
"Of course I remember it! What am I supposed to do, pretend I didn't know you before, pretend you never fell asleep on my bed, never told me those fucking stories when they got inside your head in the worst way, that you never told me anything? I've tried that, okay? I've really tried, because hey, I don't want to lose what we've got now on top of everything else, of course I don't - but I do remember, I remember everything, there wasn't a single point when I didn't!"
"But -" Eduardo's pulled a back a bit, is staring at him now, and Mark thinks he preferred the worrying, abrasive tremors, to this unrelenting scrutiny.
"But what," he says, flat and tired, and trying not to notice that Eduardo might be looking at him, might have lifted his head enough for that, but he hasn't let go of Mark's shirt and he hasn't slackened his arms, and Mark hasn't let go either, and he thinks distantly that he might have to be forced to physically, if it comes down to it.
"You never said," Eduardo says wonderingly, shaking his head a little. "All those times, all those times when I was pushing you, and you never once said..."
"I didn't want to lose what we have now," Mark repeats, feeling tired and heavy-headed - heavy-hearted - and dull.
"I don't,"Eduardo says with emphasis, "I don't either. But Mark, I didn't realize you thought that meant losing everything we had before as some kind of payment! I'd never have asked that of you, I'd never have asked that of me, God, why would you think -" He stops, and the unholy expression of understanding, of realization, the old look that meant he'd got something about Mark that no-one was supposed to be able to even hint at seeing, crosses his face.
"What?" Mark says uneasily.
"You thought that was what you deserved," Eduardo says slowly. "You thought that was what you deserved, better than you deserved, so you never even questioned it, you never once let yourself even think too loudly that if that was what I was asking, it was completely unfair. You would have let me get away with - fuck, Mark, just what were you going to let me get away with?"
Mark bites his lip, hard; tries not to answer; tries to think of a lie; tries to think of a plausible evasion, and fails at it all.
"Anything you wanted to," he says, and his voice cracks, humiliatingly, in the middle of that damning word wanted, needlessly emphasizing how much it's come to mean to him. "Anything you needed to."
"And you say I'm an idiot," Eduardo mutters in disbelief, loosening his grip on Mark's shirt. Mark, even knowing this had to be coming, cannot stop himself from making an involuntary sound of protest, his own arms tightening around Eduardo completely without his brain's say-so - but Eduardo's not moving away, he's moving in, his hands moving up to Mark's shoulders, skimming over them and up the sides of his neck, cupping his jaw with a strange, careful kind of intensity that Mark never wants to lessen.
"Wardo -" he starts, with no clear idea of where he's going with this or even where he wants to go, and Eduardo shakes his head, still looking at him, still making Mark look back, his hands steady and somehow resolved where they hold Mark's face still.
"Anything," he says, as though it's a vow, a decision, a statement, and nods to himself, smiling a little. "Okay then."
Kissing Eduardo is nothing like coming home.
But it's everything like dreaming of falling - and finding instead that it's become flight.
**
They miss the walking corpse, and the dead child - if they were ever there to be seen, which Mark will never - quite - stop doubting.
"But the rest -" Eduardo says.
They have the photographs, still. The dark shape that could be a head in the corner of the picture; the figure crawling across the lawn in the moonlight, with the white cross painted on its back; the open window.
The closed window that the innocent, daylight-shaded mezzo-tint now shows.
"Yeah," Mark says, and skeptic though he is, skeptic though he proudly is under these circumstances, he's pretty sure it won't only be Eduardo who has bad dreams, heavily involving shrouded figures or rotting faces, for a while.
"Maybe it'll start again," Eduardo says. "Maybe if this time we saw the whole thing -"
"Maybe we could just fucking burn it," Mark says with some venom. He really hates it when his original idea is the best idea and still gets dismissed, even when ensuing events have proved it was the best idea all along.
Eduardo looks at him, and his mouth opens slightly on a kind of incredulous half-laugh. "Are you telling me that it scares -"
"I'm telling you," Mark says, and leans up to kiss him, because he can, now, and because he's learned it's the best way of silencing Eduardo, even if he's pretty sure he's going to stop anyone else from using it as a proven method from now on, and because it's one of his new favorite pastimes on top of all that, so why the hell shouldn't he? - "I'm telling you we shouldn't tempt fate."
Eduardo's face softens, in the way that Mark has always pretended to despise, and which actually never fails to make him feel correspondingly like giving in to whatever might be said next - which is something he's learned to be wary of, when it's the unknown - and he says, "Yeah, I think we've done enough of that for one lifetime."
They burn the photograph in the fireplace.
In retrospect, they should have checked first if the fireplace was real.
"Still," Eduardo says, with a fair attempt at being philosophical, considering they've set off all the fire alarms and the ceiling sprinklers, "at least it's, you know, burned."
"And drowned," Mark agrees, feeling way too cheerful, considering how big the hotel bill is and how much everyone's going to yell at him when they find out just what caused this.
"And gone," Eduardo concludes happily, looking at the small, sad, greyish pile of soggy ash. "Completely gone."
He's kissing Mark, uncaring of forthcoming yelling and descending water and shrieking alarms, and Mark is thoroughly enjoying the chance to respond, when the inevitable onslaught of frantic hotel staff arrive, and seem even more annoyed by the fact that the instigators of the disaster that was once a perfectly good hotel room are standing in the middle of their deliberately-engineered chaos and kissing, than they are about the noise, the water, and the smell of old burned mezzo-tint that's still hanging pretty heavily in the air.
That's the point when the shouting starts.
"Worth it," Mark says, feeling Eduardo's delighted, surprised laughter at his attitude run through them both, warming him more than any dry clothes or a heater could manage. "So very worth it."
Eduardo leans his head against Mark's, and keeps laughing; and if part of that is the slight hysteria of relief, Mark finds it hard to blame him.
As the hotel manager enters, and begins his own tirade, Eduardo says, very quietly, and laughter still shimmering under his voice -
"Can we go home now?'
- and his eyes are wide, and dark, and hold a promise that he means what he's asking on every level, he means the we of it, and the home of it, and the together, us, that's implied by it, and Mark, in wonder and something very close to perfect joy, says -
"Yeah. Yeah, we can."
He doesn't realize how hard he's smiling until it starts to almost hurt.
But he doesn't stop, he can't, and Eduardo's hand is warm around his, and the sprinklers are still going off, and there are no such things, Mark is quite certain, as ghosts.