[PART NINE] & Some News
Okay, I'm a little new at this so sorry if I mess this up first go. Because it's been 5 months since the last round even though we haven't been busy. I figured I might as well earn my keep and try to get this place alive again...
THE SOCIAL NETWORK KINK MEME
ASK THE MODS * FAQ * DISCUSSION * RESEARCH * FILL LIST * PART ONE * PART ONE (OVERFLOW) * ( Read more... )
THE SOCIAL NETWORK KINK MEME
ASK THE MODS * FAQ * DISCUSSION * RESEARCH * FILL LIST * PART ONE * PART ONE (OVERFLOW) * ( Read more... )
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Eduardo remembers being six and living in a loud, boisterous household full of laughter and chatter. He remembers warm smiles and welcoming arms, the playful squeals of children in the neighborhood sprinting across the road barefoot, relishing the warm, Brazilian earth underfoot.
At seven, he remembers family parties with his mother’s famous feijoada, the odor of spices enveloping him while he ran throughout the house with all his friends. He remembers spying on his father deep in conversation with all his business partners and the neighboring fathers whispering about souls, ruthless, and good for business. He remembers the conversation stopping short there and his father turning around slowly before contorting his face into the scariest image he can muster and roaring at the top of his lungs while chasing all the kids down the hall, filling the house with screams and laughter. He remembers the quiet and comfort after the parties, when everyone had left for the night, Eduardo tucked safely under the covers, his father reading his favorite bedtime story, the one about the sereia, the mermaid that loved his prince endlessly and even sacrificed her own life and happiness to ensure her prince’s own happily ever after. And he remembers being well on his way to slumber and his father whispering, “Querido,” and kissing his forehead. “Everything I do, everything, is for you, okay? Eu sempre o amarei, nenhuma questão o que.”
At eight, he remembers his father coming home one night and his mother bursting into tears and his father standing there, just staring, indifferent, cold. He doesn’t understand why his mother won’t look at his father, why she’s holding Eduardo like she’s lost something irreplaceable, why she’s sobbing into his shoulder. He doesn’t understand.
There are no more smiles.
No more sereias.
No more warmth.
Eduardo never really understands what happened that night, that fateful night, until he’s thirteen and moved to Miami. His father hands him magazines and books in stony silence, expecting him to familiarize himself with America culture as soon as possible and fit in, become successful. He thinks of the sereia who became human to try and fit in and win the heart of the prince and smiles a little. Maybe if he learns to fit in here, if he does it well, he could meet his prince or princess. He sorts through the pile of literature, Time, The New Yorker, The Economist, People Magazine (His father claims that pop culture is important, has to be well-liked, not an outcast. It’s hard to make connections when you’re disliked.), The Great Gatsby, The Catcher in the Rye, and more. He goes through the recent Time Magazines, learning about the state of the governments around the world. He moves onto The New Yorker, fascinated by the satirical drawings inside when he comes across an article entitled “Soul Storage”. He reads the article describing the process, the pros and cons, the outcomes, and oh. That’s what happened. That’s where the smiles, the laughter, the warmth went.
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He’s eighteen and he still doesn’t understand.
“Why did you do it?” he demands in his father’s office, so similar yet so different from the one in São Paulo.
His father stares back blankly. “Do what?”
“Don’t try to hide it, pai,” he glares at him, sick and tired of him never owning up to it, never talking about it. “I’m not stupid, I know about the soul removal.”
He continues to stare, eyebrows raised now.
“Why… Why would you do this? Why would you put us through this?”
“Stop yelling, Eduardo,” Eduardo hadn’t realized until then that he was even yelling. His heavy breathing probably should’ve clued him in though. “It was for the best.”
“For the best?” Eduardo scoffs, incredulous. “You thought that removing your soul would be the ‘for the best’?”
“Yes.”
“Oh yes please, inform me on how it was ‘for the best’, father,” he spits out, voice still raised.
“A businessman must not be compromised by trivial things like emotions.”
“’Tr-trivial’? ‘Trivial’?” he says, refusing to believe it. “You know what, pai? This, this, is the ultimate act of cowardice! Running away from your emotions?”
“I wasn’t running away from my emotions, I merely sacrificed them for success and our family’s well-being.”
“Well-being? Do mãe’s tears fall under that category? How does it feel to see her---oh wait, you wouldn’t know, would you?” His voice hurts and is a little hoarse from the yelling. “How much of your soul did they leave anyway?” He can’t help it. Morbid curiosity, he guesses.
“Two percent.”
“Jesus Christ, two percent?” he repeats, running a hand through his hair. “That might as well be none.”
“That was the point.”
“Jesus fucking Christ, I’m so glad I’m leaving soon. It’s a good fucking thing that Havard’s so far away that I don’t have to put with your bull shit anymore," he breathes before turning on his heel and leaving the room.
When it comes time for his freshman year at Harvard to start, the only hard part about leaving home is leaving his mother.
“Mãe, you know you don’t have to stay for him,” he begs, gazing at her skinny, too skinny, face. “He won’t feel anything if you leave. He isn’t capable of remorse, you know that.”
“I have to,” she sniffles, eyes shiny with tears. “I still love him. I’ll always love him. Besides, what is he going to do when he decides to buy back his soul and I’m not there?”
“That’s foolish, mãe.”
“Well, the foolish have hope, and sometimes, that’s enough.”
When Eduardo finally leaves Miami, he feels like the sereia, leaving his former life, leaving his father, leaving his family, and entering a new world, a new environment and maybe, maybe he’ll find his prince.
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When he comes home, his mother is overjoyed and his father indifferent.
The summer passes even faster than the school year while he avoids his father under the watchful eye of his lonely mother, and a week before he flies back to Cambridge, his father calls him into his office directly.
“Is there something wrong, pai?”
“No, I just wanted to congratulate you on your outstanding grades this year, Eduardo,” he explains, barely any emotion in his voice. “I wanted to give you a gift.”
Eduardo looks down at the paper slip he slides across the desk toward him. “No, no, you’re kidding me. Why are you giving me this? You-you know how I feel about this.”
“You’re becoming a businessman,” he shrugs. “I’m just keeping the option open for you. I purposely paid the company to make this valid until 2015. You could go to any center up until 2015 and become a truly ruthless, unswerving, and successful businessman.”
“It’s insulting that you would think I would take this route, father.”
“You’re too emotional to be a successful businessman, Eduardo.”
“I’m not a coward.”
“This doesn’t make you a coward.”
“Yes. Yes, it does,” Eduardo sighs, frustrated. “There’s no point in arguing about this, it’ll only make mãe more upset. So… Thank you… For the sentiment.” And with that, he turned around, and went back to his room. He didn’t know where to put the piece of paper, so he just folded it up in thirds and tucked it into a random book he had lying around before stuffing it into the bottom of his suitcase.
A week later, he’s back at the airport with his teary mother, saying goodbye again.
“I’ll call,” he promises.
“I know,” she says. “Don’t forget to hope, querido. You can never be too hopeful. Never stop hoping, yeah?”
“Okay, I know, I won’t,” he promises. So many promises. He wonders if he’ll be able to keep them all.
And then he’s on his way away again, on a plane to Cambridge for the second time, leaving Miami for the second time, hoping for a happily ever after for the second time, and hoping for his prince a second time.
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sereia: mermaid
querido: darling
Eu sempre o amarei, nenhuma questão o que: I'll always love you, no matter what.
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I managed to post one part without anon-failing.
Awesome.
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love the premise of this, really interesting idea of soul storage..
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I'm actually surprised I managed to even post ONE part anon.
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I'm so excited that you're writing this and love what you have so far! I'm probably going to try to hold out and read it all in one go when you're done, cause I prefer being able to get a bit of momentum when I'm reading, but I may not be able to resist. Either way, there will be more of me flailing at you in the future!
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Well, thank you to some degree because thanks to you my life is now composed of "UGH THAT TSN FILL WITH SOULLESS EDUARDO" and "oh other school stuff or something".
Also, I'm kind of EXTREMELY slow at writing and I've never really written any fic before SO I APOLOGIZE IN ADVANCE FOR THE INEVITABLE LAME WRITING YOU WILL READ.
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His sophomore year starts relatively uneventfully. He settles into his single (another “gift” from his father, the better one, really.) and looks into fraternities and clubs. He joins the Harvard Investors Association and when they ask him if he wants to run for a position, he thinks, fuck it, why not? and agrees to run. He mingles with some of the other students applying for the association. Some of them are dead in the eyes. He wants to throw up, he wants to leave, the gaze of too many dead, emotional eyes makes him uncomfortable, like his skin is stretched tight over his body. He graciously excuses himself through clenched teeth, a heavy pounding behind his eyes. Stepping outside, he lets the crisp early autumn air surround him as he breathes in, relishing the release in tension in his whole body. He hears the muffled noises of some kind of party in a building nearby, and he draws closer to the building, peering through the window before walking through the doorway largely unnoticed. Immediately, he feels out of place in his sharp, tailored suit among scrawny boys in worn t-shirts and skinny Asian girls dancing awkwardly in the corner with out-of-season sweaters paired with dark miniskirts and varying types of boots. It’s not really hip party, full of cheesy 90’s music and awkward pick-up lines.
He considers leaving and heading back to the Harvard Investors Association meeting, but there’s no discomfort here, no dead eyes, no feeling of overstretched skin, no reason to leave.
He stops a red-head walking by with two beers in hand, drinking from one greedily and staring at it disbelievingly in between gulps. Must be a freshman, he thinks. Only a freshman would look at cheap beer like that. “Hey, what’s this party for?”
“Only the best fraternity in the whole freaking school!” Red-Head yells, words slurring. “The fraternity of menorahs, Stars of David,and yamakas!”
Well, that explains the Asian girls, he thinks. “Oh, AEPi, right?”
“That’s right, Alpha freaking Epsilon Pi,” he says, drawing out the last syllable. “I’m Dustin Moskovitz, potential economics major, freshman,” he adds before sticking the unopened beer under his left arm, freeing his right hand and extending his arm out for a handshake.
Eduardo shakes it. “Eduardo Saverin, my major is also economics, and I’m a sophomore and considering pledging for this frat.”
“Oh god, don’t call it a frat. That just makes me imagine us as shirtless jocks with long, blonde hair and hot girlfriends that we cheat on at every single party,” Dustin says, shaking his head. “Nah, we are a fra-ter-ni-ty. We stop partying at two in the morning so we can do our homework, and we awkwardly ask out girls that are way out of our league. We are a freaking fraternity!”
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“Don’t know,” he says shrugging and taking another sip from the bottle, finding it empty. “I lost count after my fourth trip to the cooler.”
“Alright then,” Eduardo says, pulling Dustin up. “You got any friends here who can take you to your room and manage not to kill either of you?”
“Christopher,” he answers in a southern drawl, leaning against Eduardo’s side. “Last I saw him, he was saving Mark from being beat up,” he pauses for a second. “He’s probably saving his ass as we speak.”
“Okay then, let’s go find this Christopher and take you home.”
They continued to wander around until Dustin stopped him in a room where a blonde boy was standing in between a shorter, curly-haired boy and some brawny brunette towering over both of them with glowering eyes.
“CHRISTOPHEEER. ARE YOU SAVING MARCUS FROM GETTING PUMMELLED AGAIN?” Dustin practically screams across the room.
All three heads turn simultaneously much to Eduardo’s amusement. “Um. Hi, I think he needs to go home. He’s kind of extremely drunk.”
“Oh,” the blonde musters, glancing at an inebriated Dustin pressed to Eduardo’s side. “He hasn’t started talking about how he’s secretly the little boy in Jurassic Park and how he had a name change and everything yet, has he?”
“Not that I know of,” Eduardo admits as Dustin mumbles, “It’s true, okay?”
“Good. We’ve got another twenty minutes to get him to Kirkland before he passes out, then.” He turns around and mutters something to the taller boy that has gone back to glaring at the curly-haired boy behind Christopher, and with a wide-eyed look of incredulity, he bolts out of the room, and most of the room follows suit, virtually leaving the four boys alone in the room.
Christopher walks to the other side of Dustin and shifts his weight from Eduardo’s side to his own. “Thanks, by the way. For taking care of him. I’m Chris Hughes,” he smiles. He nods towards the boy with curly hair staring at the floor, “And that’s Mark.”
“Eduardo Saverin,” he replies before shaking Chris’s hand. He turns to Mark to offer his hand, but when Mark looks up, Eduardo’s stops breathing for a second. He takes in the familiar, passive, blank expression and thinks Of course. They’re everywhere now. But then. But then he takes a startled step backwards when he brings himself to meet his eyes, to face the cold, face the dead when.
Oh.,
Mark’s eyes are anything but dead. Anything but empty. They’re twinkling with some kind of amusement and curiosity, and they’re blue, the most beautiful shade of blue that brings oceans and sereias to mind. He apologizes, muttering something about drinking a little too much, which is a blatant lie because he hasn’t had the opportunity to really take an alcohol break since the school year’s started. Mark stares back with the same expression, but his eyes have shifted to something unreadable. Before Eduardo can say anything, Mark turns around abruptly, leaving the room.
Chris walks up from behind him, dragging Dustin with him. “Well, that’s Mark,” he says apologetically. “I’m honestly surprised that he stayed this long.” He turns around before leaving with Dustin. “Hey, see you around, Eduardo.”
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i am flailing ajskdfljalskd
thank you :)
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Oh Mark.
Always pissing off someone that could pummel your face...
thanks for reading :)
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