fic: this is your heart (never let it rule your head) (Mark/Eduardo, Prompt 33) 1 of 2
Title: this is your heart (never let it rule your head)
Recipient: slasher48
Prompt Number: #33
Characters/Pairings: Mark Zuckerberg, Eduardo Saverin, Erica Albright, Dustin Moskovitz, Sean Parker, Divya Narendra, Chris Hughes (pairings: Eduardo/Mark, past Mark/Erica implied)
Rating/Warnings: PG-13, but includes in passing the mention of blackmail, death, autopsies, guns and the shooting thereof, a fair number of dead people, brief descriptions of corpses, morgues and fire.
Word Count: 13,000+
Disclaimer: This fanwork is based on fictional representations of the characters in The Social Network; I make no claims of ownership of the characters or concepts.
Summary and prompt scenario: BBC Sherlock AU. Mark as Sherlock, Eduardo as John, Erica as Irene, Sean as Lestrade, Dustin as an odd combination of Molly and Mike Stanford, Chris as a less-involved and non-brotherly Mycroft, Divya as a kind of Anderson, and the not-very-OC Milton (a combination of all versions of Moriarty and Conan Doyle's Milverton)
Mark is supposed to be dead. So is Erica. It doesn't seem to have been anything more than a temporary problem for either of them. Milton, on the other hand, is dead, and Eduardo is trying to work out why none of these things add up to something which makes sense.
Author's Notes: This is a cross (or perhaps a blend) between TSN, BBC Sherlock, and the original works of Arthur Conan Doyle (to whom I am particularly indebted for the oysters, as well as the blackmailer Milverton, a man whom Sherlock Holmes does not admire or regard in any way, as he does Moriarty, but only loathes, as he does the huge and creeping snakes in the zoo). With much thanks to my betas Q, A, and H.
~~~
this is your heart (never let it rule your head)
What is the price of experience? Do men buy it for a song? Or wisdom for a dance in the street? No, it is bought with the price of all a man hath.
- William Blake
~~~
Then
"And... you're happy here?" Eduardo asks, not so much out of any genuine desire to know as complete disbelief.
The combination of Dustin, a steady job, and a morgue isn't really one that would occur to most sane people, after all, and it might be a long time since he's even spoken to Dustin, but he can't have changed that much, can he?
"Sure," Dustin says cheerfully, and wow, okay, maybe he has changed, maybe he's gotten all serious while Eduardo's been - away, and that's a whole revolution in world order he really wasn't expecting. "I mean, free experiment opportunities, right?"
Or not.
"You... experiment on them?" There's an awful lot of drawers, even if most of them are probably empty. Maybe Dustin's gone all Dr. Frankenstein on the world in the last few years, rather than settled down.
"Well, not on them, on the pathology samples, but hee, that's a thought, next time we get a John Doe I could, like, falsify some paperwork and -"
There's a banging on one of the drawers, and some muffled shouting that would be less terrifying if it didn't involve Dustin's name.
"Oh my God," says Eduardo.
"Oops," says Dustin, and hurries over to pull the drawer open. Its occupant sits up and delivers a pithy little diatribe on the state of Dustin's brain in a rapid-fire monotone.
Eduardo wonders if he's dreaming. Or on drugs. Or had a psychotic break some time ago and just didn't notice. Any or all of those would be preferable to the horrible suspicion that this is, in fact, reality.
"The timer didn't go off!" Dustin protests, waving his hands around. "So there's obviously time left, and so it's totally not my fault, Mark, okay?"
"Did you even, wow, let me think, set it?"
There's a nasty little silence. Dustin takes out his phone and actually cringes at it its blank display. The former corpse, whose name is apparently Mark, sighs. Its teeth are chattering, which is the first sign of genuine animation Eduardo's noticed in it.
"Yeah," it says. "Amazing. Thanks, Dustin. Sometime, I've really got to trust you with not freezing to death. Oh. Wait."
"Sorry," says Dustin meekly. "Oh, hey, but I've got good news!"
"You've scheduled yourself in for ECT?" demands former-corpse Mark.
"Don't be mean," Dustin says, cheerfulness undented by his look of vague underlying apology. "No, look who I found!"
The reanimated drawer-occupant looks at Eduardo for a full five beats.
"That's... nice, Dustin," he says slowly. "And I'm supposed to -"
"You were looking for someone to share your apartment, right? Now that you're not being pa - you know, to help with - in case you got lonely?"
Eduardo finds himself sharing an incredulous look with the semi-frozen Mark. Anyone less likely to get lonely, even on two minutes' worth of literally frosty acquaintanceship, is difficult to imagine.
"No," Mark says flatly.
"He's looking for a place to live," Dustin continues.
"No, really, I'm -" Eduardo starts to protest, and Dustin steamrollers over him in a horribly familiar way that time and distance have not helped him forget.
"And I thought, hey! I'm not moving back in with Mark even if he pays me, because ew, the fridge, and also you keep getting investigated and there's the way you keep making dead people attached to living people who kind of really want to kill you, and just no. Anyway, I like my place. But yeah, Eduardo won't mind, because, you know, he just got out of the sort-of Army, so it won't bother him." He folds his arms proudly.
"Investigated?" Eduardo says weakly, not even bothering to untangle the rest of it.
"Give me your jacket," says Mark.
Eduardo's the only one surprised when he takes it off and hands it over. He's not surprised when he doesn't even get a nod of thanks.
And he's very amused by just how ridiculous Mark looks wearing it when he hops off the sliding drawer and heads towards the door.
"Are you coming, then?" he demands.
Eduardo looks at Dustin.
"He means you," Dustin says, grinning. "So if you ever want to see that jacket again..."
Wondering just when he entered the Twilight Zone, Eduardo duly follows.
~~~
Now
Of all the undignified situations Eduardo has found himself in over the last six weeks, and there have been several, up to and including the never-to-be-spoken-of-again night that Dustin locked him in the morgue with Sean and the autopsy list
(admittedly he thought he was locking him in with Mark, in some Dustin-ish way of forcing them to talk to each other, but that's beside the point)
this has got to be up there in the top three.
He blames Mark. For all of it.
Mark, on the other hand, blames Erica.
Loudly. Fluently. And unstoppably.
It would be almost entertaining, if not for the fact that all the grievances Mark is currently listing - the rain, the fact they are on the ladder of a fire escape in the rain, the very dead body in the room beneath them with the bolted window, the rain, the fact that oh yes, rain makes things wet, the dead body, Erica having turned the suspect they'd been after into the dead body -
(nice shot, but Eduardo doesn't think saying that is a particularly good idea right now, because pissed as he is at Mark in general, he's somehow reluctant to make that feeling into a two-way interactive process)
- the rain - didn't also happen to be things that Eduardo is suffering from too.
Except his suffering is worse, because he's with Mark, who doesn't seem to understand just how much Eduardo does not want to hear his voice.
Ever again, for preference, but Eduardo is getting to the stage where he'd happily settle for 'in the next ten minutes'.
Futilely, he tries to convey his desire to ensure that silence by way of several violent and satisfying methods, straight into Mark's brain.
It's always worth attempting to avoid having to actually use words that will be completely ignored by means of telepathic imagery, even though it's never worked on Mark to date, either pre- or post- his assumed death, and probably won't work now, either.
"I hate her so much," Mark says, oblivious as ever to the hopes, prayers, and fervent and gory wishes of those around him. Eduardo doesn't even bother to reply this time. "I mean, what the fuck, she couldn't just - it would have - he's no use dead, what was she even thinking?"
Eduardo, who was lucky
(or unlucky, he's not quite sure which)
enough to see the look on Erica's face just before she fired her ludicrously expensive gun, the shot hitting dead centre between Milton's eyes, is fairly sure she hadn't been thinking anything at all other than die.
Possibly also you son-of-a-bitch, but that might have just been him. Then again, if he'd been capable of wearing Erica's heels, never mind walking two steps in them, he'd have taken those two steps straight across the carpet and slammed the metal caps on those same heels right into each of Milton's eyes,
(step, step, and it wouldn't have been so different, the sound and feel, not so different, blending into one sense under his foot; not so different from a loose grape on a tile floor)
giving him three holes in his head, not just one -
(why should he get them closed with dignity, when he lived and reveled in sewage and filth and his perverted and perverse love of others' degradation?)
Of course, Erica's never one for the obvious. It's probably why the corpse looks so frighteningly neat.
Erica's also supposed to be dead.
But then, so is Mark.
Or so was Mark, Eduardo's still not completely sure about how that one works, if it works at all.
(It worked all too well for too long, but he still can't think about that without wanting to break things, so he doesn't.)
Mark hadn't even left a body.
(But neither had Erica)
Mark had left a burned and unrecognizable - thing, crumbling in places and half its teeth shattered by the unbelievable heat of the magnesium-set fire he'd been caught in, not even enough left of the ones remaining for identification.
(he'd planned it well)
Mark had left them nothing but disbelieving horror as a platform from which to mourn, and he had no right to come back from that and expect the world to welcome him.
No right to expect Eduardo to welcome him back into the apartment that had once been so very much his, and is now so very deliberately anything but a shrine.
No right to expect forgiveness.
No right to anything at all, even Dustin's couch, and fuck, Dustin, Dustin who'd known Mark wasn't dead; while the rest of them tried throughout all those bleak months to pick up the pieces of lives and friendships and rent and police cases that were, are, now considered not to have a result because the provider of evidence was gone, is gone, God, how is Sean coping, what happens now? - Dustin had known.
And the rest of them hadn't even been
(still aren't)
important enough to merit a bit of hope or even unpalatable truth.
And Eduardo doesn't think he's ever going to stop being angry, stop hating, stop loathing Mark for having done that to him, to all of them. Because what kind of man just fakes his own death, to save a woman the world's mostly forgotten?
To save a woman the world believes to be dead?
The answer's in the question, and unhappily in close proximity.
Only Mark.
Only Mark, who thinks that the end justifies the means.
Mark, self-created devil of his own mythology.
Mark, whom Eduardo thinks these days should have just stayed dead, and hurt everyone less that way.
Right now, however, living in the moment, just as his therapist told him the last time
(the absolutely last time, thank you, never again)
that he saw her, Eduardo's bitterly conscious of the fact that if only 'supposed to be dead' translated to 'deceased and therefore shutting the fuck up', he wouldn't even mind the fire escape so much.
(Said fire escape, or rather the ladder of said fire escape, is either welded to itself or rusted or designed by someone with spatial difficulties. Either way, it's nowhere near reaching the ground, and Eduardo doesn't feel like adding broken bones from badly-timed jumping to the woes of his evening, so he's staying put).
But then, Mark dead had never been exactly silent, either, even if that had only been in his mind.
He carefully ignores the knowledge that when he had thought Mark was dead, he would have given everything he had
(not just about everything, or almost everything, everything. Everything.)
for it not to be true, and he'd woken up each day thinking exactly that.
As it is, he should have been a bit more careful about what he'd wished for, because now that Mark is unmistakably in the land of the living, cursing out Erica, and dripping even more water off his feet down the back of Eduardo's neck, Eduardo can't help wondering what the hell he'd been thinking.
Mark sneezes. His left foot jerks with the force of it, and thumps solidly into the middle of Eduardo's forehead.
"Sorry," he mutters.
Eduardo stares up at him through the heavy rain and the dark of the alleyway incredulously. What he can make out of Mark's expression has the audacity to appear perfectly sincere.
"You're going to apologize for that?" he demands.
"Um," Mark says, actually sounding confused, "yes? I mean, I didn't want to kick you in the head."
"That makes one of us," Eduardo mutters to the metal rungs.
"You want to - wait, no, that doesn't even - what?"
Eduardo sighs, and leans his forehead sideways onto his arm, and thereby, nastily, onto his sopping jacket. "Never mind," he says, with the inevitable hamster-on-a-wheel sense of exhaustion that's been overcoming him every time Mark spectacularly fails to just see what he did that's so fucking wrong.
You were dead, he wants to say. You were dead and you let me go all those months, weeks, days, hours, believing it was true, you let me mourn, you bastard, and yes, yes, fucking right you should be sorry, and yes, I want to kick myself in the head for trusting anything you do, and right now I hate you more than anyone on the face of this planet, and we are stuck on a fire escape in the rain, and your feet are in my face, and everything is dripping wet, and I just watched Erica shoot a guy, who's now very dead, and in about five minutes Sean is going to turn up, probably with all his little police minions trailing behind him, and he's going to laugh himself sick, and I really, really hate you.
"I'm sorry about Dustin and the morgue?" Mark offers eventually.
This time Eduardo just smacks his head into the metal rung in front of him, and prays for unconsciousness, or, barring that, a nice fuzzy concussion.
"And, um, for Sean?" Mark is really trying, Eduardo thinks distantly. Shame none of it's going to work.
He thumps his head a couple more times onto the rung, in some desultory hope that repetitive action will gain him this time around what it so failed to do the first time.
Anything. Anything to make the time pass in a comfortable haze before Sean and the inevitable hysterical circus arrive.
"Shut up, Mark," he says through gritted teeth, when neither unconsciousness nor hazy semi-delirium presents itself as a form of salvation.
There are a blissful few minutes of dripping silence, and then Mark, inevitably, breaks the peace by saying, as though it is a new and surprising thought that he hasn't voiced at least six times since they got out of Milton's room and abandoned his Erica-created corpse on the carpet -
"Fuck, I hate that woman."
Eduardo thinks wistfully of how much easier the last three years of his life would have been, if only that were true.
"Then why," he says with a great deal of accumulated bitterness that surprises even him, "did you let me think you'd died because of her?"
The quiet that follows is nothing like the one Eduardo had been hoping for.
The roofs and the fire escape and the rain drip and fall, and the water all around them hits the ground and puddles and concrete and guttering at different tempos.
It's either soothing or nerve-rattlingly syncopated, and Eduardo can't decide which.
And then Mark says, so quietly that at first Eduardo wasn't even sure he'd heard him at all, never mind correctly, his words uncharacteristically disjointed -
"But that's not why - I never meant - I didn't - I don't - wait, no, I - Wardo -"
"Yes," Eduardo says flatly, because wouldn't it just figure, that the first attempt at an explanation Mark's even tried to give, and it's a really terrible, incoherent attempt at a lie? "Yes, yeah, you did. Now shut up."
Mercifully, Mark does, which is a new, if definitely welcome development.
Because if all it would have taken to fix this, all those months ago, if all it would have taken to stop Milton and his blackmail and his increasing stranglehold over them all was Erica and her gun, then why hasn't something like this happened sooner?
~~~
Then
"I don't see why it's my fault you're all stupid," Mark says, in defiance of Eduardo's urgent throat-cutting, shut-the-fuck-up-Mark gestures behind Divya Narendra's back.
Stop pissing off the forensics guy Eduardo mouths at him urgently, hoping Divya doesn't turn around and catch him at it. Mark's traditional blank-eyed, expressionless stare in response could be aimed at either him or Divya, and he's rapidly losing the will to care about which one of them it is.
There is a muffled retching sound from the kitchen that's almost certainly someone unwisely investigating the do-not-use-this-for-food-ever fridge
(that's Eduardo's rule, at least, and it works for him, at least to the point where he can generally be sure that what he's eating is what he thought he was going to be eating)
and an equally muffled scream from someone else who has, from the sound of smashing glass that follows it, quite definitely found the two-hundred year old mummified fingers that were until seconds ago living peacefully in a jar in the cupboard above the sink.
(Mark claims they were there when he first moved in. Eduardo doesn't believe him for a second, and didn't even when Mark first told him that.)
Not for the first time, Eduardo wonders why the hell he's still living in this apartment, being periodically investigated by everyone from the ATF -
(and a more bizarre name for a sub-division of the FBI Eduardo still hasn't encountered, because seriously? Seriously? Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms in that order? It really does tell him way too much about their priorities - although it doesn't help much with what they might want of Mark, and he's resolutely not thinking about the fact that this once, it might have been more to do with him and the last subject on their list...)
- to once, in a bizarre turn of events which Mark still hasn't managed to explain to him satisfactorily, Interpol, and having to put up with regular invasions from Sean Parker's impossibly annoying crime unit, because God forbid the man can do without making sure he has Mark's attention for more than a week.
The fact that Mark actually enjoys the cases Sean brings him is beside the point.
The fact that Eduardo usually ends up enjoying working on them with Mark is even more beside the point, because one of the few unchanging facts in Eduardo's world is that Sean Parker is an irritation worse than scabies and more ineradicable than cat fleas in summer, and he's not about to revise that opinion any time soon, no matter what happens.
"Divya," he starts in his best placatory tones, and Divya takes that, rather than anything Mark has said or done, as a mortal insult, which seems bitterly unfair.
"I have," he says angrily, turning on Eduardo, "a professional title."
"Associates Degree Narendra," Mark agrees blandly, because there is just no way Mark can stand anyone being paid attention to who isn't him. Sometimes, Eduardo thinks that's what makes him tolerate
(because that's a better word than like, since Mark doesn't like anyone)
Sean at all.
"Right," Divya snaps, turning to the unfortunate souls in the kitchen, "get in here and take up the carpeting."
"Oh no," Eduardo protests futilely. "Divya, no. Come on. It costs a fortune to have this replaced..."
"And every time I think the depths of stupidity have been reached," Mark says, apparently to the ceiling, "I am proved so wrong. So tragically wrong."
Eduardo tries, and fails miserably, not to laugh.
Mark might be the most annoying man in the world, he might be an unquantifiable genius that no job title in the world has yet been invented for, and he's quite definitely the worst thing that has ever happened to Divya Narendra and his forensics team, but sometimes, random times, times like this, out of nowhere and for no good reason, Eduardo feels the kind of affection for him that leaves him completely unstrung.
Divya looks like he's thinking of ordering them both shot, and also that the fact he doesn't have the authority to give that order wouldn't stop him for a second.
Eduardo can't stop laughing, Divya's expression and his own emotions making him a little unhinged, and Mark looks back down from his contemplation of the ceiling's mysteries and gives him a tiny little grin of malicious pleasure.
Needless to say, the day goes downhill from there and straight into the depths of the inferno known as Implausible Paperwork, interspersed in all its bureaucratic hell by texts from Dustin,
(who is doing something unspeakable in the morgue that for some reason needs all caps messages to convey in its full glory)
Chris,
(who is, as well as being one of Mark's inexplicably steadfast and unoffendable friends, a very very scary man in his own right and apparently pissed off by something Mark still hasn't done for him - and by extent for the President's office, and how has this become Eduardo's life again?)
- and for some reason, Sean, who is by now in the apartment, so shouldn't need to be texting at all, and who is also smirking at them both.
Whatever it is Sean
(Detective Parker, he'd introduced himself as, right back when Eduardo had first moved into the chaos that is Mark's excuse for a life, but hey, call me Sean, he'd added, with a canary-eating smile, and only Mark's eye-roll had prevented Eduardo from saying something truly nasty, or maybe just punching him in the face on the grounds of being an insufferable asshole)
thinks he knows that he thinks no one else knows, it's put a look on his face that's enough to inspire thoughts in Eduardo of making him into the next homicide case, and not one that Eduardo would exactly encourage Mark to help solve, either.
Eduardo's also thinking of collecting up all the cell phones he can find and just jumping up and down on them. It might save time, or at least save Divya from the incipient aneurysm he's pretty sure is lying in wait for him if Mark doesn't either shut up or stop staring through him blankly every time he speaks.
While Eduardo had been revoltingly grateful for the offer of somewhere to live, just over a year ago - even if the circumstances had been truly weird - he might have been considerably less precipitate in expressing his gratitude if he'd ever, even briefly, imagined that this sort of afternoon would turn out to be ordinary.
(He should have guessed, given as he first met Mark when he was inhabiting a morgue drawer, but he'd somehow assumed that was an aberration.)
He might also have been less grateful, period, if he'd remembered just what kind of terrible ideas Dustin thought were awesome solutions to life problems.
But then it's been a very long time since college, and he hadn't even noticed Mark in those days, difficult though that is to contemplate, because even Mark sitting in the corner of a dark room, completely silent and inhabiting another planet
(population of one)
is impossible to ignore.
It's this which makes him wonder if Mark had even been studying there with them at all, something which is a bit difficult to work out since neither he nor Dustin will talk about it, and it seems oddly like an open declaration of mistrust
(which he honestly doesn't feel, he's just curious)
to look at the list of alumni or to ask the college outright if Mark was there, even for a semester, even if he never graduated, because where the hell does he come from?
The thing is that even after sharing an apartment with him all this time, Eduardo seriously can't imagine any other way that Mark and Dustin, even with Mark's love for all things forensic and, if possible, unpleasantly dead, could possibly have exchanged even a greeting.
He has to admit, though, on his side of things, that it's also possible, considering the way he'd gone off to stick his father's expectations somewhere unexpected by joining the Medical Corps, that life had pretty much stopped him right then from thinking about anyone who came from what he was happy to call his past.
His complete breaking away from all the things he associated with that time had quite certainly included Dustin, after all, and how Dustin doesn't hold a grudge against him for that is one of life's minor miracles.
Dustin, who didn't need to break away from any kind of expectations or impossible standard of imaginary success, who had stayed, and gone down the track which had led him to the morgue.
Fortunate, easy-going Dustin, with whom Eduardo hadn't so much as thought of vaguely keeping in touch, at least not until his second tour was - curtailed, and he had been forced to - come back.
(He calls it that, even in his head, because he is a fucking genius at compartmentalizing, thank you so much, and the other way of thinking about it is that now he's not capable of functioning successfully in either world, civilian or military, and he's not yet ready to face up to that kind of acceptance; he's not ready to be seen as a failure and he really doesn't want to be seen as a success. He's alive, he's making his way on his own, and that's good enough. It has to be.)
As it is, he just blames Dustin for everything that has happened to him since he - came back - and feels justified in doing so.
He especially blames him for Mark.
It was Dustin's idea, after all, to introduce them, so yeah. Speaking of titles, that one should be his.
Dustin Moskovitz. To Blame For Everything.
Divya and his crew set about destroying the carpeting with single-minded determination. Eduardo wonders if there's some way of falsifying papers and getting back into the Medical Corps.
And Sean and Mark, rarely and worryingly, are apparently having a silent argument. It involves a lot of glaring on Mark's part and a badly-suited look of immovable determination on Sean's.
"I am not," Mark says at last, "doing anything that puts me near that woman."
"Divya," Sean says, "take off the baseboard while you're at it."
He's got the canary-eating look again.
Mark groans.
"Yeah, how about someone tells me what's going on?" Eduardo says.
Later, when he's dealing with a drugged and hallucinating Mark, a worried and therefore totally useless Dustin, and a completely absent Sean, plus Chris on the phone demanding to know every five minutes what's happening, he really kind of wishes no one had told him anything, and that he'd gone to find a really good forger instead - or that when they did tell him, he'd gone to find the forger anyway, got his papers, and not been around for any of it.
He realizes with miserable and definitely 20-20 hindsight that he could have been half-way to a nice peaceful war-zone, if he'd just thought about it a bit more carefully.
But then, in his own defense, how was he supposed to know just how insanely brilliant Erica Albright is?
~~~
Now
"It wasn't because of Erica," Mark says again.
Like him, the rain shows no signs of stopping. Eduardo sighs, and shifts his position so that the pressure of the cold metal bites a little less through his shoes.
"Okay, Mark," he says, tired of fighting. "If you say so."
"Which means you don't believe me," Mark says, with a faint unwelcome bite to his voice. "Fine."
"Fine," Eduardo says tightly. He wants this travesty of a conversation to stop. He wants to go home. He wants to get dry. And more than anything else in the world he wants to never, ever have to see Mark again.
"It was because of you," Mark says then. He's not fidgeting. He's very, very still.
The rain keeps falling, terribly loud.
"If that's true," Eduardo says slowly, "then what you did - what you left us thinking Milton did - it was even worse than I thought."
He doesn't have to even make an effort to believe what Mark is saying. It's not because it makes sense. It's not even because it's the truth.
It's because Mark quite obviously believes it's the truth, that he obviously believed it then, and that's -
It's appalling.
"Yeah," Mark says. He sounds tired, as tired as Eduardo feels. "I know."
They're both quiet, now.
"Why Dustin?" Eduardo bursts out with, at last. "Why did he get to know? All those months, Mark, and I -"
At least now he knows why Dustin wouldn't talk to any of them, wouldn't come to the memorial service, wouldn't even take Eduardo's calls. He'd thought it was grief, back then, and been horrified.
He's no less horrified to realize it was guilt.
"I needed him to help me set the fire," Mark says. Eduardo tips his head back and stares up at him. Mark has the grace to shift a little under his gaze, sounding almost embarrassed as he adds, "And I needed a body to get that burned in the fire. There had to be something left. Even Divya's not that bad."
"Dustin and his John Does," Eduardo says, finally making sense of at least part of it. "God, Mark. How could you -"
"You don't get to ask me that," Mark says, sharp and angry for the first time in all the weeks since his return, and it seems that Eduardo should forget about every deliberate, well thought-out provocation to argument or outright fighting that he's been giving Mark each time they're forced to meet, because it's this kind of childish accusation he should have used if he'd wanted a response. "You don't get to ask me how, not about anything, not - not now, you don't get to ask how I could when you know I did, you, you don't. Get to ask me that."
But he does.
He does, because he'd been there, and Mark hadn't, Mark had been off somewhere doing his own thing, not involving them, not worrying about them, excusing himself by saying he was doing it for them -
(for me, he thinks, for me, but no, no, that's just what he's told himself, it doesn't mean anything, I won't let it).
And Milton, Milton the blackmailer, Milton, the owner of secrets and lies, the delighted participant in every tiny betrayal a man could commit to gain money and leverage, Milton had been there, untouchable and gloating and bloated with success, and the only one of them who could have stopped him had been officially declared dead.
How is he supposed to forgive Mark for abandoning them to that?
Eduardo puts a hand around Mark's ankle, and grips.
"Oh yeah, I do," he says, and if Mark can get angry? He's got no idea what he's going to get in response. "I do. You want me to believe you did that because of me? Well guess what, you get to explain yourself this time around. Because you owe me. So start talking. You wanted me to listen? Well guess what, you win, you got me, well done. Captive audience, right here." He stops, trying to get his words and his mind into some kind of order, and comes up blank. "What the fuck were you thinking?"
Mark wriggles his foot experimentally. Eduardo tightens his grip.
"Wardo, I -" Mark starts, sounding almost pleading. "It wasn't -"
And that, of course, is when Sean opens the window, and, right on cue, starts laughing his ass off at the both of them.
Equal opportunities mocking, that's Sean for you.
Sometimes it's hard for Eduardo to remember that he actually got to like him, or at least not want to punch him quite as often, after Mark died.
Eduardo also thinks, judging by how wet he feels, and how Mark looks, from what he can make out of him in the dim light, anyway, and with both of them hanging on to a fire escape ladder that doesn't even go down past the second floor, that Sean's probably got a point.
They must look really fucking stupid.
And yet again, it's because of Erica.
Sometimes, Eduardo can see Mark's point about hating her.
~~~
Then
"This is not good," Dustin says. "This is really, really not good."
The lack of a scathing response from the expected source is another thing that makes Eduardo extremely disinclined to argue with this assessment.
"I mean, what did she use on him, fuck, this is so not good -"
"Dustin, I got it the first time..." Actually, he'd gotten it the second Mark started making no sense at all in the middle of proving just how much smarter he was, and that having been given only five seconds, than anything Erica could come up with over months, and Erica's smile had been glorious in response to his sudden unnerving turn into vaguely psychotic babble.
Dustin is not dealing very well with any of this. He actually looks annoyed, which isn't an expression that suits him, as well as worried half out of his mind, which is something Eduardo has only seen once before, and could really do without getting in glorious 3D replay.
It's one thing to know that Mark only chooses to behave like a human being to three and a half members of the whole population, it's quite another to be forcibly reminded that those people care about him, too, that it's not just Eduardo out there on his own giving any kind of damn.
It should be comforting. Right now, with Mark's eyes flickering round his own living room like it's filled with ghosts, Eduardo's not comforted at all, because no, he's not on his own, that's great, but the only one who's actually here, out of the other two and a half remaining if you discount him from their number, is Dustin.
And Dustin is torn between taking half of Mark's blood to run tests, because wow, drug he can't recognize straight off, and just flailing.
At the moment, flailing is winning.
"And what was Sean thinking, anyway, telling him to go to talk to her?"
"Probably," Eduardo says bitterly, "that he only wants to see little green men in the corner -" or whatever the fuck it is that Mark is seeing. He's pretty sure oysters come into it somewhere, and radioactive sentient ones at that. The cab driver enduring that particularly disgusting description of what was happening to the interior of his vehicle had been even more freaked out than Mark and Eduardo combined, and half-way convinced, from what Eduardo could tell, that he was seeing them too - "on his own time."
Dustin winces. "Yeah, somehow I doubt Erica cares enough about Sean to do whatever this is to him."
Eduardo stares at him. "Dustin, seriously, you need a dictionary. Or professional help. What?"
"And by caring I mean hating his guts," Dustin explains.
Oh. Okay.
Mark chooses this moment to demonstrate his continuing affinity with the shellfish world by clamping his hand around Eduardo's wrist like a particularly vicious limpet.
"Ow," Eduardo says weakly.
"Make it stop," Mark hisses, and Dustin's face twists up in much the same way as something in Eduardo's chest has just done, because Mark should never, ever sound like that, and God, Eduardo would give just about anything to do what's been asked of him.
More worrying still, he keeps finding his free hand twitching out for his med-pack, because the next step after someone says something like that?
Tends to be one nice syringe of morphine.
He's uncomfortably aware that right now, Mark's very far from the only one in the room seeing things move in the shadows.
"Okay," he says, soothing and useless. "Okay, Mark, it's wearing off, you're going to be fine, I don't think she meant to do anything permanent."
"Please," Mark says quietly, and curls forward on their abused couch, pressing his head against Eduardo's arm, burying his face in the crook of his elbow. His breath is short and somehow jagged, and his skin is far too hot, and Eduardo is worried half to death. "I can't - Wardo, I can't think."
The last word sounds uncomfortably close to a sob, and Eduardo gives up on trying to be professional and not-seeing ghosts and everything that he's thought up until now was keeping him on the 'I'm alive and making it' end of the spectrum lying between success and failure, and puts his hand on the back of Mark's tangled head.
"So don't," he says simply. "You don't have to. I promise. Not right now."
"I keep seeing -"
"Close your eyes." He shifts Mark into a slightly more comfortable position that doesn't involve his wrist being crushed or Mark twisted in on himself like a pretzel. "There's a sedative in there with everything else, I'm pretty sure. Try and let it work."
Mark shakes his head violently, bruising Eduardo's ribs. "Can't."
"Sure you can."
"But I won't - I won't know you're here. If I sleep, you won't be here."
"I'm not going anywhere," Eduardo promises. He's not. He doesn't care if Sean gets back and wants a full report, he doesn't care if Chris flies out of Washington and needs to be picked up at the airport, he doesn't care if Erica's gone to Mexico and is about to mail them all tickets to join her, he doesn't care if Dustin removes two pints of blood from each of them and then moves on to plasma donations. He doesn't care.
And he's not moving.
"Real," Mark says nonsensically, but at least he's got his eyes shut, and that's probably half the battle won. "You. Stay."
Eduardo does.
And when Sean does come in, a little grey around the lips and obviously needing to use his inhaler, apologies spilling from him like water and three times as useless, having been pointlessly trying to get Erica into custody, he takes one look at Eduardo's expression and walks straight back out, taking Dustin with him with one hand clamped over the red-headed mortician's mouth, and ignoring the fact that Dustin is most probably licking his palm, judging from his disgusted grimacing.
Mark doesn't thank any of them, later.
He's too busy chasing Erica, his eternal pursuit in the cause of intellectual victory, running after something none of them can see, down a path they can't follow.
And at the end of the path lies not some unnamable prize, not some absolute pinnacle of superiority, but a man named Gus Milton.
Milton, and blackmail, and death.
("Real. You. Stay.")
And he does.
Through all of it.
Because he has the stupidity and hope to think that with Mark drugged out of his mind, and holding onto Eduardo's arm, hand, wrist, anything he could find in his nightmare-ridden, unhappy half-sleep, he has seen Mark's core, his heart; that he's somehow gained his trust, gained his -
Sean can say love all he likes. He can send unicorns puking rainbows in nasty little .gifs to Eduardo's mailbox as often as he feels like it.
It doesn't make any difference, and it really doesn't matter.
Because Mark is chasing Erica.
And Erica is dancing with death for her partner; death for her lover; Erica, who in New York can now take a bride of her own, if she wants to; Erica has made herself into the Corpse Bride, the damning and the damned.
And Eduardo's not sure if Mark wants to stop her or take her partner's place.
Erica and Milton, locked in some contest neither of them even seem to want to escape, and Chris desperate on the phone, because one of them knows something and Mark must stop them both
("Please, please Mark, please, she could use it -"
"It's not her you should be worried about. And anyway, that one's gone."
"Mark -"
"Chris. It's done, okay.")
Mark snapping, ignoring texts.
Mark obsessed.
I could make him beg. Erica texts Eduardo once. Could you?
He doesn't reply.
He's already heard Mark beg. He's heard dozens of men beg. Beg for the pain to stop, beg to be saved, beg and cry and plead and he'd never been able to even reach them, not with words, not with skill, not with drugs, as they bit back screams or cried out loud in their agony.
Mark's the first one he ever got through to.
And that's between them, and Erica has no right to ask.
He never answers the text.
Later, he knows he should have.
But later is when Erica is dead and Chris has given Eduardo the proof, because there is no one else Mark will believe it from, and later is Milton, always Milton, Milton and his victims who'll never admit that
(they did something to be blackmailed about)
they even met the man, and Mark is furious, furious in some burning, acid way that no one can touch.
No one can, not anymore - not Sean, not Dustin, not Eduardo, not even Chris in person, trying with all he has left to get through and make Mark give up hope, make him stop, make him for once in his life step back and admit defeat.
All of them telling him that he's the best, yes, of course he is, no one's questioning that, but that even the best need to know when winning will hurt more than it can help or save.
Sean is the one to put it out there, tentatively -
"Mark, if you - if you had something to do with Erica -"
And Mark blanches, shakes his head, shoves his hands out of sight into the pockets of his hoodie, and shakes his head again.
"I had to ask, buddy," Sean points out, but Mark only shakes his head once more, blank-eyed in a way that he never is with them, never is with Sean, with Dustin - never, ever is with Eduardo, not now, hasn't been since he realized that it actually hurt him - and retreats into the world that lies on his computer, the graphs and connections and algorithms of human nature that no one else can follow.
Eduardo doesn't ask. He makes tea instead of bringing Mark energy drinks, which is ignored,
(of course it's ignored, because Mark doesn't speak people unless he's working out the how of an impossible crime, so why should he speak the language of
please stop killing yourself, I like you around?)
- and when Mark begins to ask him if he thinks that Erica really is dead, Eduardo can only reply uselessly that he doesn't know.
Does he think Mark could be the one who killed her? Is that what Mark's asking? Is that what this has become?
did you kill her, Mark, are you that man, too, now?
(is this what he's really being asked, is it Mark's own way of inverting the question that Sean was answered with by his silent withdrawal -
"Do you think I did?")
And more than that, worse than that, what he wants to answer both questions with, the spoken and the unspoken, isn't 'I don't know,' but a question all his own. What he wants to ask is -
Do you think that she's dead? Or do you know? Do you know because you finally caught up with her, ended it, found the one trump card, took her hands for the final dance, finished this for good?
He never asks, he never even hints that he wants to put any of it into words. He's a better man than that, and it's not a question worthy of who he tries to be.
And if he says those words aloud, if he shows even for a second that he is capable of that kind of doubt, he knows he wouldn't be forgiven.
Because Mark answered once, he answered Sean, and that should be enough, it has to be enough; Eduardo will make it enough, for both of them.
(But he thinks later that Mark read the question in his eyes
that it was the moment when Mark broke faith with them because none of them had retained faith in him
that seeing those unvoiced words written clearly in Eduardo's silence was the moment when he knew he was alone; the moment he decided to leave them just as he was always being left).
And none of them see what their belief in him, forced or otherwise, will cause, because they are too busy trying to make him listen to them to stop and listen to him.
Mark on his dark and silent planet, flickering through his mind's images there.
(population of one)
It should be more.
Real. You. Stay.
But he can't, not every minute of every day, not wondering as he does if Mark really has - if Erica's death really is on those too-long-fingered, disproportionately beautiful hands - he can't.
Stay.
He would have, later. When he began to suspect the truth, he would have.
And later is too late.
Eduardo tries not to blame himself for that too much, in the time that follows.
continued here.
Recipient: slasher48
Prompt Number: #33
Characters/Pairings: Mark Zuckerberg, Eduardo Saverin, Erica Albright, Dustin Moskovitz, Sean Parker, Divya Narendra, Chris Hughes (pairings: Eduardo/Mark, past Mark/Erica implied)
Rating/Warnings: PG-13, but includes in passing the mention of blackmail, death, autopsies, guns and the shooting thereof, a fair number of dead people, brief descriptions of corpses, morgues and fire.
Word Count: 13,000+
Disclaimer: This fanwork is based on fictional representations of the characters in The Social Network; I make no claims of ownership of the characters or concepts.
Summary and prompt scenario: BBC Sherlock AU. Mark as Sherlock, Eduardo as John, Erica as Irene, Sean as Lestrade, Dustin as an odd combination of Molly and Mike Stanford, Chris as a less-involved and non-brotherly Mycroft, Divya as a kind of Anderson, and the not-very-OC Milton (a combination of all versions of Moriarty and Conan Doyle's Milverton)
Mark is supposed to be dead. So is Erica. It doesn't seem to have been anything more than a temporary problem for either of them. Milton, on the other hand, is dead, and Eduardo is trying to work out why none of these things add up to something which makes sense.
Author's Notes: This is a cross (or perhaps a blend) between TSN, BBC Sherlock, and the original works of Arthur Conan Doyle (to whom I am particularly indebted for the oysters, as well as the blackmailer Milverton, a man whom Sherlock Holmes does not admire or regard in any way, as he does Moriarty, but only loathes, as he does the huge and creeping snakes in the zoo). With much thanks to my betas Q, A, and H.
~~~
this is your heart (never let it rule your head)
What is the price of experience? Do men buy it for a song? Or wisdom for a dance in the street? No, it is bought with the price of all a man hath.
- William Blake
~~~
Then
"And... you're happy here?" Eduardo asks, not so much out of any genuine desire to know as complete disbelief.
The combination of Dustin, a steady job, and a morgue isn't really one that would occur to most sane people, after all, and it might be a long time since he's even spoken to Dustin, but he can't have changed that much, can he?
"Sure," Dustin says cheerfully, and wow, okay, maybe he has changed, maybe he's gotten all serious while Eduardo's been - away, and that's a whole revolution in world order he really wasn't expecting. "I mean, free experiment opportunities, right?"
Or not.
"You... experiment on them?" There's an awful lot of drawers, even if most of them are probably empty. Maybe Dustin's gone all Dr. Frankenstein on the world in the last few years, rather than settled down.
"Well, not on them, on the pathology samples, but hee, that's a thought, next time we get a John Doe I could, like, falsify some paperwork and -"
There's a banging on one of the drawers, and some muffled shouting that would be less terrifying if it didn't involve Dustin's name.
"Oh my God," says Eduardo.
"Oops," says Dustin, and hurries over to pull the drawer open. Its occupant sits up and delivers a pithy little diatribe on the state of Dustin's brain in a rapid-fire monotone.
Eduardo wonders if he's dreaming. Or on drugs. Or had a psychotic break some time ago and just didn't notice. Any or all of those would be preferable to the horrible suspicion that this is, in fact, reality.
"The timer didn't go off!" Dustin protests, waving his hands around. "So there's obviously time left, and so it's totally not my fault, Mark, okay?"
"Did you even, wow, let me think, set it?"
There's a nasty little silence. Dustin takes out his phone and actually cringes at it its blank display. The former corpse, whose name is apparently Mark, sighs. Its teeth are chattering, which is the first sign of genuine animation Eduardo's noticed in it.
"Yeah," it says. "Amazing. Thanks, Dustin. Sometime, I've really got to trust you with not freezing to death. Oh. Wait."
"Sorry," says Dustin meekly. "Oh, hey, but I've got good news!"
"You've scheduled yourself in for ECT?" demands former-corpse Mark.
"Don't be mean," Dustin says, cheerfulness undented by his look of vague underlying apology. "No, look who I found!"
The reanimated drawer-occupant looks at Eduardo for a full five beats.
"That's... nice, Dustin," he says slowly. "And I'm supposed to -"
"You were looking for someone to share your apartment, right? Now that you're not being pa - you know, to help with - in case you got lonely?"
Eduardo finds himself sharing an incredulous look with the semi-frozen Mark. Anyone less likely to get lonely, even on two minutes' worth of literally frosty acquaintanceship, is difficult to imagine.
"No," Mark says flatly.
"He's looking for a place to live," Dustin continues.
"No, really, I'm -" Eduardo starts to protest, and Dustin steamrollers over him in a horribly familiar way that time and distance have not helped him forget.
"And I thought, hey! I'm not moving back in with Mark even if he pays me, because ew, the fridge, and also you keep getting investigated and there's the way you keep making dead people attached to living people who kind of really want to kill you, and just no. Anyway, I like my place. But yeah, Eduardo won't mind, because, you know, he just got out of the sort-of Army, so it won't bother him." He folds his arms proudly.
"Investigated?" Eduardo says weakly, not even bothering to untangle the rest of it.
"Give me your jacket," says Mark.
Eduardo's the only one surprised when he takes it off and hands it over. He's not surprised when he doesn't even get a nod of thanks.
And he's very amused by just how ridiculous Mark looks wearing it when he hops off the sliding drawer and heads towards the door.
"Are you coming, then?" he demands.
Eduardo looks at Dustin.
"He means you," Dustin says, grinning. "So if you ever want to see that jacket again..."
Wondering just when he entered the Twilight Zone, Eduardo duly follows.
~~~
Now
Of all the undignified situations Eduardo has found himself in over the last six weeks, and there have been several, up to and including the never-to-be-spoken-of-again night that Dustin locked him in the morgue with Sean and the autopsy list
(admittedly he thought he was locking him in with Mark, in some Dustin-ish way of forcing them to talk to each other, but that's beside the point)
this has got to be up there in the top three.
He blames Mark. For all of it.
Mark, on the other hand, blames Erica.
Loudly. Fluently. And unstoppably.
It would be almost entertaining, if not for the fact that all the grievances Mark is currently listing - the rain, the fact they are on the ladder of a fire escape in the rain, the very dead body in the room beneath them with the bolted window, the rain, the fact that oh yes, rain makes things wet, the dead body, Erica having turned the suspect they'd been after into the dead body -
(nice shot, but Eduardo doesn't think saying that is a particularly good idea right now, because pissed as he is at Mark in general, he's somehow reluctant to make that feeling into a two-way interactive process)
- the rain - didn't also happen to be things that Eduardo is suffering from too.
Except his suffering is worse, because he's with Mark, who doesn't seem to understand just how much Eduardo does not want to hear his voice.
Ever again, for preference, but Eduardo is getting to the stage where he'd happily settle for 'in the next ten minutes'.
Futilely, he tries to convey his desire to ensure that silence by way of several violent and satisfying methods, straight into Mark's brain.
It's always worth attempting to avoid having to actually use words that will be completely ignored by means of telepathic imagery, even though it's never worked on Mark to date, either pre- or post- his assumed death, and probably won't work now, either.
"I hate her so much," Mark says, oblivious as ever to the hopes, prayers, and fervent and gory wishes of those around him. Eduardo doesn't even bother to reply this time. "I mean, what the fuck, she couldn't just - it would have - he's no use dead, what was she even thinking?"
Eduardo, who was lucky
(or unlucky, he's not quite sure which)
enough to see the look on Erica's face just before she fired her ludicrously expensive gun, the shot hitting dead centre between Milton's eyes, is fairly sure she hadn't been thinking anything at all other than die.
Possibly also you son-of-a-bitch, but that might have just been him. Then again, if he'd been capable of wearing Erica's heels, never mind walking two steps in them, he'd have taken those two steps straight across the carpet and slammed the metal caps on those same heels right into each of Milton's eyes,
(step, step, and it wouldn't have been so different, the sound and feel, not so different, blending into one sense under his foot; not so different from a loose grape on a tile floor)
giving him three holes in his head, not just one -
(why should he get them closed with dignity, when he lived and reveled in sewage and filth and his perverted and perverse love of others' degradation?)
Of course, Erica's never one for the obvious. It's probably why the corpse looks so frighteningly neat.
Erica's also supposed to be dead.
But then, so is Mark.
Or so was Mark, Eduardo's still not completely sure about how that one works, if it works at all.
(It worked all too well for too long, but he still can't think about that without wanting to break things, so he doesn't.)
Mark hadn't even left a body.
(But neither had Erica)
Mark had left a burned and unrecognizable - thing, crumbling in places and half its teeth shattered by the unbelievable heat of the magnesium-set fire he'd been caught in, not even enough left of the ones remaining for identification.
(he'd planned it well)
Mark had left them nothing but disbelieving horror as a platform from which to mourn, and he had no right to come back from that and expect the world to welcome him.
No right to expect Eduardo to welcome him back into the apartment that had once been so very much his, and is now so very deliberately anything but a shrine.
No right to expect forgiveness.
No right to anything at all, even Dustin's couch, and fuck, Dustin, Dustin who'd known Mark wasn't dead; while the rest of them tried throughout all those bleak months to pick up the pieces of lives and friendships and rent and police cases that were, are, now considered not to have a result because the provider of evidence was gone, is gone, God, how is Sean coping, what happens now? - Dustin had known.
And the rest of them hadn't even been
(still aren't)
important enough to merit a bit of hope or even unpalatable truth.
And Eduardo doesn't think he's ever going to stop being angry, stop hating, stop loathing Mark for having done that to him, to all of them. Because what kind of man just fakes his own death, to save a woman the world's mostly forgotten?
To save a woman the world believes to be dead?
The answer's in the question, and unhappily in close proximity.
Only Mark.
Only Mark, who thinks that the end justifies the means.
Mark, self-created devil of his own mythology.
Mark, whom Eduardo thinks these days should have just stayed dead, and hurt everyone less that way.
Right now, however, living in the moment, just as his therapist told him the last time
(the absolutely last time, thank you, never again)
that he saw her, Eduardo's bitterly conscious of the fact that if only 'supposed to be dead' translated to 'deceased and therefore shutting the fuck up', he wouldn't even mind the fire escape so much.
(Said fire escape, or rather the ladder of said fire escape, is either welded to itself or rusted or designed by someone with spatial difficulties. Either way, it's nowhere near reaching the ground, and Eduardo doesn't feel like adding broken bones from badly-timed jumping to the woes of his evening, so he's staying put).
But then, Mark dead had never been exactly silent, either, even if that had only been in his mind.
He carefully ignores the knowledge that when he had thought Mark was dead, he would have given everything he had
(not just about everything, or almost everything, everything. Everything.)
for it not to be true, and he'd woken up each day thinking exactly that.
As it is, he should have been a bit more careful about what he'd wished for, because now that Mark is unmistakably in the land of the living, cursing out Erica, and dripping even more water off his feet down the back of Eduardo's neck, Eduardo can't help wondering what the hell he'd been thinking.
Mark sneezes. His left foot jerks with the force of it, and thumps solidly into the middle of Eduardo's forehead.
"Sorry," he mutters.
Eduardo stares up at him through the heavy rain and the dark of the alleyway incredulously. What he can make out of Mark's expression has the audacity to appear perfectly sincere.
"You're going to apologize for that?" he demands.
"Um," Mark says, actually sounding confused, "yes? I mean, I didn't want to kick you in the head."
"That makes one of us," Eduardo mutters to the metal rungs.
"You want to - wait, no, that doesn't even - what?"
Eduardo sighs, and leans his forehead sideways onto his arm, and thereby, nastily, onto his sopping jacket. "Never mind," he says, with the inevitable hamster-on-a-wheel sense of exhaustion that's been overcoming him every time Mark spectacularly fails to just see what he did that's so fucking wrong.
You were dead, he wants to say. You were dead and you let me go all those months, weeks, days, hours, believing it was true, you let me mourn, you bastard, and yes, yes, fucking right you should be sorry, and yes, I want to kick myself in the head for trusting anything you do, and right now I hate you more than anyone on the face of this planet, and we are stuck on a fire escape in the rain, and your feet are in my face, and everything is dripping wet, and I just watched Erica shoot a guy, who's now very dead, and in about five minutes Sean is going to turn up, probably with all his little police minions trailing behind him, and he's going to laugh himself sick, and I really, really hate you.
"I'm sorry about Dustin and the morgue?" Mark offers eventually.
This time Eduardo just smacks his head into the metal rung in front of him, and prays for unconsciousness, or, barring that, a nice fuzzy concussion.
"And, um, for Sean?" Mark is really trying, Eduardo thinks distantly. Shame none of it's going to work.
He thumps his head a couple more times onto the rung, in some desultory hope that repetitive action will gain him this time around what it so failed to do the first time.
Anything. Anything to make the time pass in a comfortable haze before Sean and the inevitable hysterical circus arrive.
"Shut up, Mark," he says through gritted teeth, when neither unconsciousness nor hazy semi-delirium presents itself as a form of salvation.
There are a blissful few minutes of dripping silence, and then Mark, inevitably, breaks the peace by saying, as though it is a new and surprising thought that he hasn't voiced at least six times since they got out of Milton's room and abandoned his Erica-created corpse on the carpet -
"Fuck, I hate that woman."
Eduardo thinks wistfully of how much easier the last three years of his life would have been, if only that were true.
"Then why," he says with a great deal of accumulated bitterness that surprises even him, "did you let me think you'd died because of her?"
The quiet that follows is nothing like the one Eduardo had been hoping for.
The roofs and the fire escape and the rain drip and fall, and the water all around them hits the ground and puddles and concrete and guttering at different tempos.
It's either soothing or nerve-rattlingly syncopated, and Eduardo can't decide which.
And then Mark says, so quietly that at first Eduardo wasn't even sure he'd heard him at all, never mind correctly, his words uncharacteristically disjointed -
"But that's not why - I never meant - I didn't - I don't - wait, no, I - Wardo -"
"Yes," Eduardo says flatly, because wouldn't it just figure, that the first attempt at an explanation Mark's even tried to give, and it's a really terrible, incoherent attempt at a lie? "Yes, yeah, you did. Now shut up."
Mercifully, Mark does, which is a new, if definitely welcome development.
Because if all it would have taken to fix this, all those months ago, if all it would have taken to stop Milton and his blackmail and his increasing stranglehold over them all was Erica and her gun, then why hasn't something like this happened sooner?
~~~
Then
"I don't see why it's my fault you're all stupid," Mark says, in defiance of Eduardo's urgent throat-cutting, shut-the-fuck-up-Mark gestures behind Divya Narendra's back.
Stop pissing off the forensics guy Eduardo mouths at him urgently, hoping Divya doesn't turn around and catch him at it. Mark's traditional blank-eyed, expressionless stare in response could be aimed at either him or Divya, and he's rapidly losing the will to care about which one of them it is.
There is a muffled retching sound from the kitchen that's almost certainly someone unwisely investigating the do-not-use-this-for-food-ever fridge
(that's Eduardo's rule, at least, and it works for him, at least to the point where he can generally be sure that what he's eating is what he thought he was going to be eating)
and an equally muffled scream from someone else who has, from the sound of smashing glass that follows it, quite definitely found the two-hundred year old mummified fingers that were until seconds ago living peacefully in a jar in the cupboard above the sink.
(Mark claims they were there when he first moved in. Eduardo doesn't believe him for a second, and didn't even when Mark first told him that.)
Not for the first time, Eduardo wonders why the hell he's still living in this apartment, being periodically investigated by everyone from the ATF -
(and a more bizarre name for a sub-division of the FBI Eduardo still hasn't encountered, because seriously? Seriously? Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms in that order? It really does tell him way too much about their priorities - although it doesn't help much with what they might want of Mark, and he's resolutely not thinking about the fact that this once, it might have been more to do with him and the last subject on their list...)
- to once, in a bizarre turn of events which Mark still hasn't managed to explain to him satisfactorily, Interpol, and having to put up with regular invasions from Sean Parker's impossibly annoying crime unit, because God forbid the man can do without making sure he has Mark's attention for more than a week.
The fact that Mark actually enjoys the cases Sean brings him is beside the point.
The fact that Eduardo usually ends up enjoying working on them with Mark is even more beside the point, because one of the few unchanging facts in Eduardo's world is that Sean Parker is an irritation worse than scabies and more ineradicable than cat fleas in summer, and he's not about to revise that opinion any time soon, no matter what happens.
"Divya," he starts in his best placatory tones, and Divya takes that, rather than anything Mark has said or done, as a mortal insult, which seems bitterly unfair.
"I have," he says angrily, turning on Eduardo, "a professional title."
"Associates Degree Narendra," Mark agrees blandly, because there is just no way Mark can stand anyone being paid attention to who isn't him. Sometimes, Eduardo thinks that's what makes him tolerate
(because that's a better word than like, since Mark doesn't like anyone)
Sean at all.
"Right," Divya snaps, turning to the unfortunate souls in the kitchen, "get in here and take up the carpeting."
"Oh no," Eduardo protests futilely. "Divya, no. Come on. It costs a fortune to have this replaced..."
"And every time I think the depths of stupidity have been reached," Mark says, apparently to the ceiling, "I am proved so wrong. So tragically wrong."
Eduardo tries, and fails miserably, not to laugh.
Mark might be the most annoying man in the world, he might be an unquantifiable genius that no job title in the world has yet been invented for, and he's quite definitely the worst thing that has ever happened to Divya Narendra and his forensics team, but sometimes, random times, times like this, out of nowhere and for no good reason, Eduardo feels the kind of affection for him that leaves him completely unstrung.
Divya looks like he's thinking of ordering them both shot, and also that the fact he doesn't have the authority to give that order wouldn't stop him for a second.
Eduardo can't stop laughing, Divya's expression and his own emotions making him a little unhinged, and Mark looks back down from his contemplation of the ceiling's mysteries and gives him a tiny little grin of malicious pleasure.
Needless to say, the day goes downhill from there and straight into the depths of the inferno known as Implausible Paperwork, interspersed in all its bureaucratic hell by texts from Dustin,
(who is doing something unspeakable in the morgue that for some reason needs all caps messages to convey in its full glory)
Chris,
(who is, as well as being one of Mark's inexplicably steadfast and unoffendable friends, a very very scary man in his own right and apparently pissed off by something Mark still hasn't done for him - and by extent for the President's office, and how has this become Eduardo's life again?)
- and for some reason, Sean, who is by now in the apartment, so shouldn't need to be texting at all, and who is also smirking at them both.
Whatever it is Sean
(Detective Parker, he'd introduced himself as, right back when Eduardo had first moved into the chaos that is Mark's excuse for a life, but hey, call me Sean, he'd added, with a canary-eating smile, and only Mark's eye-roll had prevented Eduardo from saying something truly nasty, or maybe just punching him in the face on the grounds of being an insufferable asshole)
thinks he knows that he thinks no one else knows, it's put a look on his face that's enough to inspire thoughts in Eduardo of making him into the next homicide case, and not one that Eduardo would exactly encourage Mark to help solve, either.
Eduardo's also thinking of collecting up all the cell phones he can find and just jumping up and down on them. It might save time, or at least save Divya from the incipient aneurysm he's pretty sure is lying in wait for him if Mark doesn't either shut up or stop staring through him blankly every time he speaks.
While Eduardo had been revoltingly grateful for the offer of somewhere to live, just over a year ago - even if the circumstances had been truly weird - he might have been considerably less precipitate in expressing his gratitude if he'd ever, even briefly, imagined that this sort of afternoon would turn out to be ordinary.
(He should have guessed, given as he first met Mark when he was inhabiting a morgue drawer, but he'd somehow assumed that was an aberration.)
He might also have been less grateful, period, if he'd remembered just what kind of terrible ideas Dustin thought were awesome solutions to life problems.
But then it's been a very long time since college, and he hadn't even noticed Mark in those days, difficult though that is to contemplate, because even Mark sitting in the corner of a dark room, completely silent and inhabiting another planet
(population of one)
is impossible to ignore.
It's this which makes him wonder if Mark had even been studying there with them at all, something which is a bit difficult to work out since neither he nor Dustin will talk about it, and it seems oddly like an open declaration of mistrust
(which he honestly doesn't feel, he's just curious)
to look at the list of alumni or to ask the college outright if Mark was there, even for a semester, even if he never graduated, because where the hell does he come from?
The thing is that even after sharing an apartment with him all this time, Eduardo seriously can't imagine any other way that Mark and Dustin, even with Mark's love for all things forensic and, if possible, unpleasantly dead, could possibly have exchanged even a greeting.
He has to admit, though, on his side of things, that it's also possible, considering the way he'd gone off to stick his father's expectations somewhere unexpected by joining the Medical Corps, that life had pretty much stopped him right then from thinking about anyone who came from what he was happy to call his past.
His complete breaking away from all the things he associated with that time had quite certainly included Dustin, after all, and how Dustin doesn't hold a grudge against him for that is one of life's minor miracles.
Dustin, who didn't need to break away from any kind of expectations or impossible standard of imaginary success, who had stayed, and gone down the track which had led him to the morgue.
Fortunate, easy-going Dustin, with whom Eduardo hadn't so much as thought of vaguely keeping in touch, at least not until his second tour was - curtailed, and he had been forced to - come back.
(He calls it that, even in his head, because he is a fucking genius at compartmentalizing, thank you so much, and the other way of thinking about it is that now he's not capable of functioning successfully in either world, civilian or military, and he's not yet ready to face up to that kind of acceptance; he's not ready to be seen as a failure and he really doesn't want to be seen as a success. He's alive, he's making his way on his own, and that's good enough. It has to be.)
As it is, he just blames Dustin for everything that has happened to him since he - came back - and feels justified in doing so.
He especially blames him for Mark.
It was Dustin's idea, after all, to introduce them, so yeah. Speaking of titles, that one should be his.
Dustin Moskovitz. To Blame For Everything.
Divya and his crew set about destroying the carpeting with single-minded determination. Eduardo wonders if there's some way of falsifying papers and getting back into the Medical Corps.
And Sean and Mark, rarely and worryingly, are apparently having a silent argument. It involves a lot of glaring on Mark's part and a badly-suited look of immovable determination on Sean's.
"I am not," Mark says at last, "doing anything that puts me near that woman."
"Divya," Sean says, "take off the baseboard while you're at it."
He's got the canary-eating look again.
Mark groans.
"Yeah, how about someone tells me what's going on?" Eduardo says.
Later, when he's dealing with a drugged and hallucinating Mark, a worried and therefore totally useless Dustin, and a completely absent Sean, plus Chris on the phone demanding to know every five minutes what's happening, he really kind of wishes no one had told him anything, and that he'd gone to find a really good forger instead - or that when they did tell him, he'd gone to find the forger anyway, got his papers, and not been around for any of it.
He realizes with miserable and definitely 20-20 hindsight that he could have been half-way to a nice peaceful war-zone, if he'd just thought about it a bit more carefully.
But then, in his own defense, how was he supposed to know just how insanely brilliant Erica Albright is?
~~~
Now
"It wasn't because of Erica," Mark says again.
Like him, the rain shows no signs of stopping. Eduardo sighs, and shifts his position so that the pressure of the cold metal bites a little less through his shoes.
"Okay, Mark," he says, tired of fighting. "If you say so."
"Which means you don't believe me," Mark says, with a faint unwelcome bite to his voice. "Fine."
"Fine," Eduardo says tightly. He wants this travesty of a conversation to stop. He wants to go home. He wants to get dry. And more than anything else in the world he wants to never, ever have to see Mark again.
"It was because of you," Mark says then. He's not fidgeting. He's very, very still.
The rain keeps falling, terribly loud.
"If that's true," Eduardo says slowly, "then what you did - what you left us thinking Milton did - it was even worse than I thought."
He doesn't have to even make an effort to believe what Mark is saying. It's not because it makes sense. It's not even because it's the truth.
It's because Mark quite obviously believes it's the truth, that he obviously believed it then, and that's -
It's appalling.
"Yeah," Mark says. He sounds tired, as tired as Eduardo feels. "I know."
They're both quiet, now.
"Why Dustin?" Eduardo bursts out with, at last. "Why did he get to know? All those months, Mark, and I -"
At least now he knows why Dustin wouldn't talk to any of them, wouldn't come to the memorial service, wouldn't even take Eduardo's calls. He'd thought it was grief, back then, and been horrified.
He's no less horrified to realize it was guilt.
"I needed him to help me set the fire," Mark says. Eduardo tips his head back and stares up at him. Mark has the grace to shift a little under his gaze, sounding almost embarrassed as he adds, "And I needed a body to get that burned in the fire. There had to be something left. Even Divya's not that bad."
"Dustin and his John Does," Eduardo says, finally making sense of at least part of it. "God, Mark. How could you -"
"You don't get to ask me that," Mark says, sharp and angry for the first time in all the weeks since his return, and it seems that Eduardo should forget about every deliberate, well thought-out provocation to argument or outright fighting that he's been giving Mark each time they're forced to meet, because it's this kind of childish accusation he should have used if he'd wanted a response. "You don't get to ask me how, not about anything, not - not now, you don't get to ask how I could when you know I did, you, you don't. Get to ask me that."
But he does.
He does, because he'd been there, and Mark hadn't, Mark had been off somewhere doing his own thing, not involving them, not worrying about them, excusing himself by saying he was doing it for them -
(for me, he thinks, for me, but no, no, that's just what he's told himself, it doesn't mean anything, I won't let it).
And Milton, Milton the blackmailer, Milton, the owner of secrets and lies, the delighted participant in every tiny betrayal a man could commit to gain money and leverage, Milton had been there, untouchable and gloating and bloated with success, and the only one of them who could have stopped him had been officially declared dead.
How is he supposed to forgive Mark for abandoning them to that?
Eduardo puts a hand around Mark's ankle, and grips.
"Oh yeah, I do," he says, and if Mark can get angry? He's got no idea what he's going to get in response. "I do. You want me to believe you did that because of me? Well guess what, you get to explain yourself this time around. Because you owe me. So start talking. You wanted me to listen? Well guess what, you win, you got me, well done. Captive audience, right here." He stops, trying to get his words and his mind into some kind of order, and comes up blank. "What the fuck were you thinking?"
Mark wriggles his foot experimentally. Eduardo tightens his grip.
"Wardo, I -" Mark starts, sounding almost pleading. "It wasn't -"
And that, of course, is when Sean opens the window, and, right on cue, starts laughing his ass off at the both of them.
Equal opportunities mocking, that's Sean for you.
Sometimes it's hard for Eduardo to remember that he actually got to like him, or at least not want to punch him quite as often, after Mark died.
Eduardo also thinks, judging by how wet he feels, and how Mark looks, from what he can make out of him in the dim light, anyway, and with both of them hanging on to a fire escape ladder that doesn't even go down past the second floor, that Sean's probably got a point.
They must look really fucking stupid.
And yet again, it's because of Erica.
Sometimes, Eduardo can see Mark's point about hating her.
~~~
Then
"This is not good," Dustin says. "This is really, really not good."
The lack of a scathing response from the expected source is another thing that makes Eduardo extremely disinclined to argue with this assessment.
"I mean, what did she use on him, fuck, this is so not good -"
"Dustin, I got it the first time..." Actually, he'd gotten it the second Mark started making no sense at all in the middle of proving just how much smarter he was, and that having been given only five seconds, than anything Erica could come up with over months, and Erica's smile had been glorious in response to his sudden unnerving turn into vaguely psychotic babble.
Dustin is not dealing very well with any of this. He actually looks annoyed, which isn't an expression that suits him, as well as worried half out of his mind, which is something Eduardo has only seen once before, and could really do without getting in glorious 3D replay.
It's one thing to know that Mark only chooses to behave like a human being to three and a half members of the whole population, it's quite another to be forcibly reminded that those people care about him, too, that it's not just Eduardo out there on his own giving any kind of damn.
It should be comforting. Right now, with Mark's eyes flickering round his own living room like it's filled with ghosts, Eduardo's not comforted at all, because no, he's not on his own, that's great, but the only one who's actually here, out of the other two and a half remaining if you discount him from their number, is Dustin.
And Dustin is torn between taking half of Mark's blood to run tests, because wow, drug he can't recognize straight off, and just flailing.
At the moment, flailing is winning.
"And what was Sean thinking, anyway, telling him to go to talk to her?"
"Probably," Eduardo says bitterly, "that he only wants to see little green men in the corner -" or whatever the fuck it is that Mark is seeing. He's pretty sure oysters come into it somewhere, and radioactive sentient ones at that. The cab driver enduring that particularly disgusting description of what was happening to the interior of his vehicle had been even more freaked out than Mark and Eduardo combined, and half-way convinced, from what Eduardo could tell, that he was seeing them too - "on his own time."
Dustin winces. "Yeah, somehow I doubt Erica cares enough about Sean to do whatever this is to him."
Eduardo stares at him. "Dustin, seriously, you need a dictionary. Or professional help. What?"
"And by caring I mean hating his guts," Dustin explains.
Oh. Okay.
Mark chooses this moment to demonstrate his continuing affinity with the shellfish world by clamping his hand around Eduardo's wrist like a particularly vicious limpet.
"Ow," Eduardo says weakly.
"Make it stop," Mark hisses, and Dustin's face twists up in much the same way as something in Eduardo's chest has just done, because Mark should never, ever sound like that, and God, Eduardo would give just about anything to do what's been asked of him.
More worrying still, he keeps finding his free hand twitching out for his med-pack, because the next step after someone says something like that?
Tends to be one nice syringe of morphine.
He's uncomfortably aware that right now, Mark's very far from the only one in the room seeing things move in the shadows.
"Okay," he says, soothing and useless. "Okay, Mark, it's wearing off, you're going to be fine, I don't think she meant to do anything permanent."
"Please," Mark says quietly, and curls forward on their abused couch, pressing his head against Eduardo's arm, burying his face in the crook of his elbow. His breath is short and somehow jagged, and his skin is far too hot, and Eduardo is worried half to death. "I can't - Wardo, I can't think."
The last word sounds uncomfortably close to a sob, and Eduardo gives up on trying to be professional and not-seeing ghosts and everything that he's thought up until now was keeping him on the 'I'm alive and making it' end of the spectrum lying between success and failure, and puts his hand on the back of Mark's tangled head.
"So don't," he says simply. "You don't have to. I promise. Not right now."
"I keep seeing -"
"Close your eyes." He shifts Mark into a slightly more comfortable position that doesn't involve his wrist being crushed or Mark twisted in on himself like a pretzel. "There's a sedative in there with everything else, I'm pretty sure. Try and let it work."
Mark shakes his head violently, bruising Eduardo's ribs. "Can't."
"Sure you can."
"But I won't - I won't know you're here. If I sleep, you won't be here."
"I'm not going anywhere," Eduardo promises. He's not. He doesn't care if Sean gets back and wants a full report, he doesn't care if Chris flies out of Washington and needs to be picked up at the airport, he doesn't care if Erica's gone to Mexico and is about to mail them all tickets to join her, he doesn't care if Dustin removes two pints of blood from each of them and then moves on to plasma donations. He doesn't care.
And he's not moving.
"Real," Mark says nonsensically, but at least he's got his eyes shut, and that's probably half the battle won. "You. Stay."
Eduardo does.
And when Sean does come in, a little grey around the lips and obviously needing to use his inhaler, apologies spilling from him like water and three times as useless, having been pointlessly trying to get Erica into custody, he takes one look at Eduardo's expression and walks straight back out, taking Dustin with him with one hand clamped over the red-headed mortician's mouth, and ignoring the fact that Dustin is most probably licking his palm, judging from his disgusted grimacing.
Mark doesn't thank any of them, later.
He's too busy chasing Erica, his eternal pursuit in the cause of intellectual victory, running after something none of them can see, down a path they can't follow.
And at the end of the path lies not some unnamable prize, not some absolute pinnacle of superiority, but a man named Gus Milton.
Milton, and blackmail, and death.
("Real. You. Stay.")
And he does.
Through all of it.
Because he has the stupidity and hope to think that with Mark drugged out of his mind, and holding onto Eduardo's arm, hand, wrist, anything he could find in his nightmare-ridden, unhappy half-sleep, he has seen Mark's core, his heart; that he's somehow gained his trust, gained his -
Sean can say love all he likes. He can send unicorns puking rainbows in nasty little .gifs to Eduardo's mailbox as often as he feels like it.
It doesn't make any difference, and it really doesn't matter.
Because Mark is chasing Erica.
And Erica is dancing with death for her partner; death for her lover; Erica, who in New York can now take a bride of her own, if she wants to; Erica has made herself into the Corpse Bride, the damning and the damned.
And Eduardo's not sure if Mark wants to stop her or take her partner's place.
Erica and Milton, locked in some contest neither of them even seem to want to escape, and Chris desperate on the phone, because one of them knows something and Mark must stop them both
("Please, please Mark, please, she could use it -"
"It's not her you should be worried about. And anyway, that one's gone."
"Mark -"
"Chris. It's done, okay.")
Mark snapping, ignoring texts.
Mark obsessed.
I could make him beg. Erica texts Eduardo once. Could you?
He doesn't reply.
He's already heard Mark beg. He's heard dozens of men beg. Beg for the pain to stop, beg to be saved, beg and cry and plead and he'd never been able to even reach them, not with words, not with skill, not with drugs, as they bit back screams or cried out loud in their agony.
Mark's the first one he ever got through to.
And that's between them, and Erica has no right to ask.
He never answers the text.
Later, he knows he should have.
But later is when Erica is dead and Chris has given Eduardo the proof, because there is no one else Mark will believe it from, and later is Milton, always Milton, Milton and his victims who'll never admit that
(they did something to be blackmailed about)
they even met the man, and Mark is furious, furious in some burning, acid way that no one can touch.
No one can, not anymore - not Sean, not Dustin, not Eduardo, not even Chris in person, trying with all he has left to get through and make Mark give up hope, make him stop, make him for once in his life step back and admit defeat.
All of them telling him that he's the best, yes, of course he is, no one's questioning that, but that even the best need to know when winning will hurt more than it can help or save.
Sean is the one to put it out there, tentatively -
"Mark, if you - if you had something to do with Erica -"
And Mark blanches, shakes his head, shoves his hands out of sight into the pockets of his hoodie, and shakes his head again.
"I had to ask, buddy," Sean points out, but Mark only shakes his head once more, blank-eyed in a way that he never is with them, never is with Sean, with Dustin - never, ever is with Eduardo, not now, hasn't been since he realized that it actually hurt him - and retreats into the world that lies on his computer, the graphs and connections and algorithms of human nature that no one else can follow.
Eduardo doesn't ask. He makes tea instead of bringing Mark energy drinks, which is ignored,
(of course it's ignored, because Mark doesn't speak people unless he's working out the how of an impossible crime, so why should he speak the language of
please stop killing yourself, I like you around?)
- and when Mark begins to ask him if he thinks that Erica really is dead, Eduardo can only reply uselessly that he doesn't know.
Does he think Mark could be the one who killed her? Is that what Mark's asking? Is that what this has become?
did you kill her, Mark, are you that man, too, now?
(is this what he's really being asked, is it Mark's own way of inverting the question that Sean was answered with by his silent withdrawal -
"Do you think I did?")
And more than that, worse than that, what he wants to answer both questions with, the spoken and the unspoken, isn't 'I don't know,' but a question all his own. What he wants to ask is -
Do you think that she's dead? Or do you know? Do you know because you finally caught up with her, ended it, found the one trump card, took her hands for the final dance, finished this for good?
He never asks, he never even hints that he wants to put any of it into words. He's a better man than that, and it's not a question worthy of who he tries to be.
And if he says those words aloud, if he shows even for a second that he is capable of that kind of doubt, he knows he wouldn't be forgiven.
Because Mark answered once, he answered Sean, and that should be enough, it has to be enough; Eduardo will make it enough, for both of them.
(But he thinks later that Mark read the question in his eyes
that it was the moment when Mark broke faith with them because none of them had retained faith in him
that seeing those unvoiced words written clearly in Eduardo's silence was the moment when he knew he was alone; the moment he decided to leave them just as he was always being left).
And none of them see what their belief in him, forced or otherwise, will cause, because they are too busy trying to make him listen to them to stop and listen to him.
Mark on his dark and silent planet, flickering through his mind's images there.
(population of one)
It should be more.
Real. You. Stay.
But he can't, not every minute of every day, not wondering as he does if Mark really has - if Erica's death really is on those too-long-fingered, disproportionately beautiful hands - he can't.
Stay.
He would have, later. When he began to suspect the truth, he would have.
And later is too late.
Eduardo tries not to blame himself for that too much, in the time that follows.
continued here.