Fic: No Wealth and No Ruin [The Social Network/Dead Like Me][6/8]

[antistar_e]

☠.

His first instinct is to find Peter Thiel and bash his head in with a baseball bat.

His second instinct is to get drunk.

With neither of those things easily feasible (and never before has Mark been so upset to have the metabolism of the undead,) Mark goes with instinct number three: to find somebody who would stop him from doing instinct one and instinct two. Someone who would understand, and the only other people who would understand why Mark is pissed at the guy to whom he used to be grateful for giving Facebook its well-deserved break -- who hired a good friend to murder him -- is a reaper.

Which is how he finds himself back at the library, busier now that it's later in the day; there are little kids gathered together on the story mat, students with the laptops and giant research tomes out on the patio, a small group of old ladies with handbags using the microfiche machine. Kawali and Jessica are at their usual table, and Mark's surprised to see them both here before he remembers how secretive they'd been acting this morning, and realizes they knew this was coming.

He comes up behind them and he goes, in this hollow, wound-up excuse for a voice that doesn't sound like him at all, "They found my murderer today."

Jessica's on her feet first, her arms going around his neck. She hugs him fiercely, going, "oh, honey, I know," and "are you okay?"

And it's always easy to pretend that you're okay, up until somebody actually asks you if you are, and Mark feels his face do something horrible and crumpled and his breath catches, words jumbling uselessly in his throat where he can't do anything with them. When Jessica lets him go, it's only for a moment, and then Kawali's hugging him too, a crushing quarterback squeeze that makes him feel less like he's going to shake apart at the seams, like he's getting pushed back into the correct mold.

"What are you going to do?" Kawali asks when he releases him, soft and serious.

The library is too quiet, too peaceful, too full of other soft-spoken people and too many worlds trapped in too many books, and Mark spins on his heel and goes outside, knowing without looking that Kawali and Jessica are following.

It's bright outside, the fog from before all burned away to reveal a brilliantly-colored sky, scattered with the clouds rolling in off the sea. There are two women with a golden retriever working in the community garden, their voices carrying and cordial, and so Mark skirts around the library sculpture -- the woman running, head tilted up to the sky, made of abstract sheets of metal that look a little like the pages of a book -- and heads to the other side of the garden, past rows of thick, heavy tomatoes.

When he reaches an arbitrarily acceptable distance from the women gardening, he whips around to face Kawali and Jessica and he says, "I want to find him and tear his soul out of his body and then run it through a cement mixer."

Because you can rip the souls out of living people, Mark knows; he did it on accident once. And wouldn't it be amazing, he thinks, to have Thiel like that -- to forcibly rip his soul from his body and lock it away somewhere like Peter Pan's shadow? He'd have to endure his flesh rotting away without him like a vegetable. It'd be a fate worse than death. It'd be perfect.

"That would be abusing our powers," Jessica points out, almost timidly. She's never seen this side of Mark, the one that gets so very angry and very drunk and blogs.

"And he abused his!" Mark retorts, almost yelling. "Jessica, he invested five hundred thousand dollars into Facebook and then he killed me for it. And he didn't even have the balls to get his hands dirty himself, he told Maurice to do it and Maurice --" Maurice with his deep belly laugh and friendly jokes and keen eye for economic forecasting. "I liked Maurice. And he bashed my brains in! I was twenty-seven years old!" This, somehow, seems like one of the most important parts.

"I've always thought he took his own death a little too calmly," Kawali comments, his tone mild. "I guess the real breakdown was a long time coming."

Jessica glances at him, before looking back to Mark. They did the math once; they had been born only weeks apart, he and Jessica had, but Jessica died when she was only twenty-one. Mark had six years of life on her, but how was that enough? How was that enough for anything?

He fists his hands into his hair and makes a long, wordless noise of rage.

It goes on and on and on, this keening, this fury, this grief, a sound like screaming ghosts, wailing wintry winds. It's the most inhuman Mark has ever sounded.

He flops back into the grass.

By the time he's calmed down, it's already late afternoon, and Kawali's left for a reap up in San Mateo before the traffic gets really bad. Mark has missed work and doesn't care. Jessica's spread out on the ground next to him, on her stomach, library hardback open in front of her. The protective cellophane bookcover crinkles every time she turns a page, and she answers Mark's increasingly farfetched methods of dealing with Thiel with variations of, "sounds bloody, I love it, but you can't do it, Mark."

"I'm not going to," he answers her finally, and this concession is enough to make her look up, her mouth turned down with sympathy.

"You should stay at my place tonight," she says. "I'll cook a shit-ton of comfort food. Like, latkes or something."

Mark blinks at her.

She cringes a little bit. "Did I get that wrong? Is that even Jewish food?" She spreads her hands defensively. "I don't know! I'm culturally inept. I was raised in a Baptist family -- when we say comfort food, we mean KFC." And then her face does something complicated and horrified. "Oh, god, I'm going to get struck by lightning."

It startles him into laughing at her, coming unbidden and uncomfortable from his throat, and he pushes himself to his feet, suddenly knowing exactly what he has to do.

"I'll take a rain-check on the comfort food, Jessica," he says. "There's someone I should probably go talk to."

☠.

Grim reapers keep close tabs on who dies and leaves their property empty, since the state of the housing market means some multi-million dollar homes stay unoccupied for ages, so when Eduardo went and purchased a place on Middlefield Rd shortly after inheriting co-ownership of Facebook, Mark heard about it from one of the guys in Natural Causes. He's never had a reason to use that information before now.

It's a nice enough place, make no mistake, if a little bland; peach-colored siding and white trim on the windows and a simple, unadorned lawn. Eduardo doesn't even look particularly surprised to see him, just steps back and lets Mark in.

"Taking off like that was probably insensitive," he blurts out, in his roundabout way of apologizing.

Eduardo just kind of waves it off, with a gesture that it's either accepting or dismissive, Mark can't quite tell. He looks, if anything, worse inside than he did out in the sunshine earlier, darkness bruised under his eyes. He drags his feet into the leaving room, and Mark toes his shoes off by the door and follows.

Flopping back onto the sofa like he's made of nothing but broken bones, Eduardo watches him hover awkwardly in the room for a moment, and then he says, "You know, I never asked. Did you know him?"

This time, Mark doesn't need to ask who.

He shifts his weight. "I work at Pizza My Heart," he goes, flat. "I know everybody who works at Facebook."

This, for some reason, makes Eduardo laugh; a short, joyless noise. "Yeah, I thought getting a straight answer out of you might be asking for too much," he goes, and does that thing he used to do when Mark first met him (well, re-met him,) where he rubs at his temples like all of this is too much for him to handle.

Mark drifts over, uncertain, sitting down on the other end of the couch; barely, hovering uncomfortably on the edge of the cushion.

"Do you..." he starts, sounding too abrupt and too damn monotonous to his own ears, what else is new, Mark, come on. He turns his head to look at Eduardo and just asks it -- "what's going to happen to Facebook now, Eduardo?" -- because he doesn't have any say over it anymore. It's not his.

Eduardo groans, rocking forward to bury his head in his hands, fingers clenching around tufts of it. His spine curves in a defeated bend. "I can't tell you how much I don't care about that right now, Christopher," he goes. "Later. I'll deal with Facebook -- just, later, okay?"

"Right," says Mark, looking down at his socks.

The silence stretches out around them; across from them, the window's open, and the cross-breeze sends the curtains fluttering in some gossamer pantomime of breathing. Somewhere in the distance, a lawn mower goes droning away. A car with bad brakes squeals to a stop at the stop sign at the end of the lane. Eduardo rocks back and forth minutely, head still buried in his hands.

"Are you okay?"

Eduardo makes a wounded noise, not surfacing.

"Eduardo?"

"Do you think," comes up, muffled. "That it's possible to love someone once they're dead?"

Mark's heart stutters inside his chest, tripping over itself, and then starts hammering, louder than it ever has before.

"I think it's easiest to love someone when they're dead," he hears himself reply, voice steady. "It's not like they're around to annoy you by living."

Laughter chokes out of Eduardo, and he finally lets his hands fall, lifting his head up. It's the same broken, shattered look he had earlier, outside the Facebook offices, the one that made the laptop-smashing Eduardo of his memory seem almost cheerful. He scoots closer automatically, touching his fingertips to the shoulder seam of Eduardo's dress shirt. He feels, suddenly, completely out of his depth, because he's seen the professional secretary-turned-CEO face of Eduardo for so long that he's forgotten he feels things this acutely.

"Did you know," goes Eduardo, keeping his voice down to a whisper so that it doesn't shake. He huffs another laugh, and looks off into some middle distance. "Did you know that ever since I was a child, my mother has made sure to tell me and my sisters that she loved us. Every single day, she'd tell us. Every single day, no matter what had happened, no matter if we were fighting, no matter if we were separated by half the globe or almost out of minutes on our phone card, she would always call and tell us, just in case." He reaches up, wrapping his fingers around Mark's wrist and giving it a brief squeeze. "Just in case we never saw each other again. Just in case it was the last time."

Outside, a car horn blares, and Mark's on his feet before he registers moving, crossing the living room to yank the window shut.

He flicks the catch, and then freezes when he hears Eduardo go, quiet and cracked, "do you think anybody told Mark that they loved him, before he got killed?"

Mark turns slowly, his fingertips gone numb and his brain full of static.

Eduardo meets his gaze, his eyes red-rimmed and his mouth a wobbly shape. He spreads out his hands imploringly. "That's what I can't stop wondering. That's what's so horrible about this whole thing. Christopher, was there anyone who loved him enough to tell him they loved him every day of his life, just in case?"

The words hit him like individual blows to the sternum, too close, and he twists his head away sharply, blinking.

"God, I'm sorry," Eduardo tells him on an exhale; Mark sees him duck his head back down in his peripheral, wiping at his cheeks with the heels of his hand. "I don't mean to dump this on you. It kept me up at night, and I was starting to deal with it, and then this happened," he waves a hand around vaguely. "Thiel. God, how many hours did we spend sitting across from each other in the boardroom, trying to keep Mark's company together, the one thing Mark loved above everything else, everyone else, and he--" He cuts off, like the words just don't exist.

It goes right through Mark, then, as crystalline and clear as a bell jar, as sunlight on ice, and unfurls underneath his ribcage, swelling against his bones like it does when he has a particularly brilliant idea. The best ideas, the ones on par with, how about we take the entire social experience of college and put it online?

He looks at Eduardo, shocked speechless, and he thinks, someone misses Mark Zuckerberg.

He thinks, Someone cared enough about Mark Zuckerberg to lose sleep over whether or not he was alone when he died. Someone is crying for Mark Zuckerberg.

Someone is crying for you.

No one, no one, he realizes, not once since that last time he laid eyes on his littlest sister outside his house, crumpled and sobbing on the sidewalk, has he seen anyone actually grieving for him.

He's across the living room in a few short steps. Ungainly, impatient with it, he plants his knee down on the coffee table, balanced between two precarious piles of mail and almost knocking a mug off its coaster, and he lunges forward, hooking his fingers around Eduardo's face and pulling it up. He has just enough time to look him in the eyes and think, nonsensically, that he knows practically everything about Eduardo but he doesn't know what he tastes like, before he seizes his mouth for a kiss.

Eduardo makes a muffled, startled noise against Mark's lips, hands frozen somewhere in the air between them like they've been shot. Both of them have their eyes open for this; his features are too close for Mark to see clearly, broken and fractal and repeating like mirrors.

He kisses Eduardo again, because he can't not, not now, and this time --

Eduardo surges up for the return kiss, caging Mark's face between his hands to hold him still for it, and kisses him deep, achingly deep, so deep Mark can't taste or feel anything else. Eduardo, who used to be his CFO. Eduardo, whose general existence Mark used to forget for days at a time, how could he have ever forgotten. Eduardo, who misses him.

Eventually, Eduardo stops kissing him, but only because Mark's talking, mumbling, "I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I didn't know," over, and it's clear from Eduardo's soft, quick, "it's okay, it's okay," that he has no idea what Mark's apologizing for, but it doesn't matter, because he needs to say it, needs to as much as he needs to kiss Eduardo right now, the two needs are intertwined.

They're both on their feet, Mark somehow now on the sofa side of the coffee table and standing squarely in Eduardo's space.

"Are you --" Eduardo starts, tripping over it like there are a dozen and one questions that could finish that.

"Yes," Mark answers, to every single one of them. He grabs Eduardo by the hips and kisses him again.

☠.

They don't actually getting around to having sex. Not then.

They get as far as the bedroom -- technically, as far as just inside the door, before Eduardo's foot catches at his laptop power cord and he goes sprawling, dragging Mark with him down onto the carpet -- and then it's just too much effort to get back up again, not worth fighting gravity, not really, not when it's got them tangled on the floor like this.

Just as Mark is thinking of throwing a leg around the back of Eduardo's thighs to hike them up together, it strikes him just how bizarre this is, being here; Mark, hiding behind an identity stolen from an A.A. Milne novel because he's dead and he's not supposed to be fraternizing with people he knew before death and now he's pinned underneath Eduardo Saverin, the co-founder and co-inheritor of Facebook. He's his former best friend and Eduardo doesn't even know that; he thinks he's playing tonsil hockey with the pizza boy, whose greatest achievement to date is graduating from high school and successfully selling a pan-crust pizza the size of a wading pool.

He starts laughing, uncontrolled and shaking, which kills the mood shortly thereafter, because Eduardo joins in and then they just lie there like that; stomachs cramping up and laughing so hard they're without audio by this point, breathlessly giddy on a carpet that hasn't seen a vacuum in awhile, judging by the grit that collects on Mark's palms.

"Bad timing," Eduardo's mumbling, nonsensical between giggles. "Oh, such bad timing, shit, what are we doing."

And yeah, he briefly wonders if making out like this is somehow an insult to Mark Zuckerberg's memory, when the tears aren't even completely dry on Eduardo's face, before he remembers that he is Mark Zuckerberg, and he's too busy at the moment to be insulted, therefore it doesn't matter.

So he props himself up and goes back to kissing Eduardo like he'd die if they stopped.

Again.

And that, he finds, takes up enough of his concentration; the way his mouth and Eduardo's move, in and out and around each other, catching, dragging, pulling. Mark snatches up Eduardo's jaw in one hand, holding him still to be kissed deeper, and then there's that, too -- his thumb, Eduardo's cheekbone, his fingers, Eduardo's temple and the corner of his eye, all the things he's never had under his hands in his life, and why didn't anyone tell him before, just how easy it is to lose so much time and mind and heart in touching?

Not to touch someone because they're about to die, but touch them because they are alive.

Holy shit, this is Eduardo.

When Mark draws away, his mouth feels puffy, oversensitive, like it doesn't quite belong to his face anymore. He breathes out through raw lips, and Eduardo lifts a hand to drag his fingertips across them.

"Christopher," he goes on an exhale, and the way he says the name makes the corners of his eyes crinkle, a near smile.

But it jolts through Mark, shock-wrong like electrocuting himself trying to find the plug adapter in the dark, like he'd been expecting to hear a different name entirely, and he pulls back, leaving Eduardo's fingers to hover in midair, a question.

Do better this time, hisses that insidious voice in the back of his mind.

Mark darts his eyes sideways, taking in the unfamiliar surroundings for the first time and blinking away the light. He clears his throat, meeting Eduardo's gaze and saying, "I should ..." with a gesture over his shoulder that could mean anything.

Eduardo drops his hand and sits up, and just like that, they aren't touching anymore. Mark suddenly feels sober, locked in his own skin -- or, at least, the skin he borrowed and called by a different name. Mark Zuckerberg cannot, should not, kiss his best friend, he realizes, cannot sit here and be this man because one of his most loyal shareholders murdered him, and his body is rotting in a Jewish cemetery in New York. He is dead and buried and Christopher Robin cannot be him.

It seems a lot less amusing now.

He sighs, rolling to his feet to get away from that thought, and retreats. He's got that mussed-up feeling of someone who's been rolling around with somebody else's hands on them, and now he just wants to go home.

The house that Eduardo bought still looks caught in that midway point between two owners, less like a home that somebody owns and more like someplace Eduardo temporarily set up camp in. The chest of drawers in the bedroom will be empty, Mark's willing to bet: he saw the suitcase still open on the bedside chair, the suits hung up on the closet door. The wallpaper in the hallway is something he'd expect from Tilly's house: an enormous floral pattern that makes the furniture seem shrunken and claustrophobic. Somehow, it doesn't seem like Eduardo's style.

In the kitchen, he tugs his sneakers up on over his heels, laces too knotted to come undone.

Eduardo leans against the doorway. He's breathing through his mouth, which only brings Mark's attention to how swollen and red his lips look, parted as they are.

"So!" Eduardo interjects awkwardly into the quiet, like he doesn't even have to ask why Mark is clearing out. "I will ... see you tomorrow?"

Mark pulls at the tongues of his sneakers and stands. "Of course," he goes with a firm jerk of his chin. He draws a deep breath, thinking, what would Christopher say? "And about your friend. I ... I, um, apologize for my timing, what with everything that --"

Strangely, this takes the tension out of Eduardo's shoulders, and he laughs, holding up a hand to cut Mark off. "Stop while you're ahead," he goes, stepping up to him, and there's something about the way he says that, lowly amused and tolerant and suddenly, for one bright moment, looking exactly like the Eduardo Mark knew at Harvard, quick to smile and easy to please, that he forgets himself and closes the distance almost entirely against his will, snatching the front of Eduardo's shirt and pulling him into a sound kiss, because he wants to, everything else be damned, and that's something entirely new.

Huh, he thinks when the kiss breaks.

And then, shit, I'm a dead undead man.

"Get some sleep," he goes, brusque, stroking his thumb against Eduardo's jaw in a deliberate gesture before he turns to the door. "I imagine you're going to have a long day tomorrow."

☠.

But he doesn't see Eduardo the next day. Or the day after that. Or the rest of the week, to be perfectly honest.

Mark gives him the benefit of the doubt, because law enforcement catches up to Peter Thiel in a ski resort in Vermont, and the arrest makes national television; Mark stands behind the counter at work and watches CNN play the footage on loop, Thiel's silver head ducking down into the back of a squad car, the scenic mountains spread behind him. He can't hear what the newscaster is saying, and follows only enough of the closed captioning to learn that they're talking about the potential defense Thiel's going to mount.

He can't use his own lawyers, of course, because they're being held for questioning as suspects and accomplices, and Mark finds he doesn't care what defense attorney leaps for a high-profile case like this. He has no respect for anyone who would want to take on someone like Thiel.

Do you know what it's like? he thinks, eyes tracking the newscaster's expressions when they flash back to her. She straightens the papers in front of her and nods in response to a question, eyes narrowed in thought before she launches into a response about the possibility that, with the right defense throwing the right people under the bus, a rich, protected man like Thiel could walk. Do you know what it's like, to wake up dead in your own office and to see your brains and blood splattered across your carpet? Do you know what it's like to know that's it, you're never going to finish that development project for profiles, you're never going to tease your sisters as they grow up, you're never going to get married, you're never going to be so in love that you'll go three blocks out of your way every day just to sit with someone for half an hour?

"Peter Thiel took that from me," he whispers up at the television, the sound of it lost in the din of the lunch crowd. "All of that, for the one thing I couldn't have cared less about -- the money. Don't tell me there's a way to defend that."

Facebook becomes a media madhouse, unsurprisingly, which is good for the pizza business but bad for Mark's temper.

Sancha clues in after the third day, catching the way he keeps glancing at CNN and clenching his jaw hard enough to crack walnuts, and she grabs the remote from behind the cash register and switches to Two and a Half Man.

"I'd rather look at the misogynistic worm of a human being that is Charlie Sheen than hear another word about Mark Zuckerberg," she tells him, as he cracks open a new roll of quarters with more force than is probably necessary. They both glance across the store, where two teams of reporters and their cameramen are gathered around two deep-dish hamburger pizzas, and she adds, quietly, "I wish they would just let the poor man rest."

The look he gives her then is probably ridiculously, humiliatingly grateful, but he doesn't care.

He goes to sit at the University Cafe day after day, bouncing his leg by himself and pushing plausible deniability to its breaking point. At the end of the week, they run a segment on Pomona Graham, which Mark cannot watch without feeling sick. It doesn't matter how many souls he reaps, he doubts he's going to forget that she's dead because she was in the way of someone who meant to kill Mark.

And he doesn't see Eduardo.

And, right, okay, that's not surprising, what with everything that's currently going on; it's probably difficult for Eduardo, or Dustin, or Sean to go anywhere right now. And technically, Mark's not even supposed to see him. One of the rules of being a reaper: you don't contact the people from your old life, and Mark's been ignoring that one since the moment he saw Eduardo's reflection in the bathroom in Redwood City. Technically, Eduardo contacted him, he keeps on telling himself, which, whatever.

Stop it, he thinks on Friday, sitting down on the curb in the middle of suburbia after releasing a reap's soul, waiting for her to die. He's your best friend and he thinks you're dead. It's probably better this way. You should not have this homing device in your brain that says, oh, hey, how can we fuck over Eduardo Saverin today, so stop it.

It's a busy, sunshine-bright day, and there are kids racing around someone's postage-stamp sized yard, kicking a soccer ball around with more enthusiasm than any attempt at organized sport, and a couple men in jewel-tone dress shirts lingering at the bottom of a cracked driveway, chatting amicably, and then there's K. Morgan, digging through her backpack looking for something with her bike propped up against the fence next to her.

A man in a Santa Cruz shirt comes out onto the porch, laughing and waving a small, pocket-sized book. K. Morgan turns around at the sound of his voice, her whole face lighting up at the sight of what he's holding, and then she runs back up, taking the stairs in a single bound so she can wrestle it from him. They tussle at the top of the steps, until she gets a good kick in and wrenches it from his hands.

She's still laughing triumphantly over her shoulder as she flies back to her bike, snatching it up by the handlebars and pushes off into the street, right as a beat-up old Buick comes speeding through the stop sign.

The little book lands cover-up on the pavement in front of Mark, skidding a little bit with momentum. Travel Guide to: Paris, he reads upside down. He picks it up and wipes the blood off on the grass.

Standing up, he tucks the book into the pocket of his jacket, where it stretches out the fabric. He walks away. The Buick's hood is crumpled up like a rug, its horn wailing loud and continuous from the impact. The kids have scattered, ball lying forgotten in the grass.

A pair of footsteps fall in beside him.

"Hello, Keisha," he says quietly.

"Hello, Mark," she replies.

Behind them, the man who'd fought her for the book is screaming, wordless and terrified and hoarse with fear. Mark doesn't know who he is: Keisha's brother or lover or cousin or friend, it doesn't matter, because grief for a loved one is the same no matter who it comes from. "Oh god oh god Keisha," he moans out finally, like he's the one who suffered the mortal wound. "Keisha, hang in there, okay? We're calling an ambulance, you'll be all right."

Mark thumbs at the corner of the pages of the travel guide in his pocket. He doesn't turn around to look.

The man's voice is cracking, wavering, less a scream now and more of a plea. "Hey, hey, come on, stay with me. Stay with me, Keisha."

But Keisha's already gone, walking ghost-silent next to Mark. She looks back, because that's what people do, and her throat works.

"Did you ever talk to Kevin?" Mark asks her, because weirdly enough, it's one of those things he always wondered. Multi-billion dollar company left behind, and one of the things he dwells on at length is whether or not the little weak-chinned intern ever confessed his crush.

"Kevin?" Keisha's brows come down. "Wait, Kevin from Legal? Oh, he's nice. He'll share his Chinese food with me sometimes at lunch, even though I'm supposed to stick to those silly 100-calorie packs. Don't tell him," she grins enough to show teeth. "But I really look forward to the days he orders Chinese. Why'd you ask, though?" Confusion clouds her face. "Boss-man, please don't tell me you're haunting the offices, that is so creepy."

"It doesn't work like that," Mark says dryly. "Though not for lack of trying."

"Color me shocked," she lifts her palms up. "Okay. Seriously, what was I supposed to talk to Kevin about?"

Mark already has his answer, but he shrugs. "He was in love with you," he says, and Keisha stops dead in her tracks. He stops too, looking back at her, and at the expression on her face, adds, "We all knew."

"Did you?" Keisha says, very soft, and then she stamps her foot, face turning blotchy and livid. "Well, how was I supposed to know? He never said anything. You never said anything! How does anyone know if you don't just come out and say it!"

Mark steps up to her, and -- not even knowing what he's doing until he's doing it because this is so not what he does -- wraps her up in a hug. She makes a choked, startled noise, because Mark has not come within five feet of her since he shook her hand when she first started working on Facebook.

And then she hugs him back, quickly, like she thinks he's going to pull away, and she says in a little mournful whisper, "We're dead, Mark. We're dead, and no one was brave enough to tell us they loved us when we were alive."

"I know." And then he does pull back, offering her a smile. "Come on, you've got somewhere you need to go."

"Do you think there will be heartbreak there?" she wants to know.

"For you? No."

She doesn't look back this time.

☠.

Mark's known for awhile that what Kawali gives them isn't all the information he receives from Upper Management about the people they have to reap, but it didn't seem all that important, since name, place, and ETD were more than enough to get by.

"Anything else and you might start empathizing," he tells them when he loads the pertinent information. "And that's dangerous. You need to be professional no matter who the reap is. I don't care what kind of jobs you've had before, it was nothing compared to what you got now. You need to be professional here, because people are dying."

So when Mark, letting himself into the empty library late one night -- so late that it's more morning now; even the insects have fallen quiet and the books on the shelves are indistinguishable from the darkness, tucked into their silent, immobile little worlds -- finds in Kawali's card catalogue (which he's very bad about keeping out of reach of reapers who can't sleep) a floppy titled "Dep. External Influence: Last Thoughts," it all comes rushing back to him, the idea that there's more to being a grim reaper than what Kawali gives them.

Unable to curb his curiosity, Mark turns to the old dinosaur Macs, turning the floppy disk over in his hands as he waits for one of them to boot up.

"What's the point," he asks out loud, keeping his voice down to a whisper because that's what you do in a library at night. "Of knowing what a person thinks right before they die? That sounds counterproductive, and depressing."

The floppy disk, unsurprisingly, doesn't reply, and so Mark shoves it into the slot in the Mac.

"Oh, holy shit," he breathes a moment later, because it isn't so much a list as it is an archive.

There are so many names, so, so, so many names that the scroll wheel narrows down to the thinnest sliver, and this has to be a voodoo'd floppy disk, because there's no way it has that kind of memory space for a file this large. The dates on here go back to the sixteenth century.

He scans a few, overwhelmed by the multitude -- first initial, last name, date, and the very last thought they ever had before they died.

Many of them, he notices, are questions. Why? Why me? What's going on? Why are you doing this? What's going to happen now?

A lot of them are regrets. I should have told her. I should have never trusted you. I should have given the chicken to Matilda (Mark blinks at that one.) I shouldn't have been rushing. I should have seen this coming.

"This is depressing," he mutters, and then he does what every person does when confronted with a long list of people: he opens a Command+F prompt and fills in his own name.

There are three Zuckerbergs who have died in the West Bay Area since the sixteenth century, which makes Mark momentarily glad for having an obscure last name, before he realizes that one of them is an R. Zuckerberg, who will die in 2015 and whose last thought will be, well, this is ironic.

Mark's hands clench into fists of their own accord, because one of his little sisters shares that initial, and this better not be her or Mark will rain holy hell down on Death itself, he doesn't even care how extremely fired that will get him, because this isn't how it's supposed to work. His mother, his father, the sisters so close to him in age they got called Irish triplets all through their childhood, and then his littlest sister who loved him best -- none of them are allowed to die, not for years. They're supposed to die at an old age, in their beds, peaceful and without surprise.

That's the cosmic trade-off, Mark thinks, gritting his teeth. Are you listening? I was the one who died young and violently -- that's not allowed to happen to my family! Don't you think I earned that much?

The library is silent.

Listed right above that R. Zuckerberg who better not be related is M. Zuckerberg, who died April 15, 6:29 AM.

His last thought was: I can do better than this.

His fingers move of their own accord, filling more names into the flickering search bar.

Of the two Kawika'ainas that died on November 1, 1951, there's a K and an L. Their last thoughts were the same: I love you.

T. Tibbs, 1971. I'll do anything, just make it stop. She'd been mauled by dogs, Mark remembers.

J. Moore, 2005. If you try to kill me, you yellow-eyed bastard, I will rip your spleen out through your nose.

Mackey's last thought was, are you fucking kidding me? which sounds so like him that Mark's startled into laughter, sharp and loud in the graveside silence of the library.

Keisha. I'll miss this when you leave.

The list goes into the future by at least a couple years, he knows, and hesitates a little bit, fingertips just barely flirting along the edges of the keys. He's only gotten the first three letters of Saverin typed in before a voice speaks up from behind him, "He's not going to walk, little man."

Mark jumps clear out of his skin, because how can a man as heavy-set as Kawali manage to walk up so silently in the dead of night? He spins around in his seat, heart thundering in his ears and fingers knuckle-white on the chair back.

"What?" he goes, brilliantly.

Kawali gives him a patient look, standing at the end of the table. "The corporate haole man. He's getting charged with your murder and he's going to serve the time for it, I've made sure."

He's talking about Thiel, Mark realizes, and he blinks.

"How --" he starts.

The light bulb goes on.

Mark feels his eyes double in size. "It was you!" he exclaims, pointing a finger at Kawali and flying up out of his chair. "You were the anonymous tip! I saw you that day I took pizzas to the Facebook offices -- you weren't there because you wanted Pomona Graham's key, you wanted to follow up on your investigation into the day I was killed. You figured out that it was Maurice with the baseball bat, and Peter Thiel hired him to take a hit on me, and you gave that evidence to the cops!"

And, as if the motor movement of his mouth sends all the wheels in his brain turning, something else suddenly makes sense. "And the little girl!" he goes, tripping over it in his haste. He knows he's right. "The little girl who was murdered in the woods, the one with the unicorn, you got that guy too, and then the --" more of them click into place, all the anonymous tips sent into the county sheriff's office over the years, the ones that made the paper, that Jessica pointed out to them every morning, going, hey, these were our reaps.

The West Bay has the highest rate of solved murders in the entire state.

Justice for all the victims that their team had to watch die.

"You solve them," he concludes, looking at Kawali with something like wonder.

Kawali ducks his head, lifting his broad, quarterback shoulders in a surprisingly shy gesture, kind of like, ah, shucks.

"Why?" Mark breathes.

Walking over, Kawali pulls out the chair next to Mark and sits down, gesturing that he should do the same. He doesn't say anything for a long moment, looking Mark up and down, and just as Mark is getting impatient, he reaches into the breast pocket of his shirt, taking out a small, folded piece of paper. He holds it out.

Mark unfolds it gingerly, noting that the creases are as fragile as gossamer, well-worn from handling.

It's a sketch of a woman, all dark-haired Pacific Islander like Kawali, thick-browed and full-mouthed. Her eyes are enormous, black, the corners of them smudged, like maybe Kawali ran his fingertips over them too often.

"I don't have any photographs," Kawali goes, heavy like a confession. "Nothing of ours survived, so I asked one of the sketch artists at the precinct if they could draw it up for me as a favor. The one thing I never wanted was to forget her face."

"Is this ..." Mark trails off.

"My wife," Kawali confirms. "Her name's Lehua. We died together," which Mark already knew, and they must have had time to realize what was going to happen to them, time enough to turn to each other and think the same thing. "We were on our way home -- Kona born and bred, you know, kama'aina through and through -- and just taking off from the Moffett airfield. The plane we were on was sabotaged: it went down on the beach. Murder, of course, but not intended for us." He shrugs, a bitter jerk of his shoulders. "We were collateral damage, not important. My wife got her lights. And I ..."

He shrugs again, as if to say, here I am.

"So I tracked down the guy that brought down our plane, and I made sure he went to jail. I had to do it for Lehua, but -- but, little man, it don't stop. It don't stop, and so I don't stop. As long as there are people getting killed on our watch, we're gonna guard their souls, and I'm gonna catch their killers. I don't think I can do anything else. I have to."

And Mark gets it; it's like the way he needs to hack into Facebook, not to meddle, not to haunt, just to see. Just to check. It's the same way he needs to see Eduardo's face and hear his voice, no matter how stupid or against the rules it is; he absolutely physically cannot stop himself.

"It bothers me, though," Kawali murmurs, speaking more to himself now. "It's been years, and the murder that keeps me awake on nights like this is Jessica's."

Mark sits up a little bit. "I always thought her apartment burned down by accident," he says. "But her last thought was directed at somebody with her."

"And they killed her," Kawali nods. "Impaled her on the ceiling and lit her on fire."

"Holy shit," goes Mark, horror going cold inside of him.

"I'm still looking. The evidence points to her boyfriend, but ..." he shakes his head. "I haven't been able to find him. He disappeared. I think she looks for him, too, but," he smiles here. "She's not supposed to, so don't tell her that we know."

"Right."

Kawali studies him for another long moment, his expression somewhere between sympathetic and fond. He pulls himself out of his chair and claps Mark on the shoulder.

"Why don't you go home and go to sleep, little man?" he says gently. "We got your back. We'll watch over you."

"I know," says Mark, and he turns around to shut down the Mac.

☠.

Sancha doesn't give him any warning before she grabs him by the nipple as he walks past her towards the freezers, yanking him around in front of her. There's a fierce, pay attention gleam to her eyes.

"Ow," he complains, hands flying up to cup his nipple protectively when she lets him go. "You need to learn how to properly initiate human contact," he informs her plaintively, fully aware of the irony of Mark Zuckerberg lecturing anybody on socially acceptable behavior. "Haven't you ever heard of just, like, tapping somebody on the shoulder? I hear it works wonders."

She ignores this. "You," she jabs a finger into his sternum. "Are moping. Why are you moping?"

"I do not mope," Mark retorts, indignant.

She arches her eyebrows, politely dubious. She leans in to study Mark's face -- his eyes flick longingly behind her towards the freezers -- and she must see something there, because next, she drums her fingers on her hips and demands, "Okay, what's her name?"

Mark's head snaps back. "What?"

"Whatever girl is making your face all sad and hangdog. Wait, no," she frowns thoughtfully. "I don't actually that know for certain. I'm sorry for assuming -- crap, you'd think this is something I'd have learned about you by now. Um, his name? Or, or, shit, wait, are you ace, and am I totally putting my foot in my mouth right now? You kind of strike me as ace, to be perfectly honest. Not -- not that, like, I'm trying to jump to conclusions just because --"

She genuinely seems worried that she's insulted him, and he watches her chase herself in circles of political correctness before he takes pity on her and goes, "It's not what you think." He hasn't really given much thought to gay, straight, or asexual in terms of how they applied to him, because it hasn't seemed like the most important part of his identity. Girls are kind of amazing, he thinks; the way it feels to kiss their lip gloss off of them is probably one of Mark's favorite things, right up there between congratulations! your domain name has been registered, and Cinnamon Toast Crunch.

But Eduardo ... Mark could spend all of his spare time kissing Eduardo, no matter if the name on his tongue was Mark or Christopher, and be perfectly happy doing it. So ... what does that make him?

Shit. This was probably on one of Chris's flash cards.

He fumbles. "It isn't -- we're -- no, he's --"

Sancha's eyebrows flare up.

"Not what you think," Mark insists, and then something occurs to him. "Sancha," he drags out questioningly, giving her the fish-eye. "Are you trying to give me relationship advice?"

She tilts her chin up, like, and what's wrong with that? "Or sex advice," she admits blithely. "Depending on what, exactly, is disappointing you so hardcore."

"No," Mark heads her off, warningly. "First off, no. Secondly ... no. And thirdly, I am not taking sex advice from someone who uses Texts From Last Night as a source of inspiration."

She looks like she's going to snap back with something sarcastic, and then she tilts her head, conceding the point.

"Okay," she goes agreeably. "Just so we're clear. This 'he.' Is this problem with him a 'we have differing ideological world view points and I need to casually dispose of his body somewhere it won't be found' kind of problem, or is this problem with him more of the 'oh hey look where did my pants go' whenever you're around him variety."

"Can I just go and get some more cheese?" Mark says weakly, gesturing towards the freezers.

His reap that day falls later in the evening, past the time the train stops running and most businesses and restaurants have closed. Unintentionally, Mark gets there a full thirty minutes before the ETD, and finds himself standing across the street from the old, abandoned theater in Menlo Park, trying not to be too amused by the whole thing, because he's a grim reaper and he's haunting the haunted Menlo Park movie theater and it's almost as precious as the forced cannibalism story.

There's a ghost tale about the place, something Mark's only picked up bits and pieces of from listening in to some of his elderly neighbors and the folks in Natural Causes -- a lonely one-armed war veteran named Stanley bought the property in the late 50s and built a movie theater that played most Cannes Film Festival stuff and old black-and-whites, and he refused to let it go bankrupt, even when customers lost interest and a whole hoard of car dealerships tried to buy out the street. Even after he died, nobody bought it, as if they could still see him sitting in the box office, with his pinstripe vest and popcorn-seller's hat.

So here the theater stays, the facade coming apart and construction tape cordoned across the sidewalk, the windows broken and boarded up. It looks woebegone, forgotten, tucked ashamedly in between a Subway and a new-age Tibetan imports store, both freshly painted and bright.

He's still standing there when a flashy silver BMW pulls up to the curb and somebody gets out of the back seat, lanky and tripping over himself. The driver's voice floats out to Mark from the open door, covering up his concern with disbelief: "You sure this is what you want, Neems? Looks super-sketch to me."

Mark checks the inside of his arm.

M. Neemprakash
10:44 PM
1st tier, 7745 El Camino Real
Menlo Park

It's close enough. The boy, Neems, is hanging onto the car frame, talking lowly and persuasively through the open door to the driver, so Mark pulls his sleeve back down and crosses the street. He taps him on the shoulder, pointing out that they're in a fire zone and the cops around this stretch of El Camino like to give tickets first, ask questions later, smiling his most bland, forgettable smile.

"I'll be fine," Neems says again to the driver, slamming the door shut on any further discussion. He stuffs his hands in his pockets, cantering slowly down the sidewalk, but it isn't until the car pulls away that he doubles back, hopping over the construction tape and pulling back one of the loose boards on the theater doors. He slithers his way inside, disappearing without a trace.

Mark pauses, leaning against the wall next to a "Coming Soon" poster for Jurassic Park: the Lost World.

He's thinking he's got it pegged as a drug deal gone wrong, or some kind of stupid gang initiation. So when a long-haired girl in flare jeans, high school age and carrying a thick heavy tome of The Art of Marvel's Mighty Thor tucked under her arm, comes to stand on the curb, he doesn't make the connection right away, not until he spots tiny, elderly Tilly come out of the alleyway.

She hobbles her way up to the girl, saying in her soft-spoken voice, "Excuse me, you dropped this," and hands her something that looks like a bus pass. It's too dark to see if she flushes, but the girl ducks her head, stammering something. Under her skin, her soul glows freely, and she pockets the card, slipping into the haunted theater after Neems.

Oh, thinks Mark.

Tilly walks over to him and slips her arm through his. "Well, dear," she goes. "Shall we?"

Inside the theater lobby, the paint's peeled off the walls in long strips, and huge chunks of the carpet are missing, thick and choked with dust. The candy cases are burst, the glass shards crunching underfoot, and unintelligible graffiti streaks the walls behind them. Just inside the heavy, swinging theater doors, they can hear Neems and the girl talking, halting and breathlessly brave, like conversation with the other is the most daring thing they can dream, so Tilly nudges him and points silently towards the stairs.

The haunted theater has two levels of seats like an old amphitheater, and there are balcony booths, too, all along the sides, like where Mark imagines royalty might sit, or like the kind Abraham Lincoln got shot in. It's to one of these that Tilly leads him, and they settle themselves into seats with padding that has mostly rotted away. They have a clear view of the girl and Neems down below, bent over her book.

He tucks a lock of her hair behind her ear, and her voice stutters.

Sitting next to Tilly and watching her toes dangle above the gritty floor, Mark realizes he hasn't ever spent any time with her alone before. He doesn't know much about her; she was mauled by dogs in 1971, she's a librarian with stiff joints, so the library is the easiest place to meet and get assignments. Although she's older than Kawali, she died later, so he still has more experience than she does, and she seems, at most, amusedly perplexed by Mark's general fame ("your infamy, Mark, don't flatter yourself, I've read your Wikipedia," Jessica says,) and she always has something nice to say to her reaps.

When he glances at her, he finds her looking right back, her eyes twinkling.

"I suppose," she goes in a quiet undertone. "This is the part where I wisely advise you about matters of the undeath, and warn you off that boy you're seeing."

He fixes her with a scowl. "You and Sancha both," he mutters rebelliously. "There is no boy." In his head, Eduardo doesn't register as just that boy or this particular 'he', or anything that needs mentioning of any kind, thank you very much. People need to stop meddling.

Tilly "hmm"s in the back of her throat, but she doesn't immediately try to contradict him. Instead, she looks down at her lap, turning her hands over and running her thumb over her age spots, as if they're dirt she could scrub away with enough force.

"That's the thing about getting older, I suppose," she says offhandedly. "Is I've had so much longer to live than all you did, so believe me when I tell you that from here on out, it's just one long inevitable slide of loss. The people you know will get older, and they will die. Some earlier than others. And that's one more person you will never see again, never talk to, never hear about. Until suddenly, you're the only one left. So no, Mark Zuckerberg, I will never fault you for wanting to be this man's friend. Not while you still can."

She looks over at him. Her hair is thinning on top, he notes, but it's still long, white, and pinned away from her eyes with a heavy silver barrette.

"I think you know what I'm talking about," she says. "Those who gain will also lose, and those who lose will also gain. I think it's fair that you, who have lost your fortune, your company, and your life, should at least get to gain a love."

Mark automatically opens his mouth to protest, but she cuts him off by holding up her hand.

"Please don't insult the both of us by trying to deny it," and Mark's mouth snaps shut again. "No matter what we tell each other, there's always something from our old lives that we can't let go," she informs him with a quiet certainty. "There's always some rule we're driven to break. It's why they're rules, I think -- to warn us how much it'll cost us."

Down below, the boy and the girl keep stealing glances at each other, like all they want to do is kiss, but neither of them are quite courageous enough to know how to take that risk. Neems curls her hair around his finger, wanting, and her grip on her book is white-knuckled.

You should kiss her, Mark thinks out to him, hoping somehow he'll be able to hear it. You should get to kiss her at least once before you die. Just to know.

He meets Tilly's eyes, light-colored as smoke even in the unlit theater.

"How long do you think we'll have to keep doing this?" he asks her, writing his name in the dust on the arm chair -- his real one and his reaper one. "Watching people lose and lose?"

"I have for forty years, and Pierre has been taking souls since the light bulb was the newfangled thing," she shrugs. "Young man, I'm in no rush to fill my quota. I don't think that's the way to look at it, as just some dead-end -- please excuse the pun -- job where we count the days until it's over. I have no interest in how long I'll be in this state, or what comes after." A sharp, sparkling laugh echoes up to them from below, and something softens around the corners of Tilly's mouth. "We already have the most important job anyone on this earth could possibly be charged with. We care for souls."

"We save them from feeling the pain of their death?" Mark guesses.

"Yes. We are not bodies that have a soul, Mark, we are souls that have a body. We are more than their expiration date, because we do not stop when our bodies stop -- we go on."

"Doesn't stop the hurt of loss, now, though, does it?" he breaks in. With a nod down to the lovers in the rusting old seats, "We love each other, and death can take that from us." He thinks of the way his sister sobbed in front of his house, crumpled on herself like if she went clawing at her own chest she'd find it empty, and the way Eduardo's voice cracked when he wondered if Mark had died knowing that somebody loved him.

Her fingers immediately curl around the fleshy part of his hand. "You know that's not true," she tells him, soft. "You are dead, and death has not stopped the way you love that young man. Death cannot even touch love."

"I -- I don't --" he tries.

She squeezes his hand until she has his eyes again.

"All love is true love, I think," she comments, her voice purposefully mild. "I mean, you feel it, don't you, so what possible reasoning could you attach to it to make it mean any less? What's important is that you feel it, not the reason why you feel it," she goes, the same way Mark always tried to explain to people how he and Eduardo became friends: you don't need an excuse to be friends. Maybe you don't need an excuse to love, either.

Is it really that easy?

She lets go of his hand, nodding, like she can see some of this play out.

"I like to think that love is the one thing we as souls bring to this world of flesh and material."

He casts her a wry glance. "I think you spend too much time in the library with your books."

"So do you," she returns knowingly. "We all have someone we love to the point of ruin, Mark. Someone we would destroy ourselves for without hesitation. Kawali loves his wife. Jessica loves that man she searches endlessly for. And you have yours."

He shifts, the rusty seat creaking with him, because isn't the point of loving someone to the point of ruin to have something to ruin? Mark refused to ruin Facebook for Eduardo. But then again, he didn't love the younger Eduardo the way he loves this one.

It's that thought that stops him, because even inside the privacy of his own head, it feels all-consuming.

Like an epiphany.

"Tilly --" he starts abruptly.

Her reply is instant. "I'll look out for the lovers, and see they get to where they're going. You should probably go."

It's like a jolt to the system, that permission, and Mark launches himself out of his chair. "Thank you," he goes, fervent and burning with it, and heads for the door. He's got his hand on the doorknob when something occurs to him, and he turns around, his shoes crunching loudly in the dirt.

"Tilly?" he asks.

In the gloom, he can see her profile, turned towards him. "Hmmm?"

"What about you? What does Tabitha Tibbs love to the point of ruin?"

Even in the dark and even from his distance, he catches the way her eyes fold up at the corners, an almost smile.

"My children," she answers, in a far-off, wistful voice, and suddenly, everything she said about the inevitable slope of loss makes sense. Mark's flesh crawls at the thought of his littlest sister growing up and not being to be there for a moment of it. It has to be a hundred times worse with your children. "Which is not something any of you have known; not you -- although why would you -- and not Jessica -- who was just a child, the poor dear -- and not even Kawali and his lovely wife. I ... oh," she murmurs. "I would have stopped Death itself for my children."

"Did you?" he blurts out before he can check himself.

This time, she cranes all the way around, so she can look right at him when she says, "To my everlasting regret, I did not."

She gazes at him, and he gazes at her, and they hold steady for a long, long moment, and Mark knows that they understand each other perfectly.

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Quick-n-Dirty Hawaiian
1. kama'aina (Kona born and bred, you know, kama'aina through and through) - literally, "grown from the earth." It refers to anyone who was born on the islands, regardless of race or heritage.