Fic: No Wealth and No Ruin [The Social Network/Dead Like Me][7/8]

[antistar_e]

☠.

He feels kind of like a superhero, in the minutes and hours after he goes flying out of the abandoned theater, Tilly's words echoing in his ears. Like that moment you get a really good jump on a trampoline and it amazes you that you can do this, can propel yourself this high and stay suspended for so long, and Mark feels like Peter Parker just as he figures out that he has radioactive spider powers, can do things nobody else knows how to do. He's not helpless, he doesn't have to let this happen. This is something he can do.

The next day, he borrows Jessica's truck.

She won't let him take it until she's done with her reap for the day, so it's afternoon before she hands over her keys, looking wary and intrigued by turns.

And okay, so maybe he hasn't really driven in a long time, but it's fine. Once he accidentally reverses into a mailbox and gets that out of the way, it all comes back to him. His family had a four-car sedan that he learned to drive with, and then he got plenty of practice adjusting other people's cars for his needs, driving home drunk colleagues and his delirious assistants, and Jess's Ford pick-up sits higher up in traffic than he's used to, but as long as he doesn't unexpectedly come across any little old ladies he can't see, he'll be fine.

It's a Sunday, and when Mark pulls up to Eduardo's house, the neighborhood is weekend-quiet, the traffic on Middlefield slow and unhurried.

Eduardo himself is at the end of his driveway, bending over to pick up the Sunday paper. He's dressed in jeans and a shirt that don't quite go well together, but he still looks more presentable fetching the newspaper than Mark did even at high-profile business meetings. He lifts his head curiously when Mark swings the truck into the empty spot by the curb, without finesse or much consideration for the rules of parallel parking.

He rolls down the passenger side window and leans across the console to shout, "Get in, loser, we're going on a day trip."

For a beat, Eduardo just stands there, newspaper in hand, looking gobsmacked -- literally, like someone had come and smacked him right across the face.

It clears, and Eduardo glances behind him at the house, like he's doing a mental check to see if there's anything he needs in there or anything he'd rather be doing, before he obediently cuts across the lawn and yanks open the passenger side door.

"Paraphrasing Mean Girls at me, Christopher?" he goes, as if they're merely continuing some kind of conversation they started earlier. He tosses the newspaper down into the footwell. "Really?"

Mark shrugs, nonchalant. "You had sisters at an impressionable age when that movie came out, I had sisters at an impressionable age when that movie came out. These things happen. We acknowledge it and move on."

Swinging back out onto Middlefield, Mark hears Eduardo say from right next to him, "I didn't know you had a truck."

"I don't."

Eduardo looks amused, like Mark is something inexplicable and strange that just dropped out of the sky -- to be fair, he usually looks like that around Mark. "You stole a truck from Good Will?"

"No! I borrowed it from a friend. Now shut up and stop antagonizing your kidnapper."

He holds up his hands in acquiescence, chuckling, "just when I think I might have you figured out. Are all you pizza guys this unpredictable," and leaning his head against the passenger side window, like he's settling in for a nap.

Mark takes them west out of the valley, out of the sprawling megalopolis and into the classic California hills; spring-green and not quite golden yet, the cows grazing away right up against the fence. Eduardo sits up as they go past the reservoir, dark-deep and ethereal blue, saying, "I didn't know this was up here. I always meant to go exploring, but ..." Through the hills they go, and into the forests, where the redwood trees soar up to meet the sky like the ground has gotten too boring for them, and past That One Really Freaky Christmas Tree Farm with the Life-Size Wood Carvings of Famous Presidents that makes Eduardo's head crane around, laughing in disbelief.

Where Mark and Eduardo live is about an hour away from the coast, which is why he always rolls his eyes extra hard when relatives and Harvard psuedo-friends asks him how he likes the California beaches, because Mark's only been out there about twice in the entire time he's been living in Silicon Valley, and even then, forcibly against his will.

Eduardo reads him the Sunday comics, and then flips down a corner of his newspaper when they pass through Half-Moon Bay, a sleepy seaside town that's pretty much obliterated by fog nine months out of the year.

"Are you taking me to the beach? Really?" he goes interestedly, when Mark swings them onto a coastal access road, bumping over the dirt and sand. They can see the ocean; a slim, flat line of blue that smudges out the horizon. "I didn't take you to be much of a beach person."

"It's not one of my recreational hobbies, no," Mark replies, since that isn't exactly a lie -- the last time he came out this way, it was the dead of night and a bunch of kids buried their gullible class scapegoat and casually forgot to dig him back up again.

Mark pulls them into a vacant lot. The cold hits like a slap to the face as soon as he hops out of the truck, and this is another reason he always laughs when people asks him how he likes the beach -- you don't go swimming, or sun-bathing, or anything like that in northern California. Sometimes, you can surf, if you have a full-body wetsuit. If not, you wade up to your waist and then you try not to cry like a little bitch. Swimming off the northern California coast is a lot like running through the snowy Harvard commons in the middle of January, barefoot.

Eduardo follows him, crossing his arms over his chest as the wind howls through him, setting his hair to immediate disarray.

"Christopher?" he goes, and Mark doubles back to grab him by the hand, like a child.

Instead of leading him down the steep, rocky path down the beach, Mark tugs him along the cliff face, the rocks sharp and sloping under their feet. Over their shoulders, the sky and the sea come out in several different shades of grey -- it's hard to hear the surf over the sound of the wind.

He pulls them along, their hands warm against each other's, until he sees it; a dead lightning-struck tree, bent double and stripped bare to white by the sea winds. And just beyond it, there's an overlook, a deep crevasse cut into the cliff.

"This!" he announces proudly, tugging Eduardo to his side. In the narrow confines of the crevasse, the wind catches the sea spray and sends it twirling like a dust dervish, a pantomime of its own little weather system. The porous holes in the sides of the cliff make a sound almost like whistling, or singing, eerie and ghost-like. It's like looking at a world caught in a snow-globe.

"I know very little about California impresses you," Mark says out of the side of his mouth. "But there is this."

There's no response, and Mark looks over to find Eduardo looking right back, not even watching the wind tunnel show, his mouth quirked all to one side and his eyes soft.

"You are seriously one of the nicest people I know," he says, the words caught and snatched away from his mouth, but not before Mark jolts, startled, because that's not something Eduardo has ever said to him, ever. "Nobody else would have gone to all this trouble, just because I like the weather."

He opens his mouth to say, nastily, that's because I lost Facebook and, besides my family, you're the next best thing I have, so I might as well spend time on you, just to make Eduardo stop looking at him like that, but the wind picks up again, whistling a harmony over the holes in the rock.

They stay until their fingers go numb and a storm starts to roll in from the sea, heavy grey clouds tumbling over each other to reach the coastline. They pick their way back along the cliff until they reach the parking lot, and then Eduardo pauses, looking out towards the waves. He turns and offers Mark an enormous, shit-eating grin, before he snatches his hand from his and takes off, slip-sliding his way down the path to the beach. Mark goes to the edge and watches him shed his shirt and shuck out of his jeans, barely breaking stride as he runs head-long into the surf, the wings of his shoulders flexing as he disappears under the water.

He comes up again almost immediately, yelping about the cold.

The beach is mostly deserted except for a small party on horseback a ways away, plodding their way through the sand. Mark sits down on the rocks, folding his legs and watching as Eduardo dives back under; he's laughing when he surfaces again, loud and bright.

Mark sees the moment when the laughter goes a little hysterical and then turns to a rage, sees Eduardo lash out at the water in anger and fury, screaming; that laptop-smashing rage he never thought Eduardo was capable of until he saw it. He thinks at one point he hears, "he was my best friend, you asshole!", choked with grief and helplessness.

Somewhere in the distance, thunder rumbles in response.

When Eduardo returns to him, pulling his shirt back on over his wet shoulders, the damp spots showing, he looks exhausted, but calmer, and Mark thinks that maybe the point of this trip wasn't to look at the weather after all.

"Holy shit, that water's cold," Eduardo tells him, breathless, smiling at the sight of Mark windswept and huddled up on the cliff like a tern.

"Yeah, welcome to northern California," Mark goes dryly.

They pick their way through the horse poop back to the truck, Eduardo quiet and Mark still turning over his words in his head, on an endless loop, you are the nicest person I know.

Nice isn't really an adjective that gets used in conjunction with Mark very often. To be fair, he makes a more concentrated effort to say nice things these days; first with the help of Chris's flash cards and then on his own power, but nice isn't the first thing that comes to mind when you're describing Mark Zuckerberg. Especially not if you're Eduardo; in fact, the nicest thing Mark could ever recall saying to him was all the way back in Harvard, one night when Mark was desperate to get his CS set done and Eduardo wanted a sympathetic ear about his latest break-up, and in a last-ditch attempt to get him to focus on something else, Mark swung around in his chair and said, look, if it's that important to you -- if you haven't found someone and are happily settled down by the time you're thirty-five, I will come and marry you. There, now you have incentive to go find somebody.

So no, nice and Mark didn't really get along.

Christopher Robin, though... He could probably afford to be nice. Christopher Robin might, in fact, be the nicest person in Eduardo's world now, he doesn't know.

"I kind of wish I could talk to him," Eduardo says suddenly. "Mark, I mean," and Mark's head snaps around like it always does when Eduardo says his real name. "Just to ... I don't know, I'd like to tell him about this," he gestures at the cliff and the beach and the sky. "I could never predict what he was going to say. That was half the fun of it, sometimes." Mark knows what the 'but' is in that statement, because half of Mark's unpredictability were remarks like, it probably was a diversity thing, knowing even as he said it that it was a dick thing to say and unable to stop himself.

However, Eduardo doesn't bring it up, like it's not the important part.

Instead, he tilts his head to one side and he says, "You remind me of him sometimes, you know," and Mark tries not to die of irony on the spot. "You possess a lot of the same good qualities and I swear you think like him, too ..." He trails off, and then blanches, like he's realizing what's coming out of his mouth. "Oh god, I'm sorry, that's all kind of psychologically screwed-up, isn't it, telling you I think you're attractive because you're a lot like my dead friend --"

And Mark shuts him up with a kiss.

Eduardo catches him by the back of the head and holds him there, fingers feathered through Mark's hair and his mouth tasting cold as seawater.

Mark pulls back, staying pressed up close against Eduardo, who, if anything, looks amused. Mark will take that over distant and grieving.

"Am I going to get a kiss every time I mention Mark around you?" he wants to know, and he could sound a little more smug about this, but he'd have to try pretty hard.

"That depends," Mark replies, voice low. "How about, every time you think you miss him, you kiss me."

Eduardo shrugs, "I'll always miss him," which Mark has known since he first went over to Eduardo's house the day Maurice confessed to murder; that Eduardo missed Mark more than Mark missed him, saw it again just now with Eduardo screaming abuse at the sea, but the enormity of it still takes him by surprise. You barely spoke five words to me after you signed a nondisclosure agreement saying you'd never say a bad word about me, he thinks, but as a kneejerk attempt to make it mean any less, it's feeble.

"Then you'll always be kissing me," he replies, with the same shrug, like it didn't matter either way. "And then every time you think of him, you'll think of kissing me, and it won't be so bad. Psychological conditioning, or something something something to that regard," he waves it off.

"I don't think grief works like that," but Eduardo's smiling, and leaning in so that their foreheads touch. Mark tilts into it, minutely.

"I'm so lucky I met you," Eduardo murmurs.

Mark retorts, "I deliver pizzas. Everyone's lucky to meet me."

Eduardo's fingers tighten in his hair. "Promise me something," he goes, serious now. "Christopher. Can you promise me that, in case something happens to you, that you'll always tell your friends what's important? So you'll never have anything that was left unsaid. Promise me --"

"I love you," Mark tells him, because he doesn't need any further prompting than that.

He can still hear Keisha saying, how is anyone supposed to know if you never tell them?

"In case you die," he says strongly. "You should know that."

And Eduardo looks at him, lightning-struck, his eyes wide and startled and dark as shipwrecks. And then his hands drop to Mark's hips and he pushes him back, one step, two step, around the front of Jessica's truck. One hand slips to the small of Mark's back, pulling him close, the other fumbling along the side of the truck for the door handle. Mark takes the hint and stretches the rest of the way to kiss him, so they're joined at the mouth when Eduardo gets the door open and pushes him into the backseat -- that tiny, little narrow space that they try to call a backseat, seriously, what's the point of having those if you can barely fit yourself into them?

The storm that had been threatening over their shoulders finally reaches land, and the rain starts, a light drumming on the roof of the cab, a tinny echo in the truck bed.

Mark is glad, all of a sudden, that they didn't rush this part before, no matter how awkward it had been to just get up and leave, because while it's slow and uncertain now, self-conscious and embarrassing the way it always is the first time you try to get someone naked, it's better this way; to get caught up somewhere between the urgency of getting their mouths on each other and caution.

They keep close, laughing into each other's mouths and tugging on each other's hair, and Mark watches the rain strike up against the windows, casting shadows across Eduardo's ribs and back, flickering and grey as ghosts.

They don't say anything this time around -- Eduardo doesn't say Christopher and Mark doesn't say Wardo, but it's not deliberate, the way they avoid saying the wrong names. They've always communicated better like this, the two of them not using words. They miscommunicate too much when they use words: there's a whole series of deposition documents that prove exactly that.

They communicate best at this level, Mark and Eduardo do, nonverbal and proximal; that understanding between two people who are so unalike in every way, except for the one that matters the most.

☠.

So the first time Mark Zuckerberg has sex with Eduardo Saverin, it's in the cab of somebody else's pick-up truck.

Yeah.

Okay.

And because Mark is the epitome of classiness here, he slides into the front seat to fetch his phone out of the cup holder and texts Sancha, while Eduardo beats the sand out of his shoes, hanging out the passenger side, his cheeks still as warm and color-flushed as the rain-damp world around them. Mark texts one-handed, without looking, watching Eduardo instead. It's a visceral delight to look at him.

This is a smug guess who just got laid notification.

AHAHAHAHA, he gets back a short while later, his phone buzzing amongst his loose change. congratsonthesex.gif.

There's no actual .gif file attached to the text, though, so Mark assumes this is one of those pop culture references he's never going to understand unless he swallows his pride and goes to Google.

☠.

On the drive back, the roads hiss slick under the truck's wheels. The sun's out again, setting California-huge and low on the hills, which turns the water on the streets bright as mirrors and reduces visibility to almost nothing. Mark keeps his hands on ten and two, stays to the right because he can't see the lane dividers through the glare, and lets the more suicidal drivers take their chances: all the stupid people will live today, Mark knows, because none of their names were written down for him.

Eduardo sits next to him, hand shading his eyes, squinting out at the scenery. His feet are bare and still sandy, his shoes sitting in his lap. Mark steals glances at him at stoplights, because he's easier to look at than anything else.

They wind up at Eduardo's house without even discussing it, and Mark dogs Eduardo's steps all the way up the driveway and through the side door, stretching out a hand to stroke down his flank, ribs to hip. The look Eduardo throws him over his shoulder is dark-colored and sharp, catching at him as if he'd wound his fingers in Mark's collar.

So they fail to make it to the bed for the second time running, and wind up stretched out on the bedroom floor just inside the doorway, which is familiar enough to make Mark laugh.

"Hello, we meet again," he tells the carpet.

"Shut up," goes Eduardo, mutinous, and bites at his neck.

He drags the comforter down to join them and it becomes instantly more warm and comfortable, like children tucking themselves up in a fort. It's no effort at all, to wrap their arms around each other's necks so they can kiss without breathing, dizzy, turning, airless, and they don't get up for a very long time.

"Ugh, no," he mutters eventually, using his forearms to lever some distance between them. "Get off me for a second, I can't feel my mouth anymore."

And Eduardo laughs, dipping his head to brush against Mark's cheek with his nose, like, a nuzzle or something, god, Mark doesn't know, he just wants it.

"That's fine," Eduardo returns, looking red and beestung with kisses. "I need to go wash the sand off my feet anyway."

And he shifts sideways, rolling to his feet, and so maybe when Mark presses his lips together, they feel a little rubbery, like he's back in kindergarten and coated them in glue just to make everything he said feel weird and muted, but he doesn't actually want Eduardo to leave, not even to wash the sand off his feet.

He reaches out, snagging him by the ankle and thumbing the bone and the grit there. "I changed my mind," he goes rapidly. "Lie back down and kiss me some more."

And he's perfectly aware that he has all the sex appeal of one of those toothless lampreys they have in the Michigan lakes (that, at least, didn't change when he died,) so he's a little surprised when Eduardo one-eighties so fast he almost trips himself, and then it's fine because kissing Eduardo is better than anything that's not kissing Eduardo, really.

"Mmmphmm," he says approvingly.

Mark used to be a billionaire, but nothing he ever bought with that kind of money felt nearly as luxurious as this. His idea of the finer things in life includes eating tuna in a sandwich instead of out of a can, having reliable wifi and a good domain name and the resources to code exactly what he wants to, and a book with a plot he can't call from a mile away.

Which is why this feels so hedonistic, the most hedonistic thing he's ever done, to lie here on the floor with Eduardo, kissing with lips and tongue and teeth in turn, skating hands up and down each other because they were there to be touched, and it's nice, it's good, it's fantastic, and no other reason. To lie here and not think about getting up, not think about work, or food, or even clothing, once they actually got around to taking it off. Nothing in the world is more important right now then to stretch out on this fluffy comforter and wrap himself in Eduardo's skin and muscle and bones.

And okay, it's half sex and half, like, cuddling, and cuddling has never sounded appealing before -- he's always pictured, like, snuggling, and cooing, or something, and it creeped him out the way those motion-activated children's carousels in Super Target do when they light up and start playing carnival music when you walk past at some early hour of the morning -- but that's because nobody ever presented it to him like this: to have someone you love within arm's reach, content, and nothing being more important or more urgent than that.

He must doze off at some point, because when he wakes up it's to moonlight; a full moon, heavy and close to the earth, casting cages of light on the carpet and the mess of blanket. Eduardo's sitting on the windowsill, legs tossed lazily against the pane the same way he used to in Mark's Kirkland dorm, playing with the remote for the thermostat.

"Why don't you just open the window?" he wants to know, not even commenting on the fact that he has a remote for the thermostat, because he's pretty sure his old house had one too, somewhere.

"I like to control the climate in my own house," Eduardo replies, not even startled. "Now, shush, Christopher, I'm creating a temperature symphony."

Mark yawns his way through a laugh. He leaves him to it, because these are Eduardo's finer things in life, and rolls over to ball the comforter up under his chin, the wings of his shoulders still exposed to moonlight.

He drifts for awhile, listening to the thermostat beep and the air conditioner hum accordingly, until Eduardo suddenly blurts out, in the manner of someone who's been talking to themselves internally long enough that context doesn't matter, "Is it wrong to joke about a chicken at a funeral?"

Mark sits up.

"Because I did," Eduardo tells him seriously. "And it only just now occurred to me that maybe I should have said something more appropriate."

You went to my funeral, Mark realizes, because where else would it be inappropriate to joke about chickens, and the pressure of that thought makes his ribs feel tight, his mouth twitchy with the need to grin and never stop, and Mark beckons for Eduardo to get down here already.

This earns him a look, dark-eyed, and then he unfolds his legs, retreating from the window to come and press Mark onto his back some more.

He goes willingly, forgetting all about still being sweaty and gross and tangle-haired the instant Eduardo's fingers close around his wrists, stretching them up so that he's pinioned back into the blanket, spread mid-flight like a bird. Mark doesn't even have to crane up to get to his mouth; Eduardo comes to him, tongue curling in, demanding.

Is it possible, Mark thinks. For someone to be the love of your life if you're already dead?

"Will you stay?" Eduardo asks at one point, the softest murmur spoken into the dark, his mouth near Mark's cheek or neck or heart, it didn't matter, it was all the same; none of it feels like it belongs to Mark anymore, anyway, Eduardo could have it. "Will you stay? At least for a while?"

Mark thinks of that long-ago little girl, saying, are you an angel?

He thinks of Keisha, saying, no one was brave enough to tell us they loved us.

He thinks of Tilly, saying, we all have someone we love to the point of ruin.

And then he thinks of the decades he has left before he fills his quota of souls, fifty years or a hundred if Nikita and Pierre are anything to go by, and maybe Eduardo's life is only going to make up a small percentage of that, but goddamn, Mark does not want to miss a single year, a single month, a single moment, from this very second to the day his name appears in some reaper's ledger.

Yes, he thinks or mumbles or says, he has no idea. Yes, yes, this, I can do nothing better than this, this, the best of all things.

Eventually, they do make it to the bed, and this time, Mark learns that getting out of Eduardo's bed is so, so much harder than getting up from the floor.

☠.

"Hey, genius," Jessica calls when he comes into the library the next morning, running on maybe forty minutes of sleep and enough happy-making endorphins to kill a horse. She's stretched out across three chairs at their table like she's going for a tan, her sandals dangling from the tips of her toes, her legs extended over empty space. "Can I ask you something?"

Tilly interrupts before Mark can say anything, deliberately knocking Jessica's legs with the library cart so that she yanks them back with a stifled noise, "Only if you stop yelling in my library."

"Right," mumbles Jessica, prompted into sitting up and straddling the middle chair, arms wrapped around its back. "Sorry, Tilly."

Mark and Tilly exchange a smile as they pass each other; her eyes rake him head-to-toe, knowingly.

He takes the seat next to Jessica. "Your face tells me you're about to bitch at me," he informs her. "Let me preface it by defending myself -- I returned your truck to you. I didn't do anything untowards to it."

This earns him a mutinously arched brow. "Oh yeah?" she goes. "Then how come it reeks like sex?"

"Oh, god!" protests Kawali from one of the other computers. "Keike children, there are things I would rather not be discussing this early in the morning. Or, indeed, ever. Can you lot collect your reaps and take that conversation elsewhere?" He looks at them again and gives an exaggerated shudder, like the thought is making his skin crawl.

Mark hasn't even had time to take his backpack off, so he just steals Kawali's pen and writes his reap details on the back of his hand -- oh, hey, great, it's a 4am reap, set for the next morning. "Really?" he complains to Kawali. "San Andreas Lake -- that's, like, five minutes from SFO, can't the Frisco reapers take care of it?" No decent kind of public transportation operates at that hour, and it just doesn't seem right to have to set an alarm to wake him up at two in the morning.

"You're whining and I'm ignoring you," Kawali deadpans in response.

Mark scowls. Jessica's glaring at the side of his head, narrow-eyed and evil-looking, like she's wondering if it's possible to get rid of a grim reaper by dismembering them.

"Stop that," Mark tells her, hiking his backpack further up on his shoulder and heading for the door. "I'm not going to tell you anything. It's going with me to the grave. Oh!" he turns around, walking backwards. "Wait."

"Har har har," Jess drawls out sarcastically.

If Mark entertains even the smallest possibility of feeling guilty about defiling the cab of Jessica's truck, it vanishes at lunchtime, when he reaches the University Cafe the same time Eduardo does for once; Eduardo doesn't even stop walking, dropping his laptop case on one of the patio chairs without looking, and he catches Mark around the waist, almost pulling him right off his feet with the force of it. Like they haven't seen each other for months instead of all morning, he drags one hard kiss from Mark's mouth, and then another when it becomes apparent he's not letting Mark go. Someone wolf-whistles, and Mark hears another person's camera phone go off, and there are no words for just how much he does not care.

When they break apart and sit down at their table, the barista brings their favorite drinks out without them even needing to go up there and order them.

"On the house, boys," she goes, beaming at them with a smile so wide it's like her face is all teeth. "That was amazing."

Eduardo ducks his head, becoming shy and self-conscious one heady kiss too late, his cheeks so bright red they could probably stop traffic.

"Hi," he says to Mark, a little belatedly, and Mark laughs at him, head thrown back.

And if that wasn't enough, he gets another surprise at work later that week.

"Hey, Sancha?" he queries, standing at the kitchen door looking out across the main floor through the pane. "Can you cover for me for a minute?"

She looks up from saucing, her braid falling heavy against her hairnet. Something about the expression on his face makes her put the bowl down, and she comes over. "What is it?"

"See all the suits at table eight?" he goes, scooting to the side so they could share the narrow square of glass.

Up on tiptoes, she scans the room, curious, and then her eyes go comically wide. "That's Eduardo Saverin!" she says in a fierce whisper, like there's anyone around to overhear them. The only other person back here is the dishwasher, but his headphones are in and he's never given them the time of day anyway. "Didn't he become the CEO of Facebook after Mark Zuckerberg got his head whacked off?"

"Co-CEO," Mark corrects her, for once not even bothered by the whacking comment. "If there is such a thing. It's just ... he's never actually eaten in before. I know he knows where I work, but it's not like I was ever expecting him to come here and eat. He never showed interest in greasetastic pizza."

Sancha looks at him questioningly, and he watches as the gears turn behind those big brown eyes of hers, because no matter how good his poker face is, she usually can see right through it. It's why they're friends.

Moments later, it clicks.

Her jaw drops.

"Oh my god," she reels, her hands flying to clutch her head, the way people do when something overwhelms them. "Oh my god! Him? You're -- Eduardo Saverin is your boyfriend? Oh my god," she gasps, covering her mouth. "You're basically boning Facebook."

"... there are so many things wrong with that, I don't even --" He doesn't even get that sentence out before she flings her arms around him with a strangled, high-pitched noise, crushing him to her.

"Okay, okay!" he goes, as she squeezes him, still making that slightly terrifying noise like a tea kettle going off. "I get it, you're happy for me, now can you cover the kitchen for a second so I can go out and say hi?"

"No!" she says vehemently, releasing him and giving him a scandalized look. "At least pretend to make it look legitimate and not like you're canoodling with your boyfriend during work hours. Here," and she flies back to the window, fingering fast at the order sheets. "Yeah, I thought so, their order's almost up, so when it's done, how about you take it out to them? I can manage the kitchen, it's not going to kill me."

I hope you're right, Mark thinks, because she looks like she's about to have a conniption, she's so excited.

It's exactly what he does, though, pushing through the doors with the hot plates balanced on his arm, much to the bemusement of the wait staff. Eduardo looks up when he drops the food off at their table -- two deep-dish pizzas, one that apparently has every single artery-clogging meat known to man and one all cheese, the latter of which Mark puts in front of Eduardo on a hunch, since Eduardo's always been better than him at keeping kosher.

He slides onto the vinyl next to him, taking care to bump his hip in greeting.

Eduardo beams back, eyes crinkled up in the corners, and while he apparently has no compunction about kissing Mark right in the middle of the sidewalk on University Ave (which, what the hell, where did that come from and how did Mark not know about it before?), he at least has the good sense not to do it in front of business associates who have clearly offered him a large sum of money or will offer him a large sum of money shortly in a "drop the 'the'" kind of way, although his eyes flick briefly to Mark's mouth like he's thinking about it. It makes something go molten in the pit of Mark's stomach.

He's used to being underdressed in the company of professional business-types, but at least then he could dismiss his sartorial failings with his customary, "I'm CEO, bitch," and didn't have to wear a grease-splattered striped uniform, complete with the apron and hairnet. The two suits on the other side of the table stopped their headlong dive for the pizza as soon as he sat down, and now they're both looking at him questioningly.

Like he can hear them wondering, Eduardo puts a hand on Mark's shoulder and goes, "Meet Christopher. He's my secret weapon. Christopher, this is --"

"Caroline and Syed," Mark nods to one and then the other with a slight smile. "You're the representatives from StumbleUpon, am I right?"

"That's right," says Caroline, her smile warming up considerably.

The both of them glance back at Eduardo, who looks pleased, and for that expression alone, Mark is grateful he's met the two StumbleUpon reps before, so that he could have the opportunity to show off for Eduardo's benefit now.

"He has Wikipedia for a brain," Eduardo says by way of explanation.

"StumbleUpon already has a collaborative sharing option with Facebook, though, beyond the usual button," Mark points out. If only someone would get them to join forces with the Cheezburger network, they could have the ultimate brotherhood of Internet time-wasters. "I saw it go up earlier this year. What's this meeting about, if you don't mind my asking?"

Syed makes a face and washes down a bite of pizza with soda before he replies, "There's this guy we keep on running into at, like, events and things," he goes. "Patrick. Very determined, very ambitious, who keeps on talking about integrating both Stumble and Facebook into basic PC system software."

"Wait," goes Mark, frowning. "Are we talking about Hewlett-Packard Patrick, the head of manufacturing?" They nod, and Mark shakes his head quickly. "No. Don't sign anything with him, he's not to be trusted. He texts during cordial receptions and he thinks Janeway is a more badass captain than Picard."

"But she is," says Eduardo, soft, smiling at the side of his face. Mark thinks that smile might be stuck there; he hasn't seen it waver since he sat down.

"Blasphemer," he retorts, flat. "Get out of my pizzeria."

But it turns out the Stumble reps aren't going to take that one lying down, and they immediately launch themselves into the argument, which gets exhaustively thorough. Mark's expecting someone to put together a PowerPoint right there at the table. He leans into the conversation, setting a hand in the small of Eduardo's back; not possessively, not knowingly, but just the way he's always seen people do when they're sure of each other. That simple, easy touch that shows how glad you are that out of everyone on the dizzy, tilting earth, you met each other. The touch humans learned from the reapers.

Eduardo doesn't even so much as blink, too busy drawing Caroline into a discussion of how to politely tell the Picard-hating Patrick that they aren't interested, but Mark sees Syed take notice, his eyes tracking Mark's arm down to his hand, awareness dawning. He meets Mark's gaze, and does nothing but smile, completely distracted for a moment from the conversation, and Mark feels his own lips twitch in response.

And they sit there, the four of them, talking about Facebook and Star Trek in equal measure, until the pizza is gone.

☠.

Somehow, time passes like that; his life revolves around reaps, and work, and Eduardo's hands on his hips, the same way gravity pulls all things towards the earth.

Dustin's girlfriend, Tori, finds him on Facebook and sends him a Friend Request, which Mark accepts in a moment of oh-why-not and immediately regrets; the first thing she does is capslocks "POOH BEAR!!" all over his Wall, because while she identifies as female, she still has all the maturity of a twelve-year-old boy (or the overbearing sensibilities of a sixty-year-old spinster, he isn't sure.) And where Tori goes, Dustin follows, and before he knows it, Christopher Robin's News Feed is full of all the people Mark Zuckerberg liked best.

He's still kind of expecting retribution from Kawali, or maybe even Upper Management itself, because he doesn't think he's being particularly subtle, if the way Jessica keeps waggling her eyebrows every time she sees him and Tilly pats his shoulder in an absentminded atta-boy kind of way is anything to go by.

But apparently Death has bigger things to worry about than where and with whom Mark spends his free time, so one lazy Sunday afternoon finds Mark assembling a home office in one of Eduardo's empty rooms.

The style of the room hasn't really changed since the seventies. Nor, apparently, has it been dusted in that long either, and Mark spends nearly as much time sneezing as he does actually installing the desk, the chair, and the computer setup (Eduardo had expressed an interest in buying one of those bizarre named-after-a-feline Macs, which Mark's PC pride couldn't tolerate. Eduardo had given in under pressure.) He admits it's kind of a picturesque scene, with the thick, muffling carpet and the dust motes catching in the afternoon sun, but it doesn't stop his common sense from worrying about it clogging the filters.

Eduardo has a laptop that he usually works from when he's not in the offices -- it's in the bedroom, and the treacherous power cord is now a running joke. His explanation for wanting the home office was that if he was going to be working in Palo Alto full-time, he wanted to be able to do some of that work from home, and also he should probably make it look like somebody lived in his house.

At least, this is what he told Mark, but Mark had been there, watching Eduardo try to Skype with Divya Narendra and the apple-cheeked little Tanya, uncomfortably hunkered down in front of the laptop screen to see their faces better.

To anyone else, it's probably a frivolous reason to want a bigger desktop, but that's just kind of how Eduardo operates.

Mark spends a shameless amount of time in Eduardo's house these days. Eduardo has seen Mark's apartment in Los Altos approximately once -- long enough for them both to look at the economically compact space and lack of decoration, which by itself probably isn't that offensive, but not being allowed to flush the toilet or shower after 11 o'clock because the cheap piping would wake up everybody on the lower floors ... Eduardo had made some incredibly amusing faces trying to hide his disgust at the thought.

That's how we preserve water in California, Mark had laughed, tugging Eduardo back down with him and ignoring his wrinkled-nosed this is gross, Christopher.

And from then on, it's not even a contest of pride or privilege: they go to Eduardo's. For one, it's more colorful, and for another, they can pull each other into the shower in the middle of the night and stay as long as the hot water lasts.

Eventually, some of his stuff migrates in; the proud Navy girlfriend sweatshirt, which has managed to survive thusfar relatively blood-splatter-free, is currently thrown over the back of Mark's chair in the kitchen. His construction paper Star of David is pinned to the fridge underneath a magnet for Pizza My Heart -- there'd been one horrible, heart-stopping moment when Mark thought Eduardo might recognize it (he had spent more time in Mark's dorm room than Mark had sometimes,) but when he saw it, he'd just laughed and said, "oh, you had to make one of these, too?"

The full-volume Windows start-up jingle rouses Eduardo out of the bedroom, where he'd been taking full advantage of the sunshine by napping. He stands in the doorway, scrubbing at his eyes blearily and watching Mark clear away the styrofoam and the boxes.

"Ah, the classic Windows background," he goes around a yawn, when the dual screens load the default Microsoft desktop -- the dichotomously-bright green hills and blue sky -- that come standard on all new PCs. "So we meet again."

"It's from here, actually," Mark informs him. "That's a real place. It's in Sonoma, about an hour's drive up the 101."

Eduardo blinks a bit. "I ... did not know that," he goes musingly. "I thought it was digitally-made. Like they did for Teletubbies."

"No. It's a natural California wonder," says Mark, feeling unusually proud of his state -- it is an interesting bit of trivia, either way. "Patrick and his wife held their wedding ceremony out there, I think."

"Hewlett-Packard Patrick?"

"Yeah." They exchange a look, and roll their eyes in unison, because that's such a Patrick thing to do.

Mark checks the time at the corner of the start bar, and sucks in a breath through his teeth. He has less than an hour to get to San Mateo for today's reap. "I need to go," he says, standing up out of the office chair, which has that lovely brand-new IKEA smell and only required the minor cursing on Mark's part to assemble. "I have an appointment."

"You and your mysterious appointments," Eduardo mumbles, catching Mark when he tries to slip past him through the door, sleepily palming at his hip. "I'll figure it out one day, you know. I'm surprisingly smart." He side-eyes Mark curiously. "Please tell me it's a flash dance."

"Yes," Mark deadpans. "Now you know my secret. We're doing the electric slide in the Stanford commons, please come."

Chuckling lowly, Eduardo twists them around and backs him up into the doorframe, less by intent and more because he's leaning all his weight onto Mark, not yet awake enough to attempt to be smooth about it. He puts his hands on Mark's face, caging it and tilting it up.

"You know," he says, as if he's answering a question he'd asked himself, "Even if I didn't have Facebook to run, you're worth staying in California for."

Only a short time ago, this would have irritated him, the implication that something in this world is worth more of Eduardo's attention than Facebook. But now Mark just brushes the backs of his knuckles against Eduardo's stomach and replies, tart, "Well, thank you for your noble sacrifice."

"Mmmm, your noble," Eduardo goes quietly, which doesn't even make sense, and Mark's about to inform him of that fact, except Eduardo catches him up into a kiss, hands on his face and pushing his head back into the wood of the doorframe.

And Mark isn't afraid of this. He might have been, once; afraid to the point where he couldn't even have acknowledged it as a possibility. But since then, he's become a grim reaper, a hooded black cape and a silver scythe for the modern age; he's seen people die horribly, pointlessly, in every strange, gruesome way imaginable, and he has walked with them to paradise, each one more different than the last, and it puts a lot of things into perspective. He has nothing to fear from Eduardo. He's spend his whole life going from one extreme to the other with very little in-between; calm to righteous fury, college sophomore to CEO, youngest billionaire in the world to cherishing every bit of loose change he found, casual lunch date to head-over-heels in love.

If there is going to be a this with Eduardo, then no way in hell is Mark going into it half-assed.

He slackens his jaw to suck Eduardo's tongue deeper into his mouth, feeling rather than hearing the responding moan. The kiss goes on, slow and deep and aching, neither of them wanting to be the one that pulled away first.

They kiss until all of his nerves feel as if they've been lit like fireflies, a slow, dizzying pulse, and he can't quite remember what all he was capable of doing with his body before Eduardo started touching it.

The flicker of the desktop flickering to screensaver in his peripheral vision snaps him out of it, and he pushes at Eduardo's chest, levering enough distance between them to say, "No, come on, I really can't be late."

Eduardo obediently relinquishes his hold, but then he murmurs, like he didn't even mean to say it out loud, "Moments like this, I think I'll want you to the day I die."

And Mark knows exactly how flimsy that partition is, and stretches up to touch their noses together, saying without thinking, "And after?"

Up this close, Eduardo's eyes look as if they're filled with light, and he laughs, shocked and wondering; Mark feels it with his whole body.

"Yes," Eduardo says, like a promise. "Yes, even then."

☠.

They get cited for public indecency near the end of March, which Mark is kind of smug about because that's never happened before, and it's Christopher Robin's first infraction with the police. That's something of a small miracle in and of itself, given how Mark's entire job revolves around lurking at crime scenes. He could have done a lot worse.

Eduardo isn't quite as proud, considering their fine gets doubled for being within 500 yards of a school.

"You have the money to pay it, though," Mark feels the need to point out, absently fingering the spines of the books at the end of the shelf. "In fact, you probably have the money to pay off the outstanding fines of everybody in Santa Clara county."

"The money's not the point, Christopher, you know that," Eduardo cuts him a sidelong look, mouth quirked dryly. They're in Kepler's, the enormous bookstore in Menlo Park that has a surprisingly decent collection and also the distinction of being one of the very few remaining privately-owned bookstores in the Bay Area, which is something Eduardo's oldest sister will appreciate. Mark has more experience than most with buying birthday gifts for sisters, but he doesn't really know her tastes and isn't much help here.

"I know," he answers, because he believes him, and then rounds the corner of the aisle before his face can give him away. It's easy for Eduardo to say, but a pizza delivery salary doesn't exactly leave Mark with a lot of spare change to spend on paying fines, and he's not going to ask to borrow money -- that's how all the bad shit between him and Eduardo got started in the first place.

So he takes it down to Mackey, the maintenance reaper at the courthouse, remembering belatedly that Mackey knows exactly who Eduardo Saverin is, since he'd been sitting right there when Eduardo came stamping out of the board room to smash Mark's laptop to bits.

Shit, he thinks, as an absolute, wicked kind of delight spreads over Mackey's face.

But he makes it go away, much to the relief of Mark's bank statement and Eduardo's reputation.

It doesn't stop him from being a little smug. Okay, a lot.

"That's because you're a horrible excuse for a human being, why do I let you talk me into these things," Eduardo tells him without any bite whatsoever, and Mark laughs.

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Quick-n-Dirty Hawaiian
1. keike (keike children!) - plural form of children. so yes, Kawali did say "children children."