Fic: A Seahorse Gilt in Gold (the Dear Mrs. Robinson Remix) [The Social Network][3/3]
<-- part two: florida
Mark, because he's a complete fucker and Eduardo will never stop owing him, brings him the holy grail of gifts.
"Shit," is all he can manage to say at first, leaning in through the car door to inspect the number of boxes Mark has stacked behind the passenger seat. The foam in the headrests have been gnawed away, he notices; Eduardo presumes Mark didn't do that, because he doubts there's much nutritional value in foam. "Where did you get these?"
He picks up box after box of ammunition, checking them -- wrong caliber, wrong caliber, wrong make, wrong -- oh, hey, these won't fit his shotgun but they'll definitely chamber in his handgun. He pockets them, thrilling with delight; it feels a lot like gluttony, the realization that with this, he isn't going to have to ration his gunshots for awhile.
Bullets are more valuable than food, than clean water, than shelter, and Mark's brought him what Eduardo failed to find for himself.
He cranes his neck back, catching a glimpse of Mark through the window; he's scanning outwards, a nervous back-and-forth tick of his eyes, wary even though it's daylight. He glances towards Eduardo like the touch of his gaze is a physical thing, his mouth twisting sardonically in the corners.
"Wardo," he says, his voice raspy; either from weeks of silence, or, like Eduardo, complete overuse in a bid to fill the silence. "It took me three days to get through Texas, because I practically had to abscond to Mexico to avoid the unholy trifecta that is Austin, San Antonio, and Houston smack in the fucking middle of the state," he makes an ugly gesture with his hands, like he's trying to wipe Texas off a map in punishment for the inconvenience. "Seriously, walk into any farmhouse in the state and you'll set on those," he nods at the boxes of ammo.
Eduardo's heart does something strange and palpable inside his chest.
He doesn't know what's showing on his face, but whatever it is, it makes Mark's eyes go guarded. "What?" he says defensively.
Eduardo just shakes his head, unsure as to how to express it. Here's Mark, who survived the destruction of the Bay Area, who lost his entire social network, all his friends and family, same as Eduardo -- and yet he still pronounces Texas like an adolescent kid, like he's never been north of the Mason-Dixon line: stretched out and exaggerated, Tex-ASS.
He hasn't thought about kissing Mark since before he heard his voice from a thousand miles away, but the urge swells up out of nowhere, to swing the door to the Jeep closed and step up to him, put one hand on the back of his neck to keep him still, and kiss his mouth until it kissed him back.
He thinks of how hard Mark had held on to him -- it was the kind of hug that Eduardo can still feel, cement-pressed into his bones -- and it occurs to him that Mark might not push him away.
-
Using the theater as an epicenter, Eduardo had used his daylight hours to scout in circles, radiating outwards, and the same day he heard the roar of the Jeep's engine coming up the Lake Worth bridge, he found an all-Cuban grocery that had mostly remained unscathed by humanity's mass panic. The major supermarkets were completely ransacked by the crowds before Eduardo even got here, but despite the ominous, rank smell coming from the produce and the deli sections, there are still provisions for the basics on these shelves.
Two days after Mark's arrival, he takes them out to stock up on industrial-strength bottles of vitamin supplements, because lack of fresh dairy is one of the first things they're going to start feeling the effects of. Into their backpacks go the calcium, followed by fish oil and the whole spectrum of vitamins A through E. Eduardo catches Mark studying the back of a bottle of Vitamin D, his mouth quirked like he's going to make a crack about why you would even need Vitamin D supplements in Florida of all places, but he catches Eduardo's eye and says nothing.
Mark hasn't really spoken a word since the first night, but Eduardo isn't going to push.
Trauma has different effects on different people.
Eduardo goes crazy and shoots things -- Mark, apparently, just goes quiet.
Next they compare jams and jellies; it's going to have to be their main source for fruit, up until the wild oranges come into season again. With the jams come the crackers, and with the crackers comes the sudden explosion of three freshly-woken zombies out of the freezer section.
Eduardo's shotgun is still propped up against the shelves of potassium and magnesium, so he drops his jar of apricot preservatives and pulls the back-up handgun from the waistband of his jeans, clicking the safety off and leveling the first zombie with a perfect headshot.
An answering shot from Mark takes out the second one, and Eduardo looks over, startled: Mark holds his gun with the awkward, self-aware uncertainty of someone who had to learn how to shoot things the hard way, eyes half-mad with the disgust at unfamiliar brain matter splattered all over him, but when Eduardo looks at him, he looks back, like this is the first time he's seen Eduardo, too.
Which is why the third zombie surprises both of them, snatching Mark up and pinning him, gun trapped uselessly between their bodies.
Mark flails, arms straining with the effort of holding the monster away from his jugular, and there's nowhere to go. As soon as he realizes this, his eyes fill with a real kind of mortal fear.
For one highwire, suspended moment, like the holding note of a symphonic chorus, Eduardo thinks about putting a bullet between Mark's eyes.
He has a clear shot, he can do it -- kill him now, before the zombie bites into his flesh and infects his blood, turns him into one of them. It'd be a mercy, Eduardo knows that. Mark wouldn't thank him if he stood back and let him transform. He imagines it, easily, settling into the stance, breathing out the way Charlie taught him, aiming and sending Mark's brains splattering against the glass.
He hears Isi's voice. Are you with me?
I'd want you to kill me. Mark.
Yeah. How about not.
Unthinking, he drops the gun into the mess of apricot at his feet and rips the twine straight out of the unpacked box next to the noodles. Without breaking stride, he loops it around the zombie's throat and pulls, hard. It staggers back into his body, its flesh putrid, slipshod, giving way beneath Eduardo's touch as easily as if it's made of mushed peas.
The second he has room, Mark jams the barrel under its chin and blows its head to smithereens; Eduardo cranes his neck out of the way to avoid the worst of the splatter, and feels the lukewarm smear of it across his earlobe and the side of his throat.
"Thanks," gasps Mark; Eduardo can scarcely hear him over the roar in his own ears.
He looks at him, unintentionally catching him at a fragile moment -- Mark looks glassine, like one of those see-through jellyfish or a fresh-hatched tadpole, all watery limbs and deeply undefended innards. He trembles, all over, and Eduardo wonders what it would be like, if he could split his own sternum open and keep Mark safe inside, protected by his own ribs and beating heart. Eduardo would do it, would do it without thinking.
Right.
Right, okay, they're done. They don't need nutrients that badly.
-
Here's another thing filed away with the things that Eduardo isn't going to forget until the day he dies: the noise Mark makes when he slams him up against the wall, a hard, physical sound like he's summoned his bones back to earth, a rush of breath punched out between his teeth.
His hands scrabble at Eduardo for purchase. Eduardo needs him to hang on. Needs.
"I'm fine!" Mark's talking, he realizes distantly, saying something, responding to something that's slip-streaming out of Eduardo's mouth, he doesn't know. "Wardo, I'm good, I'm --"
Maybe.
Maybe if somebody had held a gun to Mark's head that night in the Palo Alto house, threatened his life the same way that zombie breathing so close had made terror shoot panicked sparks inside his skull, if someone had made Eduardo stop and realize just how fucking fragile it all was and how there's never really ever an excuse to not kiss someone when you have the chance, then maybe he would have done this sooner.
As it is, now will have to do, and (he can still see it, so clear in his imagination that the action itself feel as instinctive as pulling the trigger, like it's already part of his muscle memory,) Eduardo grabs Mark's face, hands hooking around his jaw, and reels him in for a wrecking kiss.
Another noise, starved-sounding, and Mark's hands are on him, hauling him in.
His mouth cracks wide in order to suck down Eduardo's tongue, and Eduardo moans, falling into him like he'd been struck across the back of the knees. Their feet tangle in a desperate attempt to support them, and Eduardo catches them against the wall. They are touching everywhere, their knees, thighs, hips, stomachs, their hands to each other's faces and their mouths, their desperate mouths.
When Mark tries to break away, mouth moving in the direction of his neck, Eduardo snatches up a fistful his his shirt and yanks him back so hard his head rebounds off the wall. There's still bits of exploded zombie on him; Eduardo doesn't want to test this virus's tenacity upon being ingested via enthusiastic hickey.
That would be an incredibly sucky way to die.
"I'm okay," Mark says again, touching his wrists. Gentle, almost, the fucker, like Eduardo was the one who almost died. Fuck him, fucking fuck fuckerberg with the fucking.
Eduardo grabs onto his hair, yanks his head back so he can fasten his mouth to the (clean, relatively speaking,) skin at his throat. Mark whimpers. His pulse pounds against Eduardo's mouth; Eduardo sucks in time to it.
Nails bite into his shoulders, scrape down his back. The touch of Mark's fingertips to his hips have him shifting into the touch automatically.
"I'm okay, I'm not going anywhere," Mark continues, and fuck him, that's exactly what he almost did!
"Shut up," he snaps, and even pinned to the wall with his thighs locked in between Eduardo's legs, Mark still manages to shoot him a yeah, right, like that's going to happen look. "Mark --"
Fucker.
Eduardo came to this country to find his family, and now he has Mark, and that's going to have to be close enough, and fuck it if he's not going to do every-fucking-thing he can to keep it that way, and Mark Zuckerberg is not allowed to die, he isn't, he isn't.
"-- don't," manages to break through the static in his head. Mark's talking again. "Don't you go anywhere, either, fuck --" and his voice cracks right down the middle with need.
He turns his head to kiss him, open-mouthed and wanting to taste what that feels like, to have Mark need him as much as he needs Mark.
Why did you do it? Eduardo thinks at him, furious and terrified and so fucking in love he didn't stand a chance. Why did you risk everything to drive across the country to me? You could never even be bothered to show up on time when I asked you to, so why this?
Unbidden, he hears Charlie's voice, quiet in his memory.
If the people you love don't come to you, then you must go to them.
His eyes fly open. Mark looks back. His irises are blue-grey, pupils blown so wide they're only a thin rim of color, and when Eduardo puts the flat of his palm against his belly button, sliding it downwards, his eyes lid and his throat bobs.
-
They're warier every time they go scouting through stores after that.
By mutual, if not vocal, agreement, the bookstore becomes their favorite place to venture during their outings. They keep nocturnal hours, huddled up in the hot, claustrophobic space of the projection room, and sleep in shifts during the day; Eduardo sleeps from sunrise to noon, Mark sleeps during the afternoon.
Eduardo, arguably, gets the most sleep, but whenever he tries to swap, Mark just gives him this look like he couldn't imagine sleeping even if they had all the time in the world.
At the high point of noon, Mark wakes Eduardo up by slipping cold fingers into his sleeping bag to hook around his ankle.
Eduardo comes awake instantly, his eyes catching on Mark's face -- the wispy facial hair that might, in another life, have been a beard or a mustache -- and he groans in protest, levering his foot against Mark's hip to push him away.
"You need to shave that off," he complains.
Mark's mouth makes a funny almost-smile. "Don't knock it until you try it," he answers, and then, "oh, wait, look, you've got a horrific mess of your own," and pats at Eduardo's cheeks. It's true: at this rate, Eduardo could probably apply for one of those Geico caveman commercials.
So the next time they make a supply run, Mark grabs the last Venus razor off the shelf and a thing of moisturizing cream and shaves it off right there in the aisle, foam dripping everywhere.
"Hey, whatever!" he goes, catching Eduardo's look, and Eduardo lifts his hands, because he hadn't said a word. "There's no one left alive to judge me, anyway. So, here, want it? Lady shavers actually are smoother."
"I'm ... not going to ask how you know that."
Mark's mouth curves, but his eyes go sad and shuttered away. He clams up like this, whenever Eduardo brushes too close to a memory of a time before the apocalypse.
It's not like he really has room to talk: tentatively, Mark had brought up Miami one night, and Eduardo had wanted to talk about it as much as he wanted to pull his teeth out of his gums.
He still doesn't know how to handle that grief. He doesn't want to witness Mark's fumbling attempt with it, either.
Eduardo had actually scoped out the two closest bookstores during the time Mark took to drive across the country: obstinately, he'd gone in with the romantic idea that he was going to use the end of the world to catch up on all the reading he never got done while he was working ten-hour days, wallow in some nostalgia as the protagonists wrestle with every-day demons that Eduardo now can only about, but in actuality, he spends most of his trips in the how-to section, because being separated from Wiki How is like missing a limb, and there's still a lot of shit Eduardo doesn't know how to do.
"I'm thinking we should rig together some kind of pulse charge, or at least a simple kind of bomb," he's telling Mark on one of these days, stepping down the glass-scattered sidewalk. There's rain coming; the clouds tell him so. "Explosions are a fantastic way of ensuring that a downed zombie stays down, but weirdly enough, they don't publish manuals on How to Blow Up Things That Were Formerly People."
Mark makes a noise in the back of his throat, and beelines straight down one of the aisles as soon as they're inside. About thirty seconds later, he returns with a water-stained copy of Fight Club.
Eduardo feels the flush of gratitude go down to his toes. "That works," he says.
-
When Mark finally does tell Eduardo everything, it literally is everything at once.
He'd left Mark sleeping as the sun set, climbing up onto the roof of the theater to do a perimeter sweep. Things had been more or less quiet since the encounter in the Cuban grocery; they were still picking off zombies like they were going to win a state fair prize for it, but they'd been lonely stragglers, easy shots, and they'd taken up Isibel's practice of tallying their kills. Squinting into the setting sun, Eduardo scans the surroundings in quadrants -- clear, clear, clear, and --
No.
There, on the bridge. There's at least a dozen of them, ambling around each other and checking the abandoned vehicles like kids hunting through their parents' pockets for sweets. They're too far away for Eduardo to shoot from here, especially not while aiming into the setting tropical sun.
There's no other choice -- they're going to have to hide and hope the zombies move north or south during the night without exploring the area too closely.
He slips from the roof, careful of where he casts a shadow, and steals through the empty theater, hurriedly picking up all signs of inhabitation, anything that might indicate fresh, unturned meat.
Since they're made of nothing but cartilage, noses are one of the first things on the undead to rot, so he doesn't think they have a very acute sense of smell, if any, but that doesn't mean they don't have some scary keen sense for tracking down living humans. He wonders if his pounding heart is leaving some sort of signature in the air. It's an incredibly frightening thing to think.
His anxiety keeps them both on edge all night.
Sitting cross-legged in their sleeping bags, they manage to piece together a plan to, if that pack of zombies still wandering around tomorrow, lure them into a trap and blow them to pieces with help from Tyler Durden, but they can't do much besides go over the plan again and again while locked up in the projection room.
Finally, Mark gets fed up with Eduardo's obsessive pacing and furtive checking of the locks ("you're making too much noise, genius!" he hisses out between his teeth, and Eduardo sits down again, because he has a point,) and zips their sleeping bags together, curling into it. It's pitch-black, and Eduardo listens to the sound of Mark shifting around in the vinyl, trying to get comfortable.
After his comment about noise, it seems unnecessarily loud, and, annoyed, Eduardo goes down onto his hands and knees. He climbs into the nest of sleeping bags, wrapping Mark up just to keep him still.
Mark settles into him, easy, stretching his legs out so that their ankles slip against each other. They both smell as rank as gym socks, but Eduardo's mostly gotten used to it by now.
Unbidden, he remembers what it was like to have his hand down Mark's pants, the way Mark's fingers clutched at him like a cliff's edge.
Close to sunrise, Mark starts talking; the words come pouring out of him, a pauseless, airless slipstream that stirs memories in him of standing there and hearing if one domino goes, the other dominoes go. Wardo.
In a voice so quiet it's barely there, he gives Eduardo a chronology of the events that unspooled in California -- everything Eduardo himself had been scared to ask after. The way he tells it, it sounds like he's been ordering and organizing this entire story for weeks, just waiting for a chance to tell somebody.
Eduardo stays still, and stays quiet, keeping his eyes fixed on the uneven tail of hair at the nape of Mark's neck, the souvenir from a mishap with a pair of hair clippers at some point in his past, before he crossed the country to get back into Eduardo's life.
He doesn't say anything, just lets himself become a reservoir for Mark to pour his words into, like it was the only thing he was made to do.
Mark talks about the panic room he had in his house in Palo Alto, the sterile-lit white room he holed out in for weeks and weeks and weeks, before hunger for something other than freeze-dried beef jerky and the world's worst case of cabin fever drove him out into the changed world. He tells him about the first time he killed a zombie ("I threw up everywhere, like, immediately after," he says, and Eduardo makes a mental note to tell him sometime about the fainting,) and he tells him about searching his neighborhoods for any sign of life.
You were alone, Eduardo thinks, and closes his eyes against the pain of that thought: he didn't even last three days of being on his own. Mark shivers at the brush of Eduardo's eyelashes against the top of his spine. Before I called you. You were completely alone.
For months.
Mark's story continues onto the road trip; how he bundled into that Jeep and plotted himself a course across the deep American south, with only the thinnest hope that Eduardo would be alive when he reached the other end.
"I drove during the day and slept at night," he murmurs. "Weighing the need for visibility while I was driving versus being defenseless at the time of night when zombies were most active. I got really familiar with sleeping with my gun." He tilts his head, musing. "I poured water over the engines to cool them, too. Just in case zombies could, like, sense heat or something. I don't know, I didn't know much about zombies then -- I'd locked myself away before there was even much concrete theory on their behavior. So. Yeah, I had to learn as I went," he adds as an afterthought, like mastering zombie survival wasn't any different than teaching himself to play the oboe. Of course he can do it, Wardo, he's Mark Zuckerberg.
"I thought ... I thought maybe they'd pass me up if I looked as dead as everybody else. I don't know. It took me eight days -- and that whole time, I didn't see a single other living soul."
The silence after that stretches for a very, very long time.
Finally, Eduardo wets his lips and speaks up.
"We -- I mean. I think it's the light that attracts them most during the night," he says, because the first time Mark flicked on a flashlight in the darkened theater, Eduardo'd knocked it from his hands faster than the striking bite of a snake. Just earlier this evening, he'd shaken Mark awake and enlisted his help in blacking out the projection room windows -- he doesn't think the zombies are going to come in for a late-night showing of The Fast and the Furious, but he doesn't want to give them a single excuse to investigate.
They follow the light: he and Isi had made a game out of it once, from the top of an enormous four-story house. They shined their flashlights down at the ground and watched the zombies stumble after it like cats chasing a penlight, straying easily within shooting range.
"Think, like," he says. "Jeff Goldblum from Jurassic Park, with the flare. The T-Rex originally was attracted to the flare, right, but because Jeff Goldblum's character kept running, the T-Rex followed him instead."
"Oh, good, a movie reference," Mark deadpans. "I think in nothing but movie references these days."
"Body heat is another theory," Eduardo continues. He's been thinking about that fear he had earlier, about leaving some kind of stench of fear on the air. It makes sense. There's nothing quite like the warmth of somebody's skin, after all, so he supposes it's only natural that you'd still want it, even necrotic and rotting, all your sentience gone except for the functions necessary to staggering around, following that electric spark of somebody else's neural synapses.
"If that's the case," Mark allows. "There's nothing we can do about it. They'll always be following us."
Eduardo slips a hand underneath Mark's shirt, palm spreading flat on his stomach. There's no intent behind it, just thought: there's nothing, he thinks, that will ever be as warm as Mark's stomach, that single spot right over his solar plexus.
How badly do you think he'll want this, if he's the one that turns first?
-
"I was so scared, Wardo," comes out of Mark like a confession, like it'd been twisted and pulled out of him.
He thinks about returning the gesture -- telling him about Lin Yao and his girlfriend from Alabama, about Magnolia and his first spectacular failure at zombie-killing, about Charlie, the way he said, you were the only one who came to see if she was okay, about Isi and her son with the missing teeth who was going to start first grade, and the way her dead body had ragdolled when he picked her up, her neck creaking alarmingly until he supported it, no elasticity in her muscles left.
He doesn't. Instead, he nuzzles into the back of Mark's neck, brushing his lips against the warm, human skin there, and tells him to go to sleep.
They need the rest.
-
Eduardo flew around the globe to find his family, and he did, and Mark drove across the country to find him, and he did, but that doesn't really mean either of them know what to do about it.
Eduardo cannot lose Mark. This he knows. Cannot. Simply cannot. It's already happened once -- Eduardo letting another person become the center of his universe, and then she died, and he doesn't think he can go through that kind of grief again, that sinkhole of gravity inside his chest.
So he's careful. He's so fucking careful, and for him, being careful translates to doing nothing at all. He'd rather do nothing than run the risk of driving Mark off, or getting him killed.
He doesn't ask about Dustin.
He doesn't ask about Chris, or Chris's boyfriend, or Tanya the current CFO of Facebook, or Mark's sisters, or any of them, and Mark doesn't volunteer the information.
Those stories all kind of become the one and the same, in the end.
So instead, they sleep in their own eclectic patterns and stay up all night, thoroughly exhausted and listening to the sounds of zombies ransacking their side of the city in search of food. They keep on catching each other's eyes; in the darkness, they make for eerie gleams, flickering in and out every time they blink. Mostly, though, they just exist in their own worlds, within the same proximity.
At noon each day, the sun is at its highest point, driving the zombies deep into into their nests. Usually they're groggily napping around that time and switching shifts, but not always, because high noon is the safest time to be out and about. Sunset and sunrise is the worst, that needle's point edge where the zombies are moving and so are they. They need to run for supplies more often now than Eduardo ever did on his own, because there's two of them to feed and shelter and keep healthy.
In one of those sad twists of fate, Mark sunburns pretty spectacularly during each of these outings; the most dangerous time to be out in the sun in this side of the globe is from eleven to two, although it stretches a little longer in both directions during the summer.
He picks at them as they peel, coming away with flecks of dead skin which he rolls into little balls between his fingers and flicks away, frequently in the direction of Eduardo's sleeping bag.
He makes a face, and his voice cracks with disuse. "Do you have to do that?"
Mark blinks, slowly, and takes a moment to make the correlation between his action and Eduardo's reaction. Then he scoffs, scooting across the floor in a crab-walk. Reaching out, he does the inexplicable and pushes his hand into Eduardo's hair, carding his fingers through it. Eduardo cants up, an involuntary response to the pressure of Mark's nails on his scalp, unevenly torn as they are.
Mark pulls away, showing Eduardo the ends of his fingers. Dandruff covers the pads at his fingertips.
"We're so unwashed I don't think a little more dead skin is going to hurt us," he says dryly.
On a whim, Eduardo pulls out their Floridian atlas, the one Mark brought, while Mark is busy warming up something that will attempt to be edible in the employee's room microwave, during another one of the stints where the electricity comes back on. He drags his finger along a topographical map, finds a fitness center at the bottom of an incline, which might still have legitimate water pressure thanks to gravitational forces. He thinks about a hot shower, and then he thinks about Mark, wet and naked under the spray, thinks about putting his mouth on his skin and tasting clean water, thinks about Mark's fingers in his hair again.
"Right," he goes, and puts the atlas back on the shelf. He picks up his shotgun and goes to find Mark.
-
He rocks back onto his haunches, ducking his head down in order to spit between his legs, letting the water rush away with it down the drain. He still swallows some on accident, and grimaces as the taste settles into his mouth.
It prompts him into asking, musingly, "Do you think semen is kosher?"
Mark's laughter bursts out of him at that, unbidden and honest and ringingly loud. His knees give out seemingly against his will, and Eduardo presses himself back against the water-warmed tile of the shower cubicle in order to make room, letting him collapse down like a deck of cards. There still isn't any space; their wet legs scissor around each other, forming a cradle hold.
"That's probably something you can find in the Tanakh, if you wanted to go look," Mark murmurs. The flush of orgasm stains the high bones of his cheeks and tracks a red pattern down his chest. His fingers traipse along the knobs in Eduardo's knees, like he can't help but touch.
Eduardo wants to lick him.
Just. Because.
The shower beats down on the tops of their heads, and Mark lifts a hand, tracing the tip of his finger along the chain at Eduardo's neck. He presses down on the ten-cent coin, hard enough to leave an imprint in Eduardo's flesh. The way he rubs back and forth across the seahorse makes Eduardo think he knows there's a story there, but he's decent enough not to ask.
Their foreheads brush, and Eduardo nuzzles against the bridge of his nose, breathing out.
They're touching everywhere, and the water swirls away down the drain.
-
"I knew I should have brought toothpaste," Eduardo bitches later, when they finally pull themselves out from under the water. He bares his teeth at himself in the mirror, eyeing the yellowed ridges of scuzz built up around his gums. "My teeth are gross and I have dick breath, and it's kind of your fault."
Mark snorts. "I'm not the one who wanted to fuck in the shower," he reminds him, dry as bone, and then wanders off, leaving Eduardo to try and scrape some off with his fingernails.
Him not being directly in his line of sight makes Eduardo antsy like he's unarmed, which probably isn't healthy in a psychological way, but whatever, everyone he's ever known is dead, he's entitled to a little separation anxiety.
In a decision between grabbing for his boxers or grabbing for his shotgun, Eduardo goes for the gun. He needn't have worried, though; Mark's just in the next room over, not getting chewed on by zombies or sticking his finger in a light socket or in any danger whatsoever. He's still naked, standing amidst a row of lockers, back to the door with his shoulders hunched up. Eduardo takes a moment to study the architecture of his spine, before stepping up behind him.
"Hey," he goes, and Mark lifts his head with a distracted noise. In one hand, he has a roll of measuring tape, and in the other ...
Eduardo gets a look at what he's doing and stops short, amused.
It has to be written all over his face, what he's thinking, because the look Mark gives him is unrepentant. "What?" he goes, on the defense. "I've never done it before."
"Mark. Mark, that's ... that's like a girl not knowing her cup size." Eduardo boggles a little bit -- to think, he's still learning new things about Mark Zuckerberg, the hyped-up, over-publicized CEO of Facebook, even now. "You've never measured your own dick before?"
"Obviously not, Wardo, keep up."
"I'm finding this to ... What else were you doing during those lawsuits, then?"
"Oh, ha ha," Mark goes, without heat.
Eduardo waits until he puts the measuring tape back where he found it before he goes, "Well? What's the verdict?"
Mark cuts him a look at that, eyes raking him from head to toe in a slow drag. "Don't worry," he goes, pushing himself off the lockers and approaching Eduardo, who goes hot all over. There's intent in the way Mark's looking at him, and he shifts his stance, bracing his feet the way he does when he's anticipating the recoil from a shotgun blast. Mark's tongue darts out, licking at his bottom lip; it's basically like being shot.
"I'm a grower," he confides, low, and when Eduardo grabs for him, unable to go a beat more without touching him and hissing out a soft come here, you fucker, he puts a hand to his shoulder, digging his knuckles into the bruise he sucked into Eduardo's skin.
-
Unlike Isi, Mark doesn't talk about finding any other survivors.
Eduardo knows there has to be other people left alive, because they can't be the only ones resourceful and lucky enough to have avoided getting sick or bitten or brutally murdered or otherwise turned into a flopping, drooling mess of necrotic flesh, but Mark just doesn't seem to care if there's anyone else alive on the planet, or if he and Eduardo really are the last two living remnants of Homo sapiens, game over, thanks for playing.
It's ... it's the way he touches Eduardo sometimes, like he's found all he was ever going to find.
Eduardo can't even pretend he knows how to handle that.
So, for the most part, he doesn't.
-
Mark, it turns out, is conversationally competent in at least five languages, and seems to take the end of the world as his excuse to learn them all -- he takes to collecting Rosetta Stone on cassette tapes the same way other people would collect movie ticket stubs or glass unicorn figurines.
Every time they hit up the bookstore, looking for information on how to fix whatever else has gone wrong with their hideaway this time, or how to wreak destruction down on the heads of the undead, Mark always comes away with one tiny phrase-book or two tucked into the kangaroo pouch of his sweatshirt, which he pages through idly during the long, sleepless, claustrophobic hours of the night, shoulders pressed up against the jutting corners of the projection machine and his lips moving soundlessly over foreign syllables. Eduardo watches him put headphones on over his ears, hands cradling the cassette player like it's an ostrich egg, eyes closed through his conversations with long-dead partners.
Eventually, he has to ask. "What's the point?"
Mark casts an absent look in his direction, turning the cassette over to side B. "Hmm?"
"Of --" he gestures; the Rosetta Stone box is broken open, smiling front facing him. Today, Mark is working on his Finnish. "What are the odds that you're going to meet a native Finn wandering around Palm Beach?"
"Oh." Mark considers it, and then shrugs in that way he does. "Someone ought to, I guess. Be kind of ..." he slants his eyes, thoughtful. "Kind of like a museum. As long as I'm alive and speaking, the culture doesn't go extinct. So much of culture is language, Wardo."
It's one of the more surprising things Mark's ever said to him. At Harvard, he knew Mark had tested out of his foreign language requirement by acing the Spanish and French proficiency test (he only needed to take one, but he took both, because he's Mark and that's how he operates,) but since then, Mark's picked up two new languages, and then learns two more here, bringing his total proficiency to: English, Spanish, French, Mandarin, Portuguese (Eduardo's eyebrows hike up at that one, but Mark gives no apology or explanation, and for a couple days after this revelation, they move seamlessly and gleefully between it and English, and it's only then that Eduardo really figures out what Mark meant -- he hadn't realized how homesick he was for his native tongue after all the silence until he hears it in Mark's mouth -- but at the same time, however, it reminds him almost eerily of Isibel, and he steers them back into exclusively speaking in English; if Mark notices, he doesn't ask,) Catalan, and Arabic. And now he's working on Finnish.
"Okay," says Eduardo, and scoots closer. "Practice on me."
Mark's hands still on the cassette player. "Do you want to learn something?"
"Mandarin," says Eduardo immediately. He doesn't have Mark's easy ability to pick up new languages: it's like his brain got stuck after the age of five. He's picked up some polite phrases, of course, because it's difficult to live in Singapore and not learn at least basic Chinese. Christy taught him some, too, in semi-nervous preparation for meeting her parents. They broke up before that happened, but he did meet her grandmother once. She was at least two heads shorter than Eduardo was, and had to stretch up in order to pat his face in a friendly way. She kept repeating something, smiling benignly and patting him some more, and it got stuck in his head the way song lyrics would. He never did remember to ask Christy what she said.
He tries it out on Mark once, just to see, as they stand side-by-side, swirling the cold rainwater in a bucket for their weekly shave.
It takes him a moment to sort out the unexpected shift in language, and then Mark double-takes, his whole face collapsing in surprise. When he sees the earnestness in Eduardo's expression, he cracks up.
"What?" Eduardo goes, suspicious. "Wait, wait. No, crap, what did I say?"
"You --" Mark looks at him again, and breaks into fresh sniggers, his shoulders shaking with the force of it. "You -- oh my god, you just told me my kids would look like monkey piss."
"What -- oh my god, are you serious?" And then they're both laughing, holding onto the edges of the table in order to stay upright, because all these years, Eduardo had thought Christy's grandmother was just extending some conversational pleasantry, and the whole time, she was cheerfully maligning his and Christy's hypothetical mixed-race children, and Eduardo had just smiled and nodded his way through it.
"I -- I," Mark wheezes. "I really hope you never actually used that on anyone before, thinking it was a compliment!"
"Me too!" Eduardo manages to get out, and it sets them off again.
-
Before the zombie apocalypse, before Singapore, before even the whole ugly mess with Facebook and the lawsuit, once or twice or maybe even a few more times than that, he'd imagined what it would be like to grow old with Mark.
Not in a gay way. Not then, at least, because queer identity hadn't even really been in Eduardo's vocabulary until Chris put it there, their senior year at Harvard, and really got him thinking about where he fit within the sphere of being different, something which hadn't even occurred to him that he could do, and by that point it was too late to think of Mark in anything but a distant, poisonous, bitter kind of way.
But just, like, he'd thought about growing old with him, the same way everybody kind of carelessly imagines growing old with their best friends. Uncomplicated. Happy.
And now, now that it's a reality -- he is literally going to spend the rest of his life with Mark Zuckerberg, it scares him, scares him the same way it scares him when Mark touches him like he'd trekked across the ravaged country just so he could put his hands on Eduardo, and there's a part of Eduardo that simply doesn't want to come to terms with that.
So he starts picking fights.
It's over the stupid stuff, even, the stuff that doesn't even fucking matter except for the weeks, the months, the thick, vicious years he spent desperate to say them -- they fight about Facebook, about what they did wrong; long, cyclical fights that turn their throats raw every time their volume climbs. It feels a lot like they've been holding back since Mark got here; in the dark silence between them, this is what lurked.
You cut me out!
And --
You froze the accounts!
And --
But you signed the settlement.
Around and around they go, and it isn't until Eduardo finds himself hurtling Singapore against Mark like it's a hammer meant to smash him and not the best damn thing that happened to him, outside of "it's like a final club, except we're the president, Wardo," (and then I moved to Singapore, do you know what that's like?) that he thinks maybe he's hit rock bottom, empty-stomached and in pain, because you're never supposed to let something you love get turned into a weapon to hurt somebody else, but here Mark is, shoulders up around his ears and his face set, hard, like it's been glued back together out of a dozen pieces, and here's Eduardo, trying to break him apart again.
Why are you doing this? Eduardo asks himself, but he already knows the answer.
He doesn't trust Mark as far as he can spit, not with his company or his memories or his feelings, and that's scary when you know now that you're never going to leave him.
If Mark left right now, just started walking that line right back across the American south, then Eduardo would pick up his shotgun and follow; it wouldn't matter that Mark told him the Phoenix Club only wanted a token diversity pledge, it wouldn't matter that Mark forgot him on the tarmac at SFO, wouldn't matter that he signed the settlement to make him go away. All of that is horrible, and Eduardo will never forget Mark Zuckerberg's amazing capacity to injure him in every way, but it wouldn't be enough to make Eduardo live without him.
And.
The thing is.
Mark has never played by anyone's rules. He keeps on making these half-joking, half self-deprecating remarks that he's the exact opposite of whatever type of person you'd expect to survive the zombie apocalypse, but that's exactly why he survives when everybody else is gone. He has never once done what anybody has expected him to do.
He's a different kind of survivalist, the cockroach kind, and Eduardo trusts him in case of zombies.
Eduardo doesn't trust Mark with a lot of things, but he trusts him with his life, no question.
-
Mark, of course, completely upends the status quo: he kisses Eduardo first.
-
"You know what would be cool?" goes Eduardo, stretching out his legs so that his joints pop and his muscles yawn, contented. He's on his back on the theater roof, gravel digging into his shoulder blades, watching the clouds scuttle across the sky. He can tell the wind direction, easy as anything, but he's out of practice and he's going to need a calculator if he wants to determine the speed.
It'll be sunset soon, and they'll need to load their guns and hide away, but there's some time yet.
"If," he continues. "They made a movie about us. Later, you know, all I Am Legend and shit." He props himself up on his elbow, pulling a thoughtful face. "Will Smith could totally play me, don't you think? He's badass enough."
"Right, because we're so glamorous right now," Mark answers, dripping sarcasm. "Everybody will fall all over themselves making a movie out of this," he pulls his shirt away from his skin and makes a grossed-out face; the armpits are yellowed out, and there's a stain on the front from where Eduardo sort-of not-really accidentally jerked off on him.
He smirks. "Are you telling me you wouldn't just love to have a movie made about your life?"
They're both ignoring the fact that there isn't anybody left to make movies, not about anything.
"God, no," says Mark immediately. "I can't imagine anything worse."
Eduardo tilts his head, questioning.
"They'd get it wrong," Mark says, soft, and touches his thumb to Eduardo's bottom lip, like it's the bravest thing he can imagine doing.
-
The first couple of times, Mark is horrifically shaky right after sex. They're full-on anxious tremors, running all through his frame as he puts himself back together; his hands fumble trying to do up his clothes, his eyes twitch nervously, flicking from Eduardo to away and then back again. It's like his whole world has shaken apart under the pressure of Eduardo's hands on him.
Those first few times becomes several times.
Several times becomes a pattern.
Summer becomes fall without much discernible change in the weather; storms come in off the Gulf and meets the cold front brewing over the Atlantic.
Singapore is only about a stone's throw away from the Equator, so it's been years since he's has to worry about anything like the days getting shorter -- the change of the seasons isn't as bad as it would have been if they'd tried to eke it out somewhere up north, but the nights here will get longer, and with it, the zombies are going to be out later and later. They're going to need to act -- sooner, rather than later.
Eduardo knows he's digging his heels in. He can't help it. Mark is the most settled Eduardo has ever seen him, and he doesn't want to do anything that might change that.
He has no idea what to do, but at this point, he's kind of used to the sensation. He doubts he'll ever know what he's doing.
There's no precedent for something like this, after all. No case study, no projection forecast, no omen cropping up in a deck of tarot cards, nothing that tells him what to expect, now that he's the man whose whole entire world can be found in the cartography of Mark Zuckerberg's body; the bend in his neck, the soft movement of his ribs as he naps trustingly up against Eduardo's legs, the way his eyes change color when he looks at Eduardo, going the blue-grey color of a sunrise sky.
On the roof, he rolls over and pins Mark back into the gravel. His hands go instantly to cradle Eduardo's face, thumbing his cheekbones and pulling him in for a kiss, like it's as necessary as breathing.
It's the kind of thing that can move continents, Eduardo thinks.
Afterwards, he pitches American quarters off the side of the building, sunset blazing full and bright on the horizon. Mark doesn't shake at all when he takes his gun in a two-handed grip and shoots each one of them clear out of the sky.
-
They pick their way back to shore, the waves pulling at their calves and their fingers still dangling in the space between their bodies, tangled like a promise. With the other hand, Mark lifts his fingers to his cheek, absently touching the spot where Eduardo kissed him as easily as if they had been married for years.
It's the memory of Singapore that gave him the idea, actually. It had taken him months to sort out the names of all the hundreds of Indonesian islands that border their country to the south, scattered like buckshot into the Indian Ocean. He remembers Isibel telling him about her plan to set up a refuge in the Everglades, on some island where the zombies will be afraid to come.
The rest of Florida has places like that too, he knows, out in the Gulf and in Key West; islands set up as nature preserves, where the sea turtles will come to lay their eggs as they have for centuries, heedless of the zombies.
Some of them, if Mark and Eduardo can get to them, will be uninhabited.
Where there were no inhabitants, there will be no zombies.
Mark breaks the silence.
"Before," he says, and gestures around, meaning before I drove cross-country to get to you, before you flew here to get to me, before the zombies, back when we were billionaires and enemies and ex-friends. "If I had called, would you have come?"
"No," says Eduardo, who doesn't even have to think about it.
He rubs his thumb over the Singapore ten-cent coin, back and forth.
Mark nods like he understands, and he probably does -- he talks about California the same way Eduardo talks about Singapore, like he's never been as happy anywhere else. They missed each other, of course they did, and they'll openly admit as such, but neither one of them would have come for the other, without this impetus.
Zombies. It was the end of the world at the hands of zombies that brought Mark Zuckerberg and Eduardo Saverin back together again.
Go figure.
-
It's been five months since Ground Zero climbed into the back of a New York taxi cab, sneezed, said excuse me, and started the apocalypse.
It's been four months, one week since the first zombie sat bolt upright on an autopsy table and went for the jugular of the coroner, ravenous and deranged.
It's been four months since America declared a state of emergency and went into quarantine.
It's been three months since Eduardo learned how to shoot people in the face.
It's been two months since he got the last flight out of Singapore, since he cradled his dead cousin's skull in his hands and said good-bye, since he made a phone call and Mark answered.
It's been one month, three weeks since he met Mark on the Lake Worth bridge and knew he was never going to be alone again, not if he could help it.
And today is today.
"I found a boat," says Eduardo.
Mark looks up from his book; his hair is curling, messy with humidity, and he needs to shave again. But he smiles, and comes down the steps to meet him.
-
fin
For the necessary repairs to your heart, please to be seeing moogle62's fantastic epilogue.