Fic: Place That Don't Know My Name [The Social Network/Doctor Who][2/2]

[antistar_e]

<-- part one

6 |

On New (New New New) Singapore, Eduardo gets separated from the Doctor at an intergalactic job fair.

This isn't surprising, since the Doctor comes to these kinds of things and spends two seconds at every station, muttering variations of "wrong!" and "I like the nano version better" and "come back in hundred years, and then we'll talk 'advanced'," so when Eduardo looks up and finds the Doctor nowhere in sight, he just rolls his eyes and keeps on browsing.

New Singapore is the Kokoxomoso galaxy's leading hub for technological development, so everything new and hip and upcoming and every golden opportunity for young entrepreneurs is shown off here. According to the Doctor, at this point in time, the real name is something that's all consonants and no vowels, since human beings haven't even crawled out of the primordial soup yet. Eventually, they'll come and colonize and rename the place New Singapore, but not right now, so all this tech is alien.

"But it looks --" Eduardo starts, looking back and forth.

The Doctor flashes him a smile. "Curious, isn't it? So many different kinds of life developing everywhere in the universe, and yet you lot all wind up on parallel tracks sooner or later, doing the same things and making the same kind of technology."

"Oh, is that what it is?" Eduardo drums his fingers against his tie thoughtfully. "To be honest, I was wondering if the TARDIS was doing something."

"Do you think she's doing something to you?"

"Besides translating everything in my head? Well, that's it, exactly. Is she still translating? Like, she'll translate languages, but in order to understand something, you need to translate a lot more than words -- you need both syntax and semantics. Is she altering how I perceive these planets, so that I can recognize some local kind of domicile as a building the way I have experience with buildings? Is she altering how I see and smell food so that I recognize it as food?" This earns him a rhetorical, look at you, aren't you adorable? from the Doctor, which he steadfastedly talks over. "Is she altering what I see at this job fair so that I'll look at that and know it's --" he gestures vaguely at the nearest booth, because to be honest, it looks a bit like a --

"Three-speed blender, yes," the Doctor confirms, looping a circle around him in order to get a closer look. "I've always wanted one of these! I stuck a plant in our last one, and now I have an infestation in the pantry." He suddenly looks thoughtful.

"No, Doctor," Eduardo jumps in preemptively, because he knows that look. "You can't nick it."

The sky in New Singapore isn't a real sky: it's a thin net of a hologram, set to change every couple of hours to reflect the effects from various planets. Eduardo stands on a street corner for awhile, watching very something similar to the Northern Lights dance far up above his head, and feels an inarticulate joy swell up in his chest, because how is this his life? How is he this lucky? His cheeks start to hurt, and it's only when he lifts the back of his fingers to them does he realize that he's smiling that hard. He covers his mouth and laughs: it feels like fireworks inside his chest.

Sometime later, he's watching a presenter demonstrate what basically amounts to a car, only when you get out of it and press a button on your keys (it even beeps!) the car folds -- kind of like a Transformer, now that he thinks about it -- and folds and folds some more, until it's the same size and shape of a cigarette lighter. She then cheerfully tucks it into her purse and goes on her way.

Eduardo's still geeking out a little when his phone rings.

He fishes it out of his pocket, thumbing the accept button as he lifts it to his ear.

"Doctor!" he calls out in greeting, and he knows he sounds so stupidly, inanely, ridiculously happy, but he doesn't even care. The Doctor should know. "Doctor, you need to come see this! I think someone stole your idea, you know, the bigger-on-the-inside one," a thought occurs to him, and he doesn't even pause for breath, "and please hold off on sticking your nose in any intergalactic warfare for the next hour or so, I'm not done with this floor."

There's a beat of silence on the other line.

And then.

"... Wardo?"

Eduardo stops dead in his tracks.

Everything mutes; the alien chattering on every side, the PA system announcing the next set of presentations, his own breathing. Everything cuts out except for the rush in his ears and the nothing, the nothing coming from the phone, until -- yes, yes, that's the clacking of fingers on a keyboard.

"Mark," he says flatly.

"Hi." It's a syllable, just a syllable, and still, it's hardwired in Eduardo to peel every meaning out of it: that's all him, not the TARDIS. In "hi," Eduardo can tell that Mark is as thrown-off as he is. "I ... you said -- where are you?" he asks abruptly.

"Singapore."

"Why are you in Singapore?"

"I live here," Eduardo lies, and it's that obliviousness that has every one of his walls coming back up. He wonders how long it's been since the deposition, and he wonders what Mark's been doing, alone by himself on his tiny little Facebook anthill. "Mark," he says tiredly. "What do you want?"

"No, you're right," Mark says, brisk now. "I don't have time for a game of Where's Wardo anyway. Listen, do you remember where we put the --"

Something with six legs and an awkwardly-proportioned proboscis bumps into Eduardo from behind. They both apologize reactively and maneuver around each other, but it makes Eduardo feel clammy, like he wants to crawl out of his own skin, and this -- this is what Mark does to him. He is light-years, galaxies, even millennia away, and he still makes Eduardo feel hunted and claustrophobic.

He pushes through the clusters of aliens stopping and examining the booths. He needs to get outside now.

"-- hello?" Mark goes impatiently on the other line. "Wardo, did you hear anything I said?"

Why am I still on the phone? Eduardo thinks, like a light bulb flicking on. He slides his finger up to the End Call button, jabbing it with a dull throb of satisfaction, because Mark Zuckerberg already has so much of him, he doesn't get a second, a heartbeat, a breath more.

It's too late, of course, and where's the fairness in that? He escapes, finding somewhere less crowded and more quiet. He sits down under the pixellated sky, breathing hard, and he's the first human being to ever set foot on this planet and see this idea-exchanging mix of alien races, and all he feels now is numb. How come, when all the way across the universe their ancestors are just one-celled organisms floating around trying to decide if maybe there's something to this newfangled mitosis thing, Mark Zuckerberg can still make him feel like shit? Mark has always made Eduardo feel like shit during some of the best moments of his life, because that's just what he does. The others he hoarded for himself, demanding Eduardo's attention and setting his teeth to his jaw once he got it, like the half-crescent mark served as some kind of serial number, saying, this, this, your happiness belongs to me, too.

At the time, Eduardo had been willing to give it all.

This is how the Doctor finds him, an unspecified amount of time later. He's still by himself when he hears the Doctor's cheerful, "Aha! I wondered where you'd gotten off to. Did you see the auto car that could fold into this lighter-looking thing-a-ma-bob?" His voice lilts up, "Someone's trying to copycat Time Lord technology. It's never going to work: the thing has abysmal safety ratings -- Eduardo?" He's standing in front of him now; Eduardo can see the odd, squared toes of his shoes through the fan of his eyelashes.

He lifts his head.

"Ah," says the Doctor, blinking back at him. And then, "oh dear."

"Tell me something, Doctor," Eduardo says tonelessly. "Is this what Mark Zuckerberg does? Is this what his legacy is going to be -- ruining the lives of anyone who's ever offered him anything?"

The Doctor takes a deep breath and then squats down in front of him. "I was wondering when you were going to ask about him," he responds, his voice low. He reaches out, fitting the palm of his hand against the curve of Eduardo's skull, dragging him close so he can press a kiss against his hairline.

"Eduardo," he says heavily, mouth rolling against his skin. "Oh, Eduardo Saverin." He pushes himself up to his feet. "Come on. There's something I need to show you."

7 |

The TARDIS door creaks on her hinges, and the sunlight's so bright it blinds Eduardo momentarily; in the space in which everything is shot to white, he can hear children laughing, a splash. There's the unmistakable watermelon smell of cut grass.

Then his vision clears and he stops squinting and he sees they're outside a community pool, the kind you can find anywhere in human existence. It's summer, the sky is endlessly blue, and he can hear the wet smack of children's feet against the cement, another splash. The Doctor leans a shoulder against the TARDIS and makes a shooing motion with his hand, so Eduardo goes up to the fence.

And there, sitting along the edge of the pool with their feet in the water, a red lifeguard floatie draped over their laps, are the twins. He recognizes them instantly, for all that he only met them a couple times in person, the last of which was over a deposition table -- they're that distinctive. This is clearly in their future: there are crow's feet visible around their eyes even from a distance, and they've no longer got the bulging arms that scream I'm an Olympian athlete! Eduardo guesses they're in their mid-forties: the kind of mid-forties that can lifeguard at a pool without shirts and lose no dignity doing it, but he doesn't think the Winklevosses are the type to ever fall to ruin, not even in the face of old age.

As he watches, a woman walks through the gate. The twins look over at the loud squeal the metal makes, and their faces light up with identical expressions of surprise and delight. They fling the floatie to the side in their haste to get to their feet. She's not in a bathing suit and she's wearing shoes, which probably breaks about fourteen pool rules, and she's got thin brown hair that tumbles all across her shoulders; it's all Eduardo can see of her from this angle.

As she walks towards them, one of the men breaks into a run, and Eduardo catches a snatch of the other one yelling, "what is wrong with you, Tyler, you don't run at a pool!" but it doesn't matter, because Tyler reaches the woman and grabs her up into a hug, the kind where her feet leave the ground and he spins her around in a circle. He sets her down so that the other twin can hug her too, all of them talking over each other ("It has been entirely too long since we saw you last, woman, what is this" "I've forgotten how ridiculously tall you two are!") and then Cameron steps back and Eduardo feels the second sharp stab of surprise in between the ribs.

The woman is Erica Albright.

Ask Eduardo to write a list of the last people he'd have expected to see, and she would have been on there, somewhere in between George Washington with an ax and the goddamn Batman. He curls his fingers around the fence wiring, as Tyler goes to wrap an arm around Erica's waist and she squirms away, damp patches already showing on her clothes from where they hugged her.

"The thing that people tend to forget," comes from behind him. Eduardo startles, looking over his shoulder at the Doctor, who ghosts up next to him, fingering at his suspenders. "Is that we get along with far more many people than we quarrel with. Our friendships last longer than our grudges because friendships are so difficult to lose."

Eduardo looks back; Erica's hair is grey at her temples, but when she throws her head back and laughs, the sound is as joyful and young as any of the sun-darkened children splashing about in the water. "They're happy?"

"Mark Zuckerberg is nothing but some insignificant glitch in their past," the Doctor confirms, and reaches out, curling his fingers around Eduardo's where they're still gripping the fence. "That's what time is so very good at doing: it puts distance between you and the pain of heartbreak, so that you can go on and make friends with people on their own merit, for your own reasons, and be happy in the end. Most people learn this lesson by living it, but I think this is a spoiler that won't hurt you to see a little early."

Eduardo takes a deep breath, and lets go of the fence, letting his fingers lace together with the Doctor's as they fall back to their sides.

"Come on," says the Doctor, squeezing his hand. "One more stop."

8 |

He recognizes where he is immediately, and it guts him, hooks inside of him and rips everything out and he's airless, spinning inside his own head like a kaleidoscope.

He stands at the end of the hallway in Peter Thiel's office and watches himself come out of the elevator. Himself several years and one lawsuit younger, nervously fingering at the button on his suit jacket and constantly turning around so he can smile hugely at Mark: Mark, who looks exactly the same, with the heavy Neanderthal brows and the soft-to-the-touch clothes and the enigmatic half-smile at the corner of his mouth. He lifts his head every time younger Eduardo comes near in order to reflect his own joy back at him, amused and tolerant.

It takes everything in Eduardo not to stalk down the hallway and grab him around the throat and throttle him, because this is what he could never shake, this is what kept him up at night: the idea that maybe he could have seen the double-cross coming, that there was something in Mark's demeanor this day that was off, something Eduardo didn't recognize because he was too stupidly, wonderfully happy and trusting. He has gone over this moment in his head again and again, trying to find something.

And now here it is, in front of him again, and his worst suspicion is confirmed: Mark Zuckerberg lead his CFO to his death sentence with a smile on his face.

How can you look so calm? Eduardo's brain screams at him, watching his younger self catch at Mark's cuff, pulling him in to whisper something in his ear like a child, smiling a million watts the whole time. The evidence of his own happiness is twice as painful, the second time around. HOW. You plotted this. You KNOW. You KNOW what's going to happen, you miserable backstabbing --

Behind him, movement. The Doctor.

"Why did you bring me here?" Eduardo goes lowly, and doesn't recognize the strangled thing that comes out of his mouth as his own voice. "This is the last thing I want to relive."

This is the day he signed the angel investment papers. This is the day he shook Peter Thiel's hand and afterwards, Mark slipped into the office, fingering out the last bit of a text message and lifting his chin up to smile when Eduardo spun on him. Is this satisfactory? he'd asked, lifting his eyebrows imperiously.

This is the day he grabbed Mark by the shoulders and pinned him against the glass window, held him there while San Francisco glittered and moved below them and Mark complained, shifting and mumbling something about having no time for this, come on, Wardo, priorities.

Shut up, Eduardo had told him cheerfully, leaning in so that his entire world was nothing but Mark and glass, holding him there by the hips and the thighs. He dropped his voice to a murmur, low and humming, This is the happiest I have ever been.

I know, Mark had replied in that simple, straightforward way of his. Out of everything, Eduardo remembers this the clearest; Mark had looked right at him, studied him with an easy, assessing flick of his eyes, and then he smiled and he said, well, come on, then.

Ask a man to stop being a smug bastard for thirty seconds ... And then Eduardo had fisted his hands in the collar of Mark's shirt and pulled him up to his mouth; Mark's neck bent bonelessly against the pressure, his hair tickling against Eduardo's forehead and making it itch. They'd stayed there for a long time, kissing, the window cold against Mark's back and people bustling by with folders and Sean Parker off in the building somewhere where Eduardo really, really didn't care about him. The memory itself feels like glass, too bright to touch, and it presses hard against his ribs until they feel like splintering.

"Because," says the Doctor slowly, laying a hand on Eduardo's shoulder. "Because this is the moment, Eduardo, in which you are the most important person in the whole of creation."

Eduardo chokes on a laugh. "How?" he goes, cracked and too loud, and the Doctor transfers his grip to his elbow, pulling him into an empty room before they attract unwanted attention. "How, Doctor?" he implores when the door clicks shut behind them. "How am I important? Did you see me out there? I'm just a kid. A dumb, stupid, gullible --"

"Shhh shh," goes the Doctor, pressing his fingers to Eduardo's lips to quiet him. He grips the back of Eduardo's neck and gives him a shake. "Oh, Eduardo, if only you can see. Listen to me. Listen very carefully. Are you listening?"

Eduardo swallows, and nods.

"Good. Now, everywhere there is an important decision to be made, the universe splits in two, and nobody even feels it, because they can never see the consequences of what they do: there are hundreds of thousands of billions of parallel worlds all layered along this one, and every single one of them extends from one little person standing somewhere and trying to decide whether to turn left, or turn right. This is your turn left moment. This is where you decide the fate of your world. You can change it, you know. Right now -- you can send a note over there and remind yourself to have your own lawyers look at those papers, you can do it right this minute, and bam! Everything you know changes. That parallel universe becomes this one."

His voice is so weak he can barely hear it. "What will happen?"

The Doctor looks at him, sympathy cut deep into the lines around his eyes. "Mark never betrays you," he confirms, not much louder than a whisper. "But Facebook fails."

Eduardo makes a noise that's half a cry, half a sob. He drops into the empty seat, burying his head into his hands, gripping fistfuls of his hair, because Mark was right, Mark was right; it was him or the company, and a universe in which Mark is right is a universe that sucks.

"I'm glad I've had 900 years to sort this out, because I always wind up having to explain it to one of you little beautiful mayfly creatures. What you've never learned --"

And the Doctor is right there, kneeling in front of him. "What you don't trust," he says slowly. "Is your own significance. You have the power to change Mark Zuckerberg's mind. You've always had the power to change his mind. If you catch the clause in the paperwork and if you confront him, he will turn on Sean Parker to save his own skin. Since the first time you gave him advice on how not to scare off every girl he talked to, he's looked to you to be a conscience, to be the rhyme to his vast quantities of reason. You win, Sean Parker leaves, and Facebook booms for a year, maybe two, and then it fades into the same kind of obscurity that MySpace and LookBook have. Mark moves to Singapore with you and helps with company start-ups, and you live relatively happily. How could you not? You know nothing else."

"Someday you're going to explain to me how it is you know all this," Eduardo says, but he's listening.

"Oh, someone sat me down and very patiently described it to me," the Doctor goes, unrepentant, and closes his fingers around Eduardo's knee, squeezing it for emphasis. "But, do you realize that 68% of all the 21st-century advancements in the field of communications technology happened because somebody was stuck in a boring meeting or stuck in the back of class and wanted nothing more to do than check their Facebook feed? You studied business: supply and demand is what charters all things. Facebook revolutionized social networking, which revolutionized technology, which revolutionized the very process of human relations. Without it, without every new thing it inspired, the world never advances."

Eduardo lowers his hands and looks at the Doctor for a very long moment. "So what you're saying," he says eventually, fighting the ridiculous urge to laugh or cry, he doesn't know which. "Is that I have to choose. It's either Mark or the world?"

"Not to put too fine a point on it, yes."

Eduardo does laugh then, leaning back and sinking down into the chair, his throat constricted. He laughs helplessly, because who can make this up? How is this his life? He laughs until he finds his eyes stinging and his cheeks hot, and those are tears. Why offer him a choice at all? It's not even a choice!

"I can't --" he gasps, sobs, all sense of dignity gone. On the other side of the door, existing here and in his memory simultaneously, Peter Thiel is deciding how much longer he's going to make those Facebook kids sweat. Sean Parker keeps on smoothing his hair down, grinning. There's a solid foot of space between him and Eduardo on the bench, whereas Eduardo is close enough to Mark to be pressed together knee to hip to shoulder. And Mark, clueless, clueless Mark, is probably sitting out there thinking about Java script. He knows the trap he's set, but does he know that Eduardo is going to pin him to every surface of his room when they get back, is going to pin him down and lick every part of his body he can get his tongue on, so full of happiness he'll be drunk on it. Does he know that Sean Parker will pound on the door and yell, put your panties back on, ladies, there's a party out there with our names on it! and Eduardo will lift his mouth from Mark's stomach and shout back, fuck off, Sean! as Mark laughs from deep in his throat. Does he know how he's going to look, naked as a jaybird under Eduardo's hands, his mouth stung red and his eyes so bright they're like glass. Does he have any idea.

Mark loved him. Mark probably still loves him, Eduardo knows that, he knows that, he can't not know that, but Mark loves mercilessly, endlessly, with the same relentless force of the sun burning. There's no comfort in loving someone like Mark, because hard as Eduardo tried to be faithful and unfailing as an html code, he can't feel enough for two people. "I can't!"

And the Doctor's arms are around him now, less like a hug and more like the act of anchoring. Eduardo fists his hands in the Doctor's jacket and buries his face into the side of his neck and holds on, because it's all he can do.

"Eduardo," the Doctor's voice is a murmur in his ear. "Eduardo Saverin, the biggest bleeding heart in the world. Facebook may be Mark Zuckerberg's legacy, but right here, right now, this is yours. Nothing has the potential to be more dangerous than a bleeding heart. Nothing. Just like nothing can be more wonderful."

9 |

It's lunchtime on a Thursday (although they call it Apple-Dash Day on this planet,) and consider Eduardo's mind blown. "Centipedes?"

He straightens, swinging to face the Doctor, laughing at the absurdity. "They use centipedes to send letters? I thought you said this was the 45th century. What is this, where have you taken me?"

"Bite your tongue!" the Doctor retorts, putting a hand to his chest in mock offense and pointing sternly with the other. "They're incredibly loyal and useful creatures, and I'll have you know Her Majesty's Royal Postal Service is the most respected institution in the nation. They have a flawless record! They deliver eight days a week, and they never get caught in the plumbing." So, ha! he adds with a lift of his eyebrows.

"Oh, no, of course not," Eduardo smirks.

The Doctor claps his hands together, wringing his fingers and pacing back and forth. "I'm serious, though. I have a very important letter to send, so shoo. Go entertain yourself for awhile, and try not to start any civil wars. Or stop them, whichever the case may be. Without me, I mean."

"Got it." Eduardo pulls on the cuffs of his suit jacket and wanders off.

Wherever the Doctor's taken them now reminds him a bit of a very, very large lobby; the kind with sweeping marble floors in every direction, expensive-looking reception desks, and far too many ceremonial-looking pillars than could possibly be needed for form or function. There doesn't seem to be any people around, humanoid or otherwise, and once Eduardo is far enough away from the Doctor that he can't hear his muttering and the soft, put-upon screeching of the sonic screwdriver, it's a little eerie.

He ducks through a door at random, finding himself in a room that's all grey everything -- flat, cubed gray surfaces, the floor, the wall, something that might be desks or counters or anything at all.

"Well, this takes minimalist design to a whole new level," he comments quietly, and takes a step forward.

Immediately, the floor splits and a panel rises in front of him. It's also a flat, grey surface, kind of like a podium, and it stays in front of him with the distinct waiting air, like it wants him to do something.

He reaches up, and tentatively touches his fingertip to the panel.

It's like touching the surface of a lake. From the place where his finger pressed against it, the panel erupts into color, rippling outwards in rings of violets, greens, oranges, so much all at once that Eduardo almost shields his eyes, because it's shocking to see after all that grey.

"Eduardo Saverin," the computerized, cool, androgynous voice comes from everywhere at once, and the panel turns a solid off-blue color. Woah, Eduardo thinks, startled, because it's always creepy to have your name just announced out of nowhere like that. "Age: 2520."

"No way," he says to no in particular.

"Occupation," the computer continues, dispassionate. "Time traveler," which makes Eduardo smile, and then he goes cold all over when it continues, "and shareholder. Welcome, Mr. Saverin. You're expected on level three C, room 114."

"I'm what?" Eduardo says blankly.

"You're expected on level three C, room 114," the computer repeats helpfully.

"How can I --" he turns in a circle on the spot, like something else might pop out of the floor and explain things to him. He turns back to the panel, not sure if he's addressing it right. "Um, not to sound, you know, ignorant or anything, but I'm pretty sure you have the wrong person, and also ... how do I get to level three C?"

There's a soft noise, and Eduardo looks to the right just as the outline of a door appears there, etched into the wall in a deep crimson color. "Please state your destination clearly. If you have any other need of assistance, we are happy to help."

"Thank you," says Eduardo, polite. He moves to the side and takes a few careful steps over to the cut-out door. The lines of red are glowing faintly, which isn't menacing at all, no. "Um," he addresses it, ever-eloquent. "Apparently I need to go to level three C?"

Walls shoot out of nowhere, too quick for the eye to follow, boxing him in. Eduardo yelps, but just like that, everything else has been shut out. There's a distinct feeling of being lifted, like he's in an elevator. It doesn't last long, because soon the walls are retreating again, folding back like partitions, and he finds himself in a hallway. It's completely different from the flat lounge below -- it looks like any hallway in any building Eduardo has ever been in, white walls and wooden doors, and the familiarity is soothing.

The main tract underneath his feet is the same grey material as the panel had been, and when he walks forward, it lights up under his shoes, splashes of color marking his footprints.

"That's actually kind of cool," he comments, looking over his shoulder to watch the rainbow trail he leaves, colors shifting and blending into each other.

The doors are all numbered, and Eduardo follows them, counting to himself as they work towards, until --

"Room 114." He opens the door.

It looks like a classroom, lecture-style, with seats that fan upwards into tiers. At the bottom, front and center in front of the whiteboard, there's a woman in a wrap-around white dress, the train of it dragging on the floor. She's sitting on a desk, twirling the chamber of what looks like a pistol, and she's got a mop of kinky, curly hair sticking out in every direction; it's enough to make the memory of Mark's Jew-fro look tamed and respectable in comparison. Behind her, his back to Eduardo, is a stoop-backed old man, the top of his head shiny and bald with only a few tufts of hair still clinging around the ears.

He's complaining bitterly when Eduardo arrives. "-- it's glitching again. Stupid. I miss the days where there was the HP and that was it. No Sony Vaio, no Macbook Air, none of this --" he gestures at the whiteboard, as aggravated as any crotchety old professor Eduardo had at Harvard. "Is he here yet?"

"You know, you keep asking that question, and I promise you, it's not going to --" the woman looks up, her expression long-suffering, and catches sight of Eduardo standing in the doorway. She stops mid-sentence. "Yes, actually."

The man whips around, surprisingly spry, and then double-takes.

They stare at each other. He shoots a look at the woman. "Doctor Song," he says, a bit testily. "You neglected to tell me exactly how young he'd be."

"It's not my fault you're old and he's a heartthrob," and the woman winks up at him, cheeky. Eduardo's starting to feel a lot like how he did the first time he met the Doctor; hopeless, confused, and a little like he has an oncoming headache. Being a time traveler, he's getting used to things not happening linearly, but it doesn't make it any less baffling.

The old man squints up the aisle. He's got a very large forehead and heavy brows -- it would be easier to overlook if he had any hair, but as is, it makes him look like a caveman. "I forgot how much hair you had. What do you use to cut it, a weedwhacker?"

"I -- um?" is Eduardo's intelligent reply.

Doctor Song throws her head back and laughs. "Oh come down here, sweetheart, we don't bite."

And then the old man does the impossible. He straightens up, sticks his hands in the pockets of his trousers, and says, simply, "Wardo."

Eduardo jerks as if struck by a lightning rod. His feet move without any direction whatsoever from his brain, taking him down the sloping aisle in between the seats. Like in the hallway, his footprints light up in riots of color, leaving imprints on the floor, but he doesn't pay them any mind. The doctor puts the gun down onto the desk and crosses her legs at the knee, and her eyes sparkle when Eduardo's gaze flicks to her briefly.

The old man watches his approach, his mouth pulled back at one corner in a way that Eduardo has seen a hundred times before, more familiar to him than even his own father's face.

He reaches the front row and stops, a pace or two away. The old man reaches out, snagging the can at the edge of the desk and tipping his head back to take a drink like it's a nervous habit, and it strikes Eduardo in the gut, recognition shivering through all the way to the ends of his fingers: apparently energy drinks are the same in the 45th century as they are in the 21st, because how many times has he seen that movement?

"Oh my god," he says blankly.

Doctor Song laughs again. "Good Lord, boy, sit down." She looks sideways. "And here I was, thinking 'he went as white as a sheet' was just a figure of speech."

Mark -- Mark, old Mark, Mark here Mark! -- chuckles ruefully. "You should have seen him the morning they published the article in the Crimson regarding his cruelty to animals." At Doctor Song's questioning look, he elaborates, "Forced cannibalism. He had a chicken eat chicken."

"Oooo, forced cannibalism. That one never gets old."

Eduardo finds his voice. "Stop!" he goes, loudly, raising his palm. "Just -- stop that. You can't --" he looks at Mark, Mark with wrinkles and no hair and age spots on the backs of his hands and pocked into his skull. "-- this can't be. This is the 45th century. What are you doing here?"

A horrible idea occurs to him.

"Oh god no," he says faintly. "Oh god, please don't tell me you're actually two thousand years old. You discovered the cure for the death and the secret to eternal life, of course you did that, that is such a Mark thing to do."

"You idiot," says Mark, and Eduardo's eyebrows fly up, because Mark's smiling again, that smug, self-satisfied smirk he gets when he knows something Eduardo doesn't. It's a hundred times worse on a face that old. "Do you think if I'd found a way to preserve myself, I would have chosen to keep myself like this?" He holds up his gnarled hands and runs them over his head, dragging them in the pits around his eyes. "I'm a ruin. No, I got to this age the long way, but I got to this century via a shortcut."

It's perhaps the biggest shock of Eduardo's entire life, and that's including the bit where he walked into the Facebook offices to find his shares got diluted down to .03%.

"No," is all he manages.

Mark hums in the back of his throat.

"No way," says Eduardo, disbelieving.

Mark lifts his eyebrows.

"But I hate you!" Eduardo blurts out.

"Do you really?" says Mark flatly, like it's the first time he's heard of it. "That sounds really boring."

Eduardo clenches his fists. "You forced me out of our company."

"And you got into a time machine with a complete stranger and you didn't do a thing to change that," Mark points out levelly. He folds his arms and leans his hip against the desk. "There's a difference, Wardo, between good men and successful men, and I've always known the difference, just like I've always known which category I fell into, and which category you fell into. It never occurred to me that you weren't able to see the same thing. Look at this way --" he spreads his hands. "I created a website that helps people obsessively stalk their significant others and the people who bullied them in high school, and you've saved the universe."

"Twice," Eduardo points out.

Mark's mouth curves. "Exactly."

He looks down at the floor, scuffing at it a little with his toe, and Eduardo studies him, still a bit floored at seeing his Mark inside this old, worn-down body. He thinks, inexplicably, of the way the Winklevoss twins pulled Erica to them, their arms dark against her small shoulders, thinks of what the Doctor said, about how people try to hold onto friendship more than they do a grudge.

"Do you remember the first office building Facebook was in?" he asks without thinking.

This startles a laugh out of Mark; a dry, croaking sound. "3505 University Ave," he answers immediately. "On the corner. We decorated it very tastefully, all glass and stainless steel, which I was told was very hip at the time, but it didn't change the fact it was one floor and one room. We had to put the servers up against the window: I practically had an fit every time it rained." He tilts his head. "We were right above that little Persian restaurant. It was only open at odd hours."

"It smelled like falafel," Eduardo remembers.

"Every damn day," Mark goes, droll. "We moved, you know, after we hit membership in one hundred countries. Needed more room for the servers. Of course," he lifts his palms. "Now we're galactic. We're on seventy-five planets, two thousand nation-states, and one-hundred-fifty space stations. They don't call it Facebook anymore, as that's discriminatory language: what about our users who don't have faces? But they still use it: I recognize hacked versions of my own code, even if it's thousands of years old," he sniffs.

Mark Zuckerberg, ladies and gentlemen and all variations thereof, Eduardo thinks dryly. Still an asshole.

The pause stretches on for awhile, and then, suddenly, Doctor Song makes an exasperated noise and throws her arms up. "Why are you still here?" she demands of Eduardo, loudly, startling him back into the present.

Eduardo shoots a look at Mark.

"I'd tell you, but it hasn't been written for you yet. Trust me, it's not like you're going to have to twist my arm." Mark says, turning back to the whiteboard. "I'll just be glad it's not another lawsuit."

And just like that, the very last piece clicks into place. Eduardo's hands fly to his head, fisting his hair.

"Oh my god," he goes, scrambling to process it. "Oh my god, it was you. It was you the whole time! Or it will be you. You're the one that told the Doctor to come get me on the last day of the depositions! You told him all that stuff about Sean, and your motivations, and my grandparents. You called him."

"Don't be stupid," Mark deadpans, dismissive. He touches his fingertips to the whiteboard, and soft ripples of color spread out across the surface, solidifying into large chunks of block text. "I left a note on his Wall."

Eduardo throws his head back and laughs, and he's going, he's going to turn on his heel and dead-run all the way back to the TARDIS, to the Doctor who will look at him and say in his fond way, Eduardo Saverin, the boy with the bleeding heart, who will take him home and to whom he will say good-bye because he has a future with his brilliant genius backstabbing best friend and someday somehow they'll wind up here, but before he can take more than one step, Song's hand closes around his arm in a vice-like grip. She leans in.

10 |

"I have a spoiler for you, sweetheart." She smells like gunpowder, and her lips brush his ear when she whispers, "It's a happy ending."

-
fin

Notes:
1. The full quote I used at the very beginning can be found at this source.
2. In the summertime, I used to see big clots of Facebook boys in Pizza My Heart all the freaking time back when headquarters was on University Ave, and I was like, what the hell, you guys, I get that you're computer nerds and you probably think that pizza counts as the bottom level of the food pyramid, but you have your own Persian restaurant, like, right downstairs! You don't even have to leave your building! And they were just kind of like, yeah, but we smell it all day. We don't want it anymore. /trivia
3. Frank!

EDIT: This story now has a sequel: Place Between Here and the Destination