Fic: say goodbye (to the world you thought you lived in) (2/9)
say goodbye (to the world you thought you lived in)
Part Two
-----------------------------------
When Mark comes around, the first thing he notices is that he’s not hungover; his head’s only foggy with the novelty of sleep. The second thing that filters in is that he’s in a bed, which is fine, but the bed doesn’t feel right, doesn’t feel like his own -- but it’s not unknown, not entirely unfamiliar. He’s slept in it before.
The third thing that hits him is recollection, realization: he’s in his bed, at the house, the Stanford house.
And that means -- that means...
He glances at the clock -- 7:50 AM -- and he blinks, wants a fucking calendar, so he stumbles to his feet and boots up his laptop. And freezes.
Shit. Holy fucking shit.
It’s December Tenth. Two-thousand and four. It’s the day they hit a million members.
Mark thinks he might throw up.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
The morning drags on, forever, and Mark feels half-nauseous the whole fucking time, something bitter present at the back of his throat that won’t go away, that keeps him just this side of shaking until they pass eleven, and then noon, and Mark remembers the first time around, being distracted and wired and hyped and unsure, but this time he’s sneaking glances at the entryway, the doors at the far side of the room where he remembers, where he knows -- knows because he’s thought about it, ran it over in his mind enough times to be sure; where Eduardo came through, came first.
Because Mark made a deal. And whether that was a dream -- whether this is a dream -- Mark made a fucking deal. Given the chance, he can fix this. Fix everything. He’s plotted it out, wondered enough times through idle hours where there’s nothing to code and no more to do, where he sits with his fingers on the keyboard, his headphones tight against his ears and just thinks, types nonsense that he won’t save, that he’ll later delete; he knows he can fix this.
And maybe it’s mostly because now he knows that there’s something to fix, something he did wrong that he wasn’t sure was even out of line that first time through; and maybe this is just the product of too much tequila on top of too much bourbon on top of too much vodka and not enough scotch. Maybe this is dehydration and alcohol poisoning and the anniversary of the depositions -- Wardo’s face in front of him -- all mixed together with his own subconscious angst: he doesn’t know for sure, he can’t. But he knows he can fix this, and he’s damn well going to try.
So when Eduardo walks through those doors at quarter after one, Mark’s on his feet, Mark’s already halfway toward him with Eduardo glances over in his direction. Mark’s ready, except no, because Eduardo grins at him, and that’s so removed from Mark’s reality, now, so filled with nostalgia and wishful fucking thinking and a thousand other intangible, inextricable things in Mark’s head that it blindsides him, takes him by surprise, and Mark’s not ready for how real Eduardo is when Mark walks up to him, when Mark gets close enough to see.
“Wardo,” Mark says, soft and wondering, because they don’t really talk, and they make significant efforts not to run into one another in closed quarters when they can avoid it -- but it’s not as if Mark hasn’t seen him, hasn’t stopped himself staring across a room, through a crowd, and he’s seen Eduardo grow up, fill out, seen the set of his face, the slight broadness that settles in his shoulders. He’s seen Eduardo, in the present, in his time, and this Eduardo standing before him, looking at him, black suit and bright eyes: this Eduardo is so innocent. This Eduardo is looking at him, not with blank eyes that shift away quick when they accidentally cross paths, but with gladness, with joy when he sees Mark, when Mark comes close. This Eduardo reaches out and puts a hand on Mark’s shoulder, doesn’t slap his back like Dustin does, but simply touches, like he wants to, like it’s normal -- and Mark: he’d forgotten that, between them, it used to be.
This Eduardo is so young, and it kind of takes Mark’s breath away.
“Mark,” and Eduardo says his name with such confidence, such fondness and sureness and weight, and Mark understands now. He doesn’t care what it looks like, doesn’t care what it’ll change. In the moment, standing here in front of the Eduardo he watched walk away those years ago, none of the pain, no betrayal in his eyes: in the moment, Mark doesn’t give a shit what comes from this. He knows why he’s here.
“Hey,” Mark says, shrugs away from Eduardo’s touch a few moments later than he would have; doesn’t really want to do even that, doesn’t really want to move away. “Look, I’ve got some,” he breathes in quick through his nose, sighs the air back out as he chews his lips, thinks on how to do this, how to make it work. “We need to talk.”
Eduardo’s grin turns lopsided, and something burns in Mark’s gut to see it. “Sounds ominous,” Eduardo quips, and Mark can feel eyes on him -- Sean across the way, his lawyer through he glass -- but he doesn’t pay them any mind, just stares at Eduardo, tries to read the minute shifts in Wardo’s expression, the little things that Mark never really cataloged as they’d happened, only ever started to parse in the recollections, the memories -- drunken afternoons and long nights, staring at the ceiling, out the window.
“Let’s, umm,” Mark swallows down the thoughts, the way he notices apprehension in Wardo’s face, and he wants them out of here, wants them to get as far from this place where it all came down as possible; “grab lunch?”
Eduardo frowns, and Mark thinks he’s fucked it up, just for a minute, until Eduardo asks, confused: “But,” he tilts his head, looks beyond Mark’s shoulder; “the party?”
And Mark breathes out slow, steady; “It’ll keep, man,” and it’s true, it’s so fucking true because Mark didn’t care about parties, not even then: he cared about functionality and growing the system and expansion and development and innovation. He hadn’t cared about parties.
And yet, there were a lot of things he hadn’t cared about then; or, had cared about, but never realized the depth.
“Let’s, just,” Mark meets Wardo’s eyes, and he says the last thing on his mind, the farthest thing from the goddamned truth.
“I’m starving,” he says it, plain and unmoved, shaking underneath with the reality, the fact that he’s here, and he has the power to change everything in just this action, just this moment. “Come on.”
He holds the door for Eduardo, gets a raised eyebrow in return but no questions, no doubt, and Mark thinks --
Mark doesn’t know what to think.
His blood is racing, hot in his veins as they descend the stairs, make their way to street level, and Mark’s lost in his head, thinking about where they can go, what he can say, and he’s still there, locked in his mind and his own concerns when the crash startles him, the sharp pull of gravity and the thump of weight, the crack of something hard as it hits, falls down the stairs and tumbles. He has to blink before the scene makes sense: Eduardo, crumbled at the landing, folded backward on himself, headfirst -- the angle of his shoulder, the position of his jaw displaced, unbalanced, and Mark doesn’t hear anything, there’s no expression of pain, no labored breath counterpoint to his own.
It’s silent. And it scares the hell out of him.
He fumbles, trips over himself and has to grasp the handrail as he makes his way to where Wardo landed, where he’s sprawled out, awkward and unnatural. He bends, drops to his knees and feels the sharp pain of impact on his shins as he settles next to Wardo, sees proof of what he’s already fearing, what’s already sinking low in his chest, but Mark doesn’t believe it, can’t believe it when he reaches out, when he counts his own pounding heart in his fingers when he feels for a pulse at Wardo’s neck, and nothing else.
Nothing else.
He stares, looks at the way Wardo’s eyes are glassy, empty -- so much more than the way he looks at Mark now, in Mark’s own time, in Mark’s reality where there’s hate and hurt between them; the gaze Mark had thought was blank and empty, there’s still so much in it, so much life and feeling, because this: this is what blank is, this is what gone is, and Mark had a chance, he had a fucking chance and he’d trusted it, he’d truly believed it could work, and the loss now, the absolute loss staring at him, blank and foreign and dead, fucking dead -- it steals something from deep inside, from somewhere at Mark’s core where he doesn’t often look, doesn’t often pay much heed; it steals something and holds it hostage, grasps it too fucking tight, and Mark can’t breathe through it, can’t stop it, can’t make any sense of it or make it go away. And when Mark blinks, the world goes dark for too long, and all he sees is Wardo: Eduardo, with blood that’s not moving of it’s own accord, just trailing and sticking as it drips from the points of impact; Eduardo, with his neck off kilter, snapped clean to the side; Eduardo, who he’s reaching for, shaky and distant like a nightmare or a dream, who he’s touching at the cheek, at the arm, at the chest, desperate, beyond his own comprehension, but there’s nothing, there’s nothing where Wardo used to be.
There was Eduardo, and now there is nothing.
This isn’t real. This can’t be fucking real.
Mark can’t fucking breathe.
___________________________
He’s gasping when he comes to, when he blinks and can’t find Eduardo, can’t find Eduardo’s body. And that’s the most important thing, in his head, in his chest: he can’t find Eduardo’s body.
The light shifts, and the woman, she’s standing over him, and if his heart was racing before, it leaps quick into a sprint when he sees her, when he tries to make any sense of what’s just happened, of what’s real.
There’s still blood on his hands. It feels very fucking real.
“Told you so,” she tells him, blasé; bends down to face him, eye to eye.
“You’re,” and he doesn’t know what he wants to say, what he was planning on saying when he opened his mouth -- if there was a plan, if there ever was a plan; “you’re-”
“You had your shot. You failed,” she snaps at him, narrow-eyed, and something flashes in her gaze, something bright and violent, something Mark doesn’t trust. “It’s not rocket science, Mark.”
“I didn’t get a chance,” Mark argues, because it was so soon, it was too quick, he’d only just seen Wardo, only just touched him and spoken a few words, and then it was over.
“You had a chance,” the woman barks at him, unsympathetic, unrelenting. “The moment he walked in, you had a chance. You fucked it up, Mark. A botched job,” and Mark wants to refute it, wants to saying something, anything to prove his point -- there was no time, but he can barely swallow, let alone speak.
“Though I don’t know what’s worse, really,” and here, she smirks at him, almost cruel; “this, or the first time.” And she laughs, she laughs and it sends shivers up Mark’s spine. “You wanted to fix things with him, and this time you didn’t break a friendship or a MacBook,” she grins, white teeth and red lips and it’s unnatural, it’s hateful and vengeful and stark; “you broke his neck.”
Mark fights the hard pull, the wrenching in his stomach and swallow bile, manages a protest because no, it wasn’t, Wardo fell: “I didn’t-”
“Semantics,” she flicks her wrist, dismisses him. “You chose this path, and this was the result.” She leans in, just a little closer, her breath sweet, hot, poison on his cheek: “You chose, Mark,” she exhales; “and you always seem to choose wrong.”
And Mark: he wants to fight her, wants to snap back, hard and fast because she’s a monster, she’s a demon, she’s a temptress who controls fucking time and space, but Mark doesn’t care, Mark doesn’t give a shit what she is, or what she’s capable of because he can do this, he can -- he knows what the future holds and he’s seen where the roads lead, and he knows what it’s like not to have anyone to turn to, who knows the relevance of the progress being made, who will laugh at an inside joke that isn’t funny, will chuckle when no one else does; he knows, and he can do so many things, he can, and he can do this.
Given a chance, a real chance, he can fix this.
And Mark wants more than anything to tell her to fucking give him his shot, but he can’t. In that moment, still reeling from the dead stare planted dull in Wardo’s eyes, the blood drying, cracked on his fingers, Mark can’t do it; in that moment, he doesn’t have an excuse, doesn’t have an alibi. There’s nothing he can say.
He’s pretty sure she knows it, too.
“Back to the bar, then,” she tuts, moves to turn away, but Mark -- he has something to say, now; he needs to say something, and this time it’s that look, that emptiness in Eduardo’s gaze and the tacky streaks of red still wet in places on his skin; this time, that’s exactly what forces the word from his lips.
“No!” Because he won’t have it, he won’t stand for it. He backed down once before.
He’s learned his goddamned lesson.
She spins back toward him, gaze shrewd. “Excuse me?” And she sounds pissed, she sounds angry, and Mark doesn’t know who or what she is, but he really doesn’t care.
“No,” he says again, steadier this time, sharp in his own way, practiced. “I want,” he clears his throat, knows it ruins the edge, any leverage he could try to claw at, to thieve. “I want to try again.”
The woman steps closer, the click of her heels like ice in his veins. “That wasn’t our agreement.” Mark doesn’t even remember what the agreement was, exactly, what it is. He doesn’t remember anything except Eduardo, dead.
“I was supposed to have a legitimate opportunity to make things right,” Mark says, all clipped consonants and the sense, the familiar sensation of things undone, opportunities untaken. “I didn’t get that,” he snaps, asserts with all of the authority he’s earned, that maybe means nothing here, wherever they are, whatever this is, but that’s never mattered. Mark’s never been afraid of people who have more power than him. They don’t know what he can do.
“I want another chance,” he says, simple. “I want to try again,” and then, louder; “I deserve to try again.”
It’s the wrong thing to say.
“Don’t presume to speak to me about what you deserve, Mark,” she spits down at him, venom and wrath and something deeper, darker, ominous and omnipotent, and Mark can’t help the way he cowers, unconsciously, the way he shrinks as she glares, calms, seethes: “Don’t forget your place.”
“Please,” and it’s out before he knows it, before he thinks to say it; and apparently he isn’t above begging, now, but that’s okay, he thinks. That’s okay, for this. “Take me back,” and he’s breathless, suddenly, rises up on his knees and keeps his gaze steady; “let me try again.”
Her expression doesn’t change, and he needs this. He needs another chance. He keeps eye contact, makes himself stare at her without flinching, without turning away; he needs this.
“Well,” she finally answers, draws out the vowel; “seeing as you asked so nicely.”
She snaps her fingers and everything fades.
Part Three --->
// Master Post //
<--- Part One
Part Two
-----------------------------------
When Mark comes around, the first thing he notices is that he’s not hungover; his head’s only foggy with the novelty of sleep. The second thing that filters in is that he’s in a bed, which is fine, but the bed doesn’t feel right, doesn’t feel like his own -- but it’s not unknown, not entirely unfamiliar. He’s slept in it before.
The third thing that hits him is recollection, realization: he’s in his bed, at the house, the Stanford house.
And that means -- that means...
He glances at the clock -- 7:50 AM -- and he blinks, wants a fucking calendar, so he stumbles to his feet and boots up his laptop. And freezes.
Shit. Holy fucking shit.
It’s December Tenth. Two-thousand and four. It’s the day they hit a million members.
Mark thinks he might throw up.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
The morning drags on, forever, and Mark feels half-nauseous the whole fucking time, something bitter present at the back of his throat that won’t go away, that keeps him just this side of shaking until they pass eleven, and then noon, and Mark remembers the first time around, being distracted and wired and hyped and unsure, but this time he’s sneaking glances at the entryway, the doors at the far side of the room where he remembers, where he knows -- knows because he’s thought about it, ran it over in his mind enough times to be sure; where Eduardo came through, came first.
Because Mark made a deal. And whether that was a dream -- whether this is a dream -- Mark made a fucking deal. Given the chance, he can fix this. Fix everything. He’s plotted it out, wondered enough times through idle hours where there’s nothing to code and no more to do, where he sits with his fingers on the keyboard, his headphones tight against his ears and just thinks, types nonsense that he won’t save, that he’ll later delete; he knows he can fix this.
And maybe it’s mostly because now he knows that there’s something to fix, something he did wrong that he wasn’t sure was even out of line that first time through; and maybe this is just the product of too much tequila on top of too much bourbon on top of too much vodka and not enough scotch. Maybe this is dehydration and alcohol poisoning and the anniversary of the depositions -- Wardo’s face in front of him -- all mixed together with his own subconscious angst: he doesn’t know for sure, he can’t. But he knows he can fix this, and he’s damn well going to try.
So when Eduardo walks through those doors at quarter after one, Mark’s on his feet, Mark’s already halfway toward him with Eduardo glances over in his direction. Mark’s ready, except no, because Eduardo grins at him, and that’s so removed from Mark’s reality, now, so filled with nostalgia and wishful fucking thinking and a thousand other intangible, inextricable things in Mark’s head that it blindsides him, takes him by surprise, and Mark’s not ready for how real Eduardo is when Mark walks up to him, when Mark gets close enough to see.
“Wardo,” Mark says, soft and wondering, because they don’t really talk, and they make significant efforts not to run into one another in closed quarters when they can avoid it -- but it’s not as if Mark hasn’t seen him, hasn’t stopped himself staring across a room, through a crowd, and he’s seen Eduardo grow up, fill out, seen the set of his face, the slight broadness that settles in his shoulders. He’s seen Eduardo, in the present, in his time, and this Eduardo standing before him, looking at him, black suit and bright eyes: this Eduardo is so innocent. This Eduardo is looking at him, not with blank eyes that shift away quick when they accidentally cross paths, but with gladness, with joy when he sees Mark, when Mark comes close. This Eduardo reaches out and puts a hand on Mark’s shoulder, doesn’t slap his back like Dustin does, but simply touches, like he wants to, like it’s normal -- and Mark: he’d forgotten that, between them, it used to be.
This Eduardo is so young, and it kind of takes Mark’s breath away.
“Mark,” and Eduardo says his name with such confidence, such fondness and sureness and weight, and Mark understands now. He doesn’t care what it looks like, doesn’t care what it’ll change. In the moment, standing here in front of the Eduardo he watched walk away those years ago, none of the pain, no betrayal in his eyes: in the moment, Mark doesn’t give a shit what comes from this. He knows why he’s here.
“Hey,” Mark says, shrugs away from Eduardo’s touch a few moments later than he would have; doesn’t really want to do even that, doesn’t really want to move away. “Look, I’ve got some,” he breathes in quick through his nose, sighs the air back out as he chews his lips, thinks on how to do this, how to make it work. “We need to talk.”
Eduardo’s grin turns lopsided, and something burns in Mark’s gut to see it. “Sounds ominous,” Eduardo quips, and Mark can feel eyes on him -- Sean across the way, his lawyer through he glass -- but he doesn’t pay them any mind, just stares at Eduardo, tries to read the minute shifts in Wardo’s expression, the little things that Mark never really cataloged as they’d happened, only ever started to parse in the recollections, the memories -- drunken afternoons and long nights, staring at the ceiling, out the window.
“Let’s, umm,” Mark swallows down the thoughts, the way he notices apprehension in Wardo’s face, and he wants them out of here, wants them to get as far from this place where it all came down as possible; “grab lunch?”
Eduardo frowns, and Mark thinks he’s fucked it up, just for a minute, until Eduardo asks, confused: “But,” he tilts his head, looks beyond Mark’s shoulder; “the party?”
And Mark breathes out slow, steady; “It’ll keep, man,” and it’s true, it’s so fucking true because Mark didn’t care about parties, not even then: he cared about functionality and growing the system and expansion and development and innovation. He hadn’t cared about parties.
And yet, there were a lot of things he hadn’t cared about then; or, had cared about, but never realized the depth.
“Let’s, just,” Mark meets Wardo’s eyes, and he says the last thing on his mind, the farthest thing from the goddamned truth.
“I’m starving,” he says it, plain and unmoved, shaking underneath with the reality, the fact that he’s here, and he has the power to change everything in just this action, just this moment. “Come on.”
He holds the door for Eduardo, gets a raised eyebrow in return but no questions, no doubt, and Mark thinks --
Mark doesn’t know what to think.
His blood is racing, hot in his veins as they descend the stairs, make their way to street level, and Mark’s lost in his head, thinking about where they can go, what he can say, and he’s still there, locked in his mind and his own concerns when the crash startles him, the sharp pull of gravity and the thump of weight, the crack of something hard as it hits, falls down the stairs and tumbles. He has to blink before the scene makes sense: Eduardo, crumbled at the landing, folded backward on himself, headfirst -- the angle of his shoulder, the position of his jaw displaced, unbalanced, and Mark doesn’t hear anything, there’s no expression of pain, no labored breath counterpoint to his own.
It’s silent. And it scares the hell out of him.
He fumbles, trips over himself and has to grasp the handrail as he makes his way to where Wardo landed, where he’s sprawled out, awkward and unnatural. He bends, drops to his knees and feels the sharp pain of impact on his shins as he settles next to Wardo, sees proof of what he’s already fearing, what’s already sinking low in his chest, but Mark doesn’t believe it, can’t believe it when he reaches out, when he counts his own pounding heart in his fingers when he feels for a pulse at Wardo’s neck, and nothing else.
Nothing else.
He stares, looks at the way Wardo’s eyes are glassy, empty -- so much more than the way he looks at Mark now, in Mark’s own time, in Mark’s reality where there’s hate and hurt between them; the gaze Mark had thought was blank and empty, there’s still so much in it, so much life and feeling, because this: this is what blank is, this is what gone is, and Mark had a chance, he had a fucking chance and he’d trusted it, he’d truly believed it could work, and the loss now, the absolute loss staring at him, blank and foreign and dead, fucking dead -- it steals something from deep inside, from somewhere at Mark’s core where he doesn’t often look, doesn’t often pay much heed; it steals something and holds it hostage, grasps it too fucking tight, and Mark can’t breathe through it, can’t stop it, can’t make any sense of it or make it go away. And when Mark blinks, the world goes dark for too long, and all he sees is Wardo: Eduardo, with blood that’s not moving of it’s own accord, just trailing and sticking as it drips from the points of impact; Eduardo, with his neck off kilter, snapped clean to the side; Eduardo, who he’s reaching for, shaky and distant like a nightmare or a dream, who he’s touching at the cheek, at the arm, at the chest, desperate, beyond his own comprehension, but there’s nothing, there’s nothing where Wardo used to be.
There was Eduardo, and now there is nothing.
This isn’t real. This can’t be fucking real.
Mark can’t fucking breathe.
___________________________
He’s gasping when he comes to, when he blinks and can’t find Eduardo, can’t find Eduardo’s body. And that’s the most important thing, in his head, in his chest: he can’t find Eduardo’s body.
The light shifts, and the woman, she’s standing over him, and if his heart was racing before, it leaps quick into a sprint when he sees her, when he tries to make any sense of what’s just happened, of what’s real.
There’s still blood on his hands. It feels very fucking real.
“Told you so,” she tells him, blasé; bends down to face him, eye to eye.
“You’re,” and he doesn’t know what he wants to say, what he was planning on saying when he opened his mouth -- if there was a plan, if there ever was a plan; “you’re-”
“You had your shot. You failed,” she snaps at him, narrow-eyed, and something flashes in her gaze, something bright and violent, something Mark doesn’t trust. “It’s not rocket science, Mark.”
“I didn’t get a chance,” Mark argues, because it was so soon, it was too quick, he’d only just seen Wardo, only just touched him and spoken a few words, and then it was over.
“You had a chance,” the woman barks at him, unsympathetic, unrelenting. “The moment he walked in, you had a chance. You fucked it up, Mark. A botched job,” and Mark wants to refute it, wants to saying something, anything to prove his point -- there was no time, but he can barely swallow, let alone speak.
“Though I don’t know what’s worse, really,” and here, she smirks at him, almost cruel; “this, or the first time.” And she laughs, she laughs and it sends shivers up Mark’s spine. “You wanted to fix things with him, and this time you didn’t break a friendship or a MacBook,” she grins, white teeth and red lips and it’s unnatural, it’s hateful and vengeful and stark; “you broke his neck.”
Mark fights the hard pull, the wrenching in his stomach and swallow bile, manages a protest because no, it wasn’t, Wardo fell: “I didn’t-”
“Semantics,” she flicks her wrist, dismisses him. “You chose this path, and this was the result.” She leans in, just a little closer, her breath sweet, hot, poison on his cheek: “You chose, Mark,” she exhales; “and you always seem to choose wrong.”
And Mark: he wants to fight her, wants to snap back, hard and fast because she’s a monster, she’s a demon, she’s a temptress who controls fucking time and space, but Mark doesn’t care, Mark doesn’t give a shit what she is, or what she’s capable of because he can do this, he can -- he knows what the future holds and he’s seen where the roads lead, and he knows what it’s like not to have anyone to turn to, who knows the relevance of the progress being made, who will laugh at an inside joke that isn’t funny, will chuckle when no one else does; he knows, and he can do so many things, he can, and he can do this.
Given a chance, a real chance, he can fix this.
And Mark wants more than anything to tell her to fucking give him his shot, but he can’t. In that moment, still reeling from the dead stare planted dull in Wardo’s eyes, the blood drying, cracked on his fingers, Mark can’t do it; in that moment, he doesn’t have an excuse, doesn’t have an alibi. There’s nothing he can say.
He’s pretty sure she knows it, too.
“Back to the bar, then,” she tuts, moves to turn away, but Mark -- he has something to say, now; he needs to say something, and this time it’s that look, that emptiness in Eduardo’s gaze and the tacky streaks of red still wet in places on his skin; this time, that’s exactly what forces the word from his lips.
“No!” Because he won’t have it, he won’t stand for it. He backed down once before.
He’s learned his goddamned lesson.
She spins back toward him, gaze shrewd. “Excuse me?” And she sounds pissed, she sounds angry, and Mark doesn’t know who or what she is, but he really doesn’t care.
“No,” he says again, steadier this time, sharp in his own way, practiced. “I want,” he clears his throat, knows it ruins the edge, any leverage he could try to claw at, to thieve. “I want to try again.”
The woman steps closer, the click of her heels like ice in his veins. “That wasn’t our agreement.” Mark doesn’t even remember what the agreement was, exactly, what it is. He doesn’t remember anything except Eduardo, dead.
“I was supposed to have a legitimate opportunity to make things right,” Mark says, all clipped consonants and the sense, the familiar sensation of things undone, opportunities untaken. “I didn’t get that,” he snaps, asserts with all of the authority he’s earned, that maybe means nothing here, wherever they are, whatever this is, but that’s never mattered. Mark’s never been afraid of people who have more power than him. They don’t know what he can do.
“I want another chance,” he says, simple. “I want to try again,” and then, louder; “I deserve to try again.”
It’s the wrong thing to say.
“Don’t presume to speak to me about what you deserve, Mark,” she spits down at him, venom and wrath and something deeper, darker, ominous and omnipotent, and Mark can’t help the way he cowers, unconsciously, the way he shrinks as she glares, calms, seethes: “Don’t forget your place.”
“Please,” and it’s out before he knows it, before he thinks to say it; and apparently he isn’t above begging, now, but that’s okay, he thinks. That’s okay, for this. “Take me back,” and he’s breathless, suddenly, rises up on his knees and keeps his gaze steady; “let me try again.”
Her expression doesn’t change, and he needs this. He needs another chance. He keeps eye contact, makes himself stare at her without flinching, without turning away; he needs this.
“Well,” she finally answers, draws out the vowel; “seeing as you asked so nicely.”
She snaps her fingers and everything fades.
Part Three --->
// Master Post //
<--- Part One