Pizza isn't meant to hurt people 1/2
Fandom: The social Network
Characters: Mark, Eduardo, Dustin, Chris (I tried to make it gen, I honestly did try, but obviously these guys INSIST on slashing themselves. I had nothing to do with it.)
Challenge: Shellfish + OT4-friendship
Warnings: Schmoop, angst, hurt/comfort
Word count: ~3500
Beta-reader: yaoi_anti_drug who was incredibly fast. Thank you so much! =) All mistakes left are mine.
Author's note: This was meant to be tag-fic to hope_calariss fic here, where she mentioned Eduardo having a shellfish-allergy. She forced me to write this. Like really. She sat on me. She threatened me. She made puppy dog eyes. She used every little sister-trick known to mankind. She was evil.
For the record - it wasn’t Dustin’s fault.
No really, it wasn’t.
It was Wardo’s very own fault for being distracted. And tired. But more for being distracted.
“Pizza?” Dustin had asked.
“Any special requests?” he had asked.
An easy enough question, right? Right. But somehow Wardo had been too busy starring at the back of Mark’s head (he sat on Mark’s bed and was supposed to be learning, except he wasn’t, not really) to say something along the lines of “anything except shellfish is fine, because one tiny piece of shellfish is probably going to kill me”. Or, you know, something similar. Maybe a little less dramatic would’ve been fine, too.
But he didn’t say that. The only thing he said was: “Chilies, pepperoni and double cheese for Mark”, because Mark couldn’t be bothered to answer and would probably forget to eat anyway if Wardo didn’t force feed him.
So it absolutely wasn’t Dustin’s fault. He had asked, okay?
Chris wanted something vegetarian (“anything is fine”), which wasn’t very specific either.
Dustin liked to have a little bit of everything on his pizza, except anchovies, because anchovies were gross. So he had decided Chris and Mark could share a pizza. Chris could totally ignore the pepperoni and eat the double cheese and chilies, right? Could a pizza be any more vegetarian? Surely not.
So he ordered two large pizzas, one for Mark and Chris and one with everything except anchovies for Wardo and himself. Because Wardo still hadn’t said anything!
Well yeah, okay…maybe Wardo had fallen asleep on Mark’s bed in the meantime. Maybe.
But still. He hadn’t exactly…you know…protested.
So it wasn’t Dustin’s fault.
It really, really wasn’t. He absolutely refuses to feel guilty.
*
“It’s my fault.”
“It’s not.”
“Chris! I practically killed him.”
He needs to stop talking. He’s going to cry if he keeps talking, he knows he will. So he absolutely needs to shut up now.
“You didn’t kill him.”
“What would you know? I could as well have stabbed him with my own hands!”
So much for no more talking. Dustin groans desperately.
“I must be the only person on earth who is able to kill someone with a pizza,” he says hollowly. “How do these things always happen to me? How?”
“Quit being so melodramatic.”
Chris’ voice is calm and matter-of-fact, but his hands are warm and gentle on his neck. He pets Dustin’s hair, soft, little brushes and it’s so nice and so comforting, and Dustin knows he shouldn’t enjoy this so much. He doesn’t deserve it.
His pizza almost killed Wardo and that’s the only reason they’re here right now.
He throws a nervous glance in Mark’s direction.
Mark, who hasn’t said anything since they've been sitting here.
*
“Wardo?” Dustin drops down on Mark’s bed next to Wardo. He’s bored. He wants someone to entertain him. But Wardo’s head rests on his arms, his eyes are closed, and he doesn’t move even as Dustin starts to bounce. “Wardo?”
“He’s asleep,” Mark says without turning away from the laptop and for a second Dustin wonders how he does that. He hasn’t stopped coding for the last three hours and Dustin is pretty sure he hasn’t turned around once during the whole time. It’s a miracle he still knows what’s happening around him.
“How many fingers am I holding up?” he asks.
Mark doesn’t bother to turn around. “Two.”
Dustin gasps, because it’s totally true. “How many now?”
“Three.”
“I knew it! You’re not human. We should drop out of Harvard and start making money with your psychic abilities. What else can you do? Except using the eyes in the back of your head and surviving four days without sleep?”
“The likelihood that you held up two fingers was about 70 percent,” Mark explains without turning around. “Three fingers would’ve been 27 percent. People almost never use four, five or only one finger, so it was merely a fifty-fifty-chance.”
“That can’t be true,” Dustin protests more as a matter of principle than true conviction.
Mark shrugs with the self-righteous air of someone who’s always right and doesn’t even bother discussing things like that.
Mark sucks. He really, really sucks.
“Doesn’t Wardo sleep an awful lot lately?” Dustin asks after five minutes of silence, just to say something.
Chris is still under the shower, so nobody’s talking to him and Dustin feels ignored. Mark is always ignoring people, so that’s nothing new, but Wardo usually isn’t. Well, not when he’s awake at least. It’s boring when Wardo’s not awake.
“No.” Mark keeps typing, but if Dustin isn’t mistaken he sounds more forceful than before.
“Yesterday he fell asleep while we played ‘Steel Cage Battle Babes IV’!” Now that he’s thinking about it …that is rather worrying. He frowns. “He’s not sleeping enough, is that it?”
Mark shrugs.
“Why?” Dustin asks. Questioningly he lifts Wardo’s limp wrist and lets it flop down to the bed, but Wardo doesn’t even twitch. He does look rather exhausted. “It’s only midterm.”
“Apparently his father is only sufficiently impressed with him if Wardo works until his brain starts to bleed out of his ears.”
It sounds biting and people who don’t know Mark as well as Dustin knows him would assume he’s an uncaring jerk. But Dustin knows him and he knows that sarcasm is Mark’s way of being angry.
He doesn’t get to ask about that though, because at this exact moment the doorbell rings.
“Pizza!” Dustin yells.
And this is, innocently enough, the moment where everything goes south.
Which is so wrong on so many levels. It’s only pizza.
*
“They aren’t talking to us. Why isn’t anybody talking to us?”
“Because we’re not family,” Chris explains patiently for the third time. Or maybe it’s already the fourth time, Dustin can’t really remember. Chris is a saint.
Chris is also keeping him mostly sane, which is a miracle, because the last two hours might have been the longest two hours in Dustin’s life. And this includes the two hours he once spent under the bed of an ex-girlfriend, while said ex-girlfriend was having hot and steamy sex with her new boyfriend on top of the bed. And don’t ask what he had been doing there in the first place. Just don’t.
“They should talk to us,” he says stubbornly. “We’re his best friends!”
“I know.”
“What if he needs something? Maybe he’s going to need a blood transfusion! Or a donor kidney. And we wouldn’t know, because they don’t tell us. Chris! What if he needs a donor kidney? I could’ve given him mine, I would’ve given him mine, I would, but now it’s too late, because they don’t TELL US ANYTHING!” He feels like hyperventilating.
“Wardo’s not going to need a kidney. I promise.” Chris is a saint. Did he mention that Chris is a saint? Dustin isn’t sure, but it doesn’t matter anyway, because nobody’s talking to them and Mark hasn’t looked at him since they arrived here and Wardo’s gone, just gone and he doesn’t even know where they took him to.
It’s terrible and he hates it.
“Mark…” he says softly, desperately, because that is the only thing he can fix right now.
Mark doesn’t answer and he doesn’t look up from his laptop. That’s not exactly encouraging.
On the other hand, it’s Mark. It’s completely normal Mark-behavior to code during the weirdest circumstances. It’s completely normal Mark-behavior to ignore you until you go away.
But right now it’s terrifying, because Dustin somehow managed to hurt the one person Mark pays almost as much attention to as he pays to his laptop.
Dustin licks his lips and tries again. “Mark…?”
He doesn’t stop typing and Dustin swallows. He shares a helpless look with Chris, who only shrugs.
Oh god. Even Chris doesn’t know what to do.
Dustin is so screwed. He’s so screwed.
“AB negative.”
“What?”
It’s the first thing Mark says and obviously it has to be something that makes no sense whatsoever. Because it’s Mark.
“You’ve got the wrong blood group, so your kidney wouldn’t help Wardo anyway. It would probably kill him.”
“Oh.” Dustin swallows. Of course it would.
Now he feels even more like a failure. Even his blood is the wrong kind of wrong. Even his blood that he didn’t even have a chance to offer could kill Wardo.
Chris sighs and he’s petting his hair again, but not even that can cheer him up now.
*
“Pass me a beer.”
“Mark, get Chris a beer,” Dustin orders, because he’s already juggling the pizza, the can opener and the remote control and juggling is not exactly his strong suit, okay?
“Chris, get your own beer,” Mark replies. He sits on the couch, his laptop on his knees and he’s typing with one hand. Mark is such an addict.
Chris sighs long-sufferingly.
Dustin grins and he walks next door to wake up Wardo, who lies still passed out on Mark’s bed.
“Wardo!”
He groans. “…gnh?”
Dustin dangles a piece of pizza in front of Wardo’s face.
“Guess what’s hot and greasy!” he singsongs.
“Please keep your pants on, Dustin…,” Wardo murmurs half-asleep.
“Dude! The pizza.” Dustin manages to sound affronted. You drop your pants one time (once!) and some people never let you live it down. It was political, okay? He was making a statement.
“What?”
“Here’s your pizza.”
“Oh, did I …? Thanks.” Wardo yawns and rubs his hand across his eyes. He still looks pretty out of it. His gaze drifts almost automatically towards Mark’s desk that is now deserted and for a second he frowns as if he’s trying to remember what happened. “What did I order?”
“The usual,” Dustin says, because when you get a pizza with everything on it, ‘the usual’ surely is covered, right? “You awake now? Do you feel like joining us?” He points to the living room, where Mark and Chris are arguing about the program.
“Not shark week again,” he hears Mark protest.
“What? I love shark week!”Chris sounds scandalized.
“Shark week is lame.”
“It’s not. It’s cool. Have you seen the teeth?”
“How are teeth cool?”
Dustin shakes his head and beams at Wardo. “See what you’re missing out on?”
Wardo returns the smile, slowly props himself up on his elbows and yawns. “Just give me a minute.”
Absentmindedly he takes a small bite. He still doesn’t sound fully awake.
He needs more than a minute. Or maybe it’s less, it’s hard to tell afterwards, when they keep asking him questions about how long it took, how much did he swallow, when did he…
But this is how Dustin remembers it afterwards: One minute everything is fine and it’s good, Dustin is wedged between Mark and Chris and munches his pizza and the next…the next minute everything is wrong.
“Dustin…?” It’s Wardo.
“What? Oh God!” Dustin doesn’t look up because there’s a huge-ass shark about to kill a dolphin which looks exactly like Flipper and he used to love Flipper, okay? Flipper can’t die! He just can’t! “Don’t let him eat you! Swim away! No!”
He’s alternately hiding his face in Chris’ shoulder or shaking Chris, who is remarkably patient about being used as a pillow.
Mark couldn’t care less about Flipper’s gruesome destiny and he keeps coding. The heartless bastard.
“Dustin.” It’s Wardo’s voice again and this time Dustin raises his head, because Wardo sounds…strange. Not as if there’s anything seriously wrong, he just sounds just…strange.
“What?”
Wardo leans against the wall next to the door and he stares at the half-eaten piece of pizza in his hand as if it’s a snake about to bite him. “What is on the pizza?”
“Sorry?”
“What. Is. On. The. Pizza?” Wardo pronounces it slowly, carefully.
“A little bit of everything. Why? Is it bad?” Dustin looks down at his own share. Looks just fine to him.
“Everything?” Wardo’s voice is still weird, even though Dustin can’t pinpoint what it is. The typing next to him stops. “Which is what, exactly?”
“I don’t know. Pepperoni, ham, onions, tuna, mushrooms, sweet corn, chilies, shrimps…,” Dustin lists.
“Oh.” And now Dustin suddenly gets why Wardo sounds strange. It’s because he’s wheezing. He keeps taking careful, forced, little breaths as if he has been running for a really long time. Which is weird, because he hasn’t run anywhere.
“Wardo.” Mark sounds awake all of the sudden and his voice is sharp. “What’s wrong?”
“Are you okay?” Chris asks worried.
Wardo nods and shakes his head a second later. He looks dazed and confused. “Yes. No.”
His face is pale. “I don’t…” He stops and clears his throat. “I… I think I’m allergic to shellfish.”It sounds almost like a question.
Dustin blinks. “What? What do you mean, allergic? Are you going to break out in a rash or…”
Wardo doesn’t answer and he doesn’t need to answer, because at this very moment his legs decide to buckle and he ends up on his knees. He starts coughing. With one hand he jerks at the collar his shirt as if he’s about to suffocate and it takes Dustin a moment to realize that, shit, shit, SHIT, he isn’t joking, this is serious and Wardo is suffocating!
He watches in slow motion as Chris kneels next to Wardo all of the sudden and starts to shake him. He’s yelling something. And when has Chris moved?
It feels surreal like a dream.
Chris is talking. Dustin hears the words, but it doesn’t make sense. “Where’s your epi-pen? Look at me! Do you have an epi-pen? Wardo!”
Wardo shakes his head. His face is white and his doe-eyes are huge and scared. He tries to talk, Dustin sees his mouth moving, but he chokes on the words as if they’re lodged in his throat. He coughs again, more forcefully this time.
“Okay. It’s okay. We’ll work it out. Dustin!” Chris orders sharply. “Dustin!”
And Dustin snaps out of it. His pizza lands on the floor as he jumps up and he couldn’t care less.
“Yes!”
“Call 911,” Chris says. “Now! And give me the phone.”
911. Call 911.
People say stuff like that in movies, but they don’t say it in real life. They just…don’t. Because if they do, it means something is horribly, horribly wrong. And how can it go so wrong so fast, when it’s just pizza?
Call 911.
His fingers are shaking as he dials. What’s happening? What’s wrong with Wardo?
His cousin is allergic to nuts, but he only starts scratching and breaks out in a rash and it’s not that bad, it’s funny, it’s nothing dangerous…he’s not dying or something and…oh God, oh God, what if Wardo…?
He throws a gaze at Mark, because if he’s struggling to comprehend the gravity of the situation then Mark’s whole being probably fails to compute.
Mark stands next to Dustin and he looks completely frozen. His laptop lays abandoned on the table and he just stares at Wardo as if he doesn’t really understand what’s happening.
“It’s okay. It’s okay. We’ll get help. You’ll be all right.” Chris voice is soothing and calm as he talks to Wardo, but there’s an underlying dread that makes Dustin panic. “Mark! Come here. Mark!”
Dustin watches as Mark moves, stiff and careful as if he walks across a frozen lake and expects the ice to break any moment. He kneels next to Wardo, hovering close by, painfully close in fact, but not touching him and Dustin thinks, maybe he wants to.
But Mark doesn’t. He keeps hovering though.
“Wardo, look at me.” Chris demands insistent. “Calm down. You need to calm down.”
“Can’t…”Wardo shakes his head. His eyes are closed and he coughs again. It’s an ugly, wheezing sound that makes Dustin’s throat hurt in sympathy.
“I can’t… I can’t breathe…” he gasps. He sounds about as panicked and scared as Dustin feels.
“I know.” Chris nods. To Mark he hisses: “Stay with him!” while he jerks the phone out of Dustin’s hand.
“This is an emergency! My friend can’t breathe,” he yells down the line. He rattles off their address and the words ‘shellfish’, ‘no epi-pen’ and ‘pizza’ get a whole new dimension of horrible and wrong, wrong, wrong.
It’s just pizza. Pizza isn’t meant to hurt people.
Dustin gets down on his knees next to Wardo and it’s not only because his legs turn to jelly. They need to do something. Anything. He tries to catch a glimpse of Mark’s eyes, tries for some silent communication a’la ‘OMG I’M FREAKING OUT HERE, WHAT ARE WE GOING TO DO NOW?!’, but Mark isn’t looking at him, he’s only seeing Wardo.
“I’ll wait outside for the ambulance and show them the way.” Chris says from the door. His face is white and the fingers with which he’s holding the phone are shaking. “They should be here soon. Keep him calm!”
Dustin forces himself to nod, because if he can almost kill Wardo with pizza, he can at least try to keep him calm.
Though before he can do anything Wardo’s hand shoots out and clutches at Mark’s shirt like a lifeline.
“I can’t…” It sounds painful. He’s shaking and his whole body is so tense that Dustin can see the strained sinews underneath the skin. His breathing becomes more irregular with the minute and that can’t be good. “Mark…”
He sounds scared and frantic and God yes, Dustin is scared out of his wits, too and he’s not even the one who can’t breathe.
No freaking out. Not now. Wardo needs to stay calm. Chris said he needs to stay calm, so it’s probably important, but how the hell do you help someone to stay calm who is about to ASPHYXIATE?!
Dustin feels like hyperventilating himself a little.
“It’s okay,” he says, even though it’s a lie. Nothing is okay and he doesn’t even know why he always believes it when Chris says it and how does Chris even do this thing where everybody believes him? “You’ll be fine. Don’t…don’t worry too much about the no breathing-thing. Breathing is massively overrated, right? It’s probably all just propaganda from the oxygen-lobby. You’ll be fine. David Blaine managed to hold his breath for 17 minutes, can you believe that? It was on Oprah, so it must be true.” He’s rambling.
Wardo doesn’t seem to be listening. His whole body is shaking and he makes painful little sounds as if there’s just not enough air in the whole world.
“Wardo…,” Dustin says helplessly and at the same time Mark finally starts talking.
“There…” Marks voices falters and he clears his throat, before he starts again. “There were five primary goals in the creation of the Java language.”
Dustin stares at him, stunned.
“First: Simplicity, object orientation, and familiarity.”
Dustin blinks, because…what? Seriously? What?
“Second: Robustness and security,” Mark continues. “Third: Architecture neutrality and portability. Fourth…”
Wardo makes a choked, little sound and it takes Dustin a moment to realize, that he actually tries not to laugh. Or maybe he’s trying to not to cry. It doesn't really matter because Mark keeps talking.
Dustin knows he should interrupt him. He knows he should tell him ‘wrong time, wrong place, Mark, again!’ but he doesn’t, because somehow and for reasons unknown and beyond comprehension Wardo listens to him.
Just like he always listens when Mark says something, anything, no matter what, even if it’s just strings and strings of meaningless code.
It’s never meaningless to Wardo, Dustin realizes.
Wardo exhales slowly and closes his eyes.
It’s as if every ounce of strength left in his body deserts him and he loosens his death grip on Mark’s shirt. He sinks limply against Mark and his head comes to rest on Mark’s chest.
His ridiculously puffy hairstyle is ruined and sweaty hair sticks to his forehead. His eyes are half-shut and his breath still comes in deep, rattling gasps, but he looks calmer somehow.
“Unlike C++, which combines the syntax for structured, generic, and object-oriented programming, Java was built almost exclusively as an object-oriented language.” Mark licks his dry lips, but he doesn’t stop. He talks about C and C++ and syntax, operator overloading and multiple inheritance, endless lines of words and codes and rules. His voice is calm and self-assured and almost soothing in a way Mark can only ever sound when he’s talking about coding.
Mark’s hand rests on Wardo’s chest and it’s like he’s orchestrating Wardo’s breathing - in and out, in and out - almost as if he’s synchronizing it to his own rhythm, with words and little touches. And maybe he is. Dustin isn’t sure, he keeps silent and just watches, and Wardo gets quieter and quieter with every second, which might be a good thing or a horribly bad thing, he doesn’t know.
“In object-oriented programming,” Mark says softly, gently, as if he’s reciting a poem, “a method is a subroutine that is exclusively associated either with a class, in which case it is called a class method or a static method, or with an object in which case it is an instance method…” Suddenly he stops. “Wardo?” His voice breaks.
There’s no reaction and his whole body seems to freeze. “Wardo!”
It’s the last thing Dustin remembers with crystal clarity before half a dozen people stream into their room and everything else becomes a blur of movement and yelled orders…Mark shaking Wardo and repeating his name like a mantra. And Wardo doesn’t move, doesn’t talk and doesn’t breathe anymore…
To be continued
Author's note:
In case you want to buy me for more TSN-fics: You find my help_japan thread here.
Chapter 2
Characters: Mark, Eduardo, Dustin, Chris (I tried to make it gen, I honestly did try, but obviously these guys INSIST on slashing themselves. I had nothing to do with it.)
Challenge: Shellfish + OT4-friendship
Warnings: Schmoop, angst, hurt/comfort
Word count: ~3500
Beta-reader: yaoi_anti_drug who was incredibly fast. Thank you so much! =) All mistakes left are mine.
Author's note: This was meant to be tag-fic to hope_calariss fic here, where she mentioned Eduardo having a shellfish-allergy. She forced me to write this. Like really. She sat on me. She threatened me. She made puppy dog eyes. She used every little sister-trick known to mankind. She was evil.
For the record - it wasn’t Dustin’s fault.
No really, it wasn’t.
It was Wardo’s very own fault for being distracted. And tired. But more for being distracted.
“Pizza?” Dustin had asked.
“Any special requests?” he had asked.
An easy enough question, right? Right. But somehow Wardo had been too busy starring at the back of Mark’s head (he sat on Mark’s bed and was supposed to be learning, except he wasn’t, not really) to say something along the lines of “anything except shellfish is fine, because one tiny piece of shellfish is probably going to kill me”. Or, you know, something similar. Maybe a little less dramatic would’ve been fine, too.
But he didn’t say that. The only thing he said was: “Chilies, pepperoni and double cheese for Mark”, because Mark couldn’t be bothered to answer and would probably forget to eat anyway if Wardo didn’t force feed him.
So it absolutely wasn’t Dustin’s fault. He had asked, okay?
Chris wanted something vegetarian (“anything is fine”), which wasn’t very specific either.
Dustin liked to have a little bit of everything on his pizza, except anchovies, because anchovies were gross. So he had decided Chris and Mark could share a pizza. Chris could totally ignore the pepperoni and eat the double cheese and chilies, right? Could a pizza be any more vegetarian? Surely not.
So he ordered two large pizzas, one for Mark and Chris and one with everything except anchovies for Wardo and himself. Because Wardo still hadn’t said anything!
Well yeah, okay…maybe Wardo had fallen asleep on Mark’s bed in the meantime. Maybe.
But still. He hadn’t exactly…you know…protested.
So it wasn’t Dustin’s fault.
It really, really wasn’t. He absolutely refuses to feel guilty.
*
“It’s my fault.”
“It’s not.”
“Chris! I practically killed him.”
He needs to stop talking. He’s going to cry if he keeps talking, he knows he will. So he absolutely needs to shut up now.
“You didn’t kill him.”
“What would you know? I could as well have stabbed him with my own hands!”
So much for no more talking. Dustin groans desperately.
“I must be the only person on earth who is able to kill someone with a pizza,” he says hollowly. “How do these things always happen to me? How?”
“Quit being so melodramatic.”
Chris’ voice is calm and matter-of-fact, but his hands are warm and gentle on his neck. He pets Dustin’s hair, soft, little brushes and it’s so nice and so comforting, and Dustin knows he shouldn’t enjoy this so much. He doesn’t deserve it.
His pizza almost killed Wardo and that’s the only reason they’re here right now.
He throws a nervous glance in Mark’s direction.
Mark, who hasn’t said anything since they've been sitting here.
*
“Wardo?” Dustin drops down on Mark’s bed next to Wardo. He’s bored. He wants someone to entertain him. But Wardo’s head rests on his arms, his eyes are closed, and he doesn’t move even as Dustin starts to bounce. “Wardo?”
“He’s asleep,” Mark says without turning away from the laptop and for a second Dustin wonders how he does that. He hasn’t stopped coding for the last three hours and Dustin is pretty sure he hasn’t turned around once during the whole time. It’s a miracle he still knows what’s happening around him.
“How many fingers am I holding up?” he asks.
Mark doesn’t bother to turn around. “Two.”
Dustin gasps, because it’s totally true. “How many now?”
“Three.”
“I knew it! You’re not human. We should drop out of Harvard and start making money with your psychic abilities. What else can you do? Except using the eyes in the back of your head and surviving four days without sleep?”
“The likelihood that you held up two fingers was about 70 percent,” Mark explains without turning around. “Three fingers would’ve been 27 percent. People almost never use four, five or only one finger, so it was merely a fifty-fifty-chance.”
“That can’t be true,” Dustin protests more as a matter of principle than true conviction.
Mark shrugs with the self-righteous air of someone who’s always right and doesn’t even bother discussing things like that.
Mark sucks. He really, really sucks.
“Doesn’t Wardo sleep an awful lot lately?” Dustin asks after five minutes of silence, just to say something.
Chris is still under the shower, so nobody’s talking to him and Dustin feels ignored. Mark is always ignoring people, so that’s nothing new, but Wardo usually isn’t. Well, not when he’s awake at least. It’s boring when Wardo’s not awake.
“No.” Mark keeps typing, but if Dustin isn’t mistaken he sounds more forceful than before.
“Yesterday he fell asleep while we played ‘Steel Cage Battle Babes IV’!” Now that he’s thinking about it …that is rather worrying. He frowns. “He’s not sleeping enough, is that it?”
Mark shrugs.
“Why?” Dustin asks. Questioningly he lifts Wardo’s limp wrist and lets it flop down to the bed, but Wardo doesn’t even twitch. He does look rather exhausted. “It’s only midterm.”
“Apparently his father is only sufficiently impressed with him if Wardo works until his brain starts to bleed out of his ears.”
It sounds biting and people who don’t know Mark as well as Dustin knows him would assume he’s an uncaring jerk. But Dustin knows him and he knows that sarcasm is Mark’s way of being angry.
He doesn’t get to ask about that though, because at this exact moment the doorbell rings.
“Pizza!” Dustin yells.
And this is, innocently enough, the moment where everything goes south.
Which is so wrong on so many levels. It’s only pizza.
*
“They aren’t talking to us. Why isn’t anybody talking to us?”
“Because we’re not family,” Chris explains patiently for the third time. Or maybe it’s already the fourth time, Dustin can’t really remember. Chris is a saint.
Chris is also keeping him mostly sane, which is a miracle, because the last two hours might have been the longest two hours in Dustin’s life. And this includes the two hours he once spent under the bed of an ex-girlfriend, while said ex-girlfriend was having hot and steamy sex with her new boyfriend on top of the bed. And don’t ask what he had been doing there in the first place. Just don’t.
“They should talk to us,” he says stubbornly. “We’re his best friends!”
“I know.”
“What if he needs something? Maybe he’s going to need a blood transfusion! Or a donor kidney. And we wouldn’t know, because they don’t tell us. Chris! What if he needs a donor kidney? I could’ve given him mine, I would’ve given him mine, I would, but now it’s too late, because they don’t TELL US ANYTHING!” He feels like hyperventilating.
“Wardo’s not going to need a kidney. I promise.” Chris is a saint. Did he mention that Chris is a saint? Dustin isn’t sure, but it doesn’t matter anyway, because nobody’s talking to them and Mark hasn’t looked at him since they arrived here and Wardo’s gone, just gone and he doesn’t even know where they took him to.
It’s terrible and he hates it.
“Mark…” he says softly, desperately, because that is the only thing he can fix right now.
Mark doesn’t answer and he doesn’t look up from his laptop. That’s not exactly encouraging.
On the other hand, it’s Mark. It’s completely normal Mark-behavior to code during the weirdest circumstances. It’s completely normal Mark-behavior to ignore you until you go away.
But right now it’s terrifying, because Dustin somehow managed to hurt the one person Mark pays almost as much attention to as he pays to his laptop.
Dustin licks his lips and tries again. “Mark…?”
He doesn’t stop typing and Dustin swallows. He shares a helpless look with Chris, who only shrugs.
Oh god. Even Chris doesn’t know what to do.
Dustin is so screwed. He’s so screwed.
“AB negative.”
“What?”
It’s the first thing Mark says and obviously it has to be something that makes no sense whatsoever. Because it’s Mark.
“You’ve got the wrong blood group, so your kidney wouldn’t help Wardo anyway. It would probably kill him.”
“Oh.” Dustin swallows. Of course it would.
Now he feels even more like a failure. Even his blood is the wrong kind of wrong. Even his blood that he didn’t even have a chance to offer could kill Wardo.
Chris sighs and he’s petting his hair again, but not even that can cheer him up now.
*
“Pass me a beer.”
“Mark, get Chris a beer,” Dustin orders, because he’s already juggling the pizza, the can opener and the remote control and juggling is not exactly his strong suit, okay?
“Chris, get your own beer,” Mark replies. He sits on the couch, his laptop on his knees and he’s typing with one hand. Mark is such an addict.
Chris sighs long-sufferingly.
Dustin grins and he walks next door to wake up Wardo, who lies still passed out on Mark’s bed.
“Wardo!”
He groans. “…gnh?”
Dustin dangles a piece of pizza in front of Wardo’s face.
“Guess what’s hot and greasy!” he singsongs.
“Please keep your pants on, Dustin…,” Wardo murmurs half-asleep.
“Dude! The pizza.” Dustin manages to sound affronted. You drop your pants one time (once!) and some people never let you live it down. It was political, okay? He was making a statement.
“What?”
“Here’s your pizza.”
“Oh, did I …? Thanks.” Wardo yawns and rubs his hand across his eyes. He still looks pretty out of it. His gaze drifts almost automatically towards Mark’s desk that is now deserted and for a second he frowns as if he’s trying to remember what happened. “What did I order?”
“The usual,” Dustin says, because when you get a pizza with everything on it, ‘the usual’ surely is covered, right? “You awake now? Do you feel like joining us?” He points to the living room, where Mark and Chris are arguing about the program.
“Not shark week again,” he hears Mark protest.
“What? I love shark week!”Chris sounds scandalized.
“Shark week is lame.”
“It’s not. It’s cool. Have you seen the teeth?”
“How are teeth cool?”
Dustin shakes his head and beams at Wardo. “See what you’re missing out on?”
Wardo returns the smile, slowly props himself up on his elbows and yawns. “Just give me a minute.”
Absentmindedly he takes a small bite. He still doesn’t sound fully awake.
He needs more than a minute. Or maybe it’s less, it’s hard to tell afterwards, when they keep asking him questions about how long it took, how much did he swallow, when did he…
But this is how Dustin remembers it afterwards: One minute everything is fine and it’s good, Dustin is wedged between Mark and Chris and munches his pizza and the next…the next minute everything is wrong.
“Dustin…?” It’s Wardo.
“What? Oh God!” Dustin doesn’t look up because there’s a huge-ass shark about to kill a dolphin which looks exactly like Flipper and he used to love Flipper, okay? Flipper can’t die! He just can’t! “Don’t let him eat you! Swim away! No!”
He’s alternately hiding his face in Chris’ shoulder or shaking Chris, who is remarkably patient about being used as a pillow.
Mark couldn’t care less about Flipper’s gruesome destiny and he keeps coding. The heartless bastard.
“Dustin.” It’s Wardo’s voice again and this time Dustin raises his head, because Wardo sounds…strange. Not as if there’s anything seriously wrong, he just sounds just…strange.
“What?”
Wardo leans against the wall next to the door and he stares at the half-eaten piece of pizza in his hand as if it’s a snake about to bite him. “What is on the pizza?”
“Sorry?”
“What. Is. On. The. Pizza?” Wardo pronounces it slowly, carefully.
“A little bit of everything. Why? Is it bad?” Dustin looks down at his own share. Looks just fine to him.
“Everything?” Wardo’s voice is still weird, even though Dustin can’t pinpoint what it is. The typing next to him stops. “Which is what, exactly?”
“I don’t know. Pepperoni, ham, onions, tuna, mushrooms, sweet corn, chilies, shrimps…,” Dustin lists.
“Oh.” And now Dustin suddenly gets why Wardo sounds strange. It’s because he’s wheezing. He keeps taking careful, forced, little breaths as if he has been running for a really long time. Which is weird, because he hasn’t run anywhere.
“Wardo.” Mark sounds awake all of the sudden and his voice is sharp. “What’s wrong?”
“Are you okay?” Chris asks worried.
Wardo nods and shakes his head a second later. He looks dazed and confused. “Yes. No.”
His face is pale. “I don’t…” He stops and clears his throat. “I… I think I’m allergic to shellfish.”It sounds almost like a question.
Dustin blinks. “What? What do you mean, allergic? Are you going to break out in a rash or…”
Wardo doesn’t answer and he doesn’t need to answer, because at this very moment his legs decide to buckle and he ends up on his knees. He starts coughing. With one hand he jerks at the collar his shirt as if he’s about to suffocate and it takes Dustin a moment to realize that, shit, shit, SHIT, he isn’t joking, this is serious and Wardo is suffocating!
He watches in slow motion as Chris kneels next to Wardo all of the sudden and starts to shake him. He’s yelling something. And when has Chris moved?
It feels surreal like a dream.
Chris is talking. Dustin hears the words, but it doesn’t make sense. “Where’s your epi-pen? Look at me! Do you have an epi-pen? Wardo!”
Wardo shakes his head. His face is white and his doe-eyes are huge and scared. He tries to talk, Dustin sees his mouth moving, but he chokes on the words as if they’re lodged in his throat. He coughs again, more forcefully this time.
“Okay. It’s okay. We’ll work it out. Dustin!” Chris orders sharply. “Dustin!”
And Dustin snaps out of it. His pizza lands on the floor as he jumps up and he couldn’t care less.
“Yes!”
“Call 911,” Chris says. “Now! And give me the phone.”
911. Call 911.
People say stuff like that in movies, but they don’t say it in real life. They just…don’t. Because if they do, it means something is horribly, horribly wrong. And how can it go so wrong so fast, when it’s just pizza?
Call 911.
His fingers are shaking as he dials. What’s happening? What’s wrong with Wardo?
His cousin is allergic to nuts, but he only starts scratching and breaks out in a rash and it’s not that bad, it’s funny, it’s nothing dangerous…he’s not dying or something and…oh God, oh God, what if Wardo…?
He throws a gaze at Mark, because if he’s struggling to comprehend the gravity of the situation then Mark’s whole being probably fails to compute.
Mark stands next to Dustin and he looks completely frozen. His laptop lays abandoned on the table and he just stares at Wardo as if he doesn’t really understand what’s happening.
“It’s okay. It’s okay. We’ll get help. You’ll be all right.” Chris voice is soothing and calm as he talks to Wardo, but there’s an underlying dread that makes Dustin panic. “Mark! Come here. Mark!”
Dustin watches as Mark moves, stiff and careful as if he walks across a frozen lake and expects the ice to break any moment. He kneels next to Wardo, hovering close by, painfully close in fact, but not touching him and Dustin thinks, maybe he wants to.
But Mark doesn’t. He keeps hovering though.
“Wardo, look at me.” Chris demands insistent. “Calm down. You need to calm down.”
“Can’t…”Wardo shakes his head. His eyes are closed and he coughs again. It’s an ugly, wheezing sound that makes Dustin’s throat hurt in sympathy.
“I can’t… I can’t breathe…” he gasps. He sounds about as panicked and scared as Dustin feels.
“I know.” Chris nods. To Mark he hisses: “Stay with him!” while he jerks the phone out of Dustin’s hand.
“This is an emergency! My friend can’t breathe,” he yells down the line. He rattles off their address and the words ‘shellfish’, ‘no epi-pen’ and ‘pizza’ get a whole new dimension of horrible and wrong, wrong, wrong.
It’s just pizza. Pizza isn’t meant to hurt people.
Dustin gets down on his knees next to Wardo and it’s not only because his legs turn to jelly. They need to do something. Anything. He tries to catch a glimpse of Mark’s eyes, tries for some silent communication a’la ‘OMG I’M FREAKING OUT HERE, WHAT ARE WE GOING TO DO NOW?!’, but Mark isn’t looking at him, he’s only seeing Wardo.
“I’ll wait outside for the ambulance and show them the way.” Chris says from the door. His face is white and the fingers with which he’s holding the phone are shaking. “They should be here soon. Keep him calm!”
Dustin forces himself to nod, because if he can almost kill Wardo with pizza, he can at least try to keep him calm.
Though before he can do anything Wardo’s hand shoots out and clutches at Mark’s shirt like a lifeline.
“I can’t…” It sounds painful. He’s shaking and his whole body is so tense that Dustin can see the strained sinews underneath the skin. His breathing becomes more irregular with the minute and that can’t be good. “Mark…”
He sounds scared and frantic and God yes, Dustin is scared out of his wits, too and he’s not even the one who can’t breathe.
No freaking out. Not now. Wardo needs to stay calm. Chris said he needs to stay calm, so it’s probably important, but how the hell do you help someone to stay calm who is about to ASPHYXIATE?!
Dustin feels like hyperventilating himself a little.
“It’s okay,” he says, even though it’s a lie. Nothing is okay and he doesn’t even know why he always believes it when Chris says it and how does Chris even do this thing where everybody believes him? “You’ll be fine. Don’t…don’t worry too much about the no breathing-thing. Breathing is massively overrated, right? It’s probably all just propaganda from the oxygen-lobby. You’ll be fine. David Blaine managed to hold his breath for 17 minutes, can you believe that? It was on Oprah, so it must be true.” He’s rambling.
Wardo doesn’t seem to be listening. His whole body is shaking and he makes painful little sounds as if there’s just not enough air in the whole world.
“Wardo…,” Dustin says helplessly and at the same time Mark finally starts talking.
“There…” Marks voices falters and he clears his throat, before he starts again. “There were five primary goals in the creation of the Java language.”
Dustin stares at him, stunned.
“First: Simplicity, object orientation, and familiarity.”
Dustin blinks, because…what? Seriously? What?
“Second: Robustness and security,” Mark continues. “Third: Architecture neutrality and portability. Fourth…”
Wardo makes a choked, little sound and it takes Dustin a moment to realize, that he actually tries not to laugh. Or maybe he’s trying to not to cry. It doesn't really matter because Mark keeps talking.
Dustin knows he should interrupt him. He knows he should tell him ‘wrong time, wrong place, Mark, again!’ but he doesn’t, because somehow and for reasons unknown and beyond comprehension Wardo listens to him.
Just like he always listens when Mark says something, anything, no matter what, even if it’s just strings and strings of meaningless code.
It’s never meaningless to Wardo, Dustin realizes.
Wardo exhales slowly and closes his eyes.
It’s as if every ounce of strength left in his body deserts him and he loosens his death grip on Mark’s shirt. He sinks limply against Mark and his head comes to rest on Mark’s chest.
His ridiculously puffy hairstyle is ruined and sweaty hair sticks to his forehead. His eyes are half-shut and his breath still comes in deep, rattling gasps, but he looks calmer somehow.
“Unlike C++, which combines the syntax for structured, generic, and object-oriented programming, Java was built almost exclusively as an object-oriented language.” Mark licks his dry lips, but he doesn’t stop. He talks about C and C++ and syntax, operator overloading and multiple inheritance, endless lines of words and codes and rules. His voice is calm and self-assured and almost soothing in a way Mark can only ever sound when he’s talking about coding.
Mark’s hand rests on Wardo’s chest and it’s like he’s orchestrating Wardo’s breathing - in and out, in and out - almost as if he’s synchronizing it to his own rhythm, with words and little touches. And maybe he is. Dustin isn’t sure, he keeps silent and just watches, and Wardo gets quieter and quieter with every second, which might be a good thing or a horribly bad thing, he doesn’t know.
“In object-oriented programming,” Mark says softly, gently, as if he’s reciting a poem, “a method is a subroutine that is exclusively associated either with a class, in which case it is called a class method or a static method, or with an object in which case it is an instance method…” Suddenly he stops. “Wardo?” His voice breaks.
There’s no reaction and his whole body seems to freeze. “Wardo!”
It’s the last thing Dustin remembers with crystal clarity before half a dozen people stream into their room and everything else becomes a blur of movement and yelled orders…Mark shaking Wardo and repeating his name like a mantra. And Wardo doesn’t move, doesn’t talk and doesn’t breathe anymore…
To be continued
Author's note:
In case you want to buy me for more TSN-fics: You find my help_japan thread here.
Chapter 2