Bones (4/10)
title: Bones (4/10)
pairing: Mark/Eduardo
disclaimer: Based on the Social Network idea of Mark Eduardo, but in no way true. All from my own head.
notes: For this promt on the tsn_kinkmeme in which Mark is sick and Eduardo takes care of him.
A/N: OBVIOUSLY NOBODY KNOWS HOW MUCH EDUARDO GOT IN THE SETTLEMENT, I'M MAKING THIS SHIT UP.
PLEASE NOTE: Everything that I write about leukemia and chemotherapy comes from Wikipedia and copious Google searches, so it is no doubt entirely inaccurate. I'm trying to piece together bits from the research I've done, but I may very well have got it all twisted around. It's just a story, so no matter. Also, I've never seen A Walk To Remember, but somebody told me that it is kind of like this story, so I might watch it.
Follow up to: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3
Three years ago, only a few hours after his final lawyer up, asshole showdown with Mark, Eduardo had thrown his cell phone against the wall of his hotel room that he had hastily booked into - he should have been staying with Mark, he should be with Mark - in a fit of rage that left his body and mind aching, shuddering with anger and sobs. The phone shattered; everything was erased. He lost Mark's number, and every time after that when he saw the space where Mark's name should have been, he felt a pang of regret and that deep, trembling sense of loss that left him breathless if he let himself think about it too much.
Now, standing by an ATM machine, bracing himself against the wall with one hand, Eduardo scrolls through his contact list on his cell with the other. His heart does a little jump in his chest when he sees Zuckerberg, Mark, the same way it has done every time he has looked at it in the past few days, pulling his phone out of his pocket and checking to see that it was still there, that this was real. That they really had some vague concept of a friendship again. They had swapped numbers after they had signed the final settlement papers together and had exchanged several phone calls over the last week, talking together in hesitant voices about the mundane things, the safe things, steering well clear of Facebook and lawsuits and illnesses.
Eduardo presses dial.
“Hello?”
“It’s a little creepy, don’t you think, that you know and have access to my bank account details.”
Mark laughs, and the happy bubble of sound makes Eduardo’s head swim.
“Where are you?” he asks, his voice tired but amused.
“At an ATM on University Avenue. I needed money for gas so that I can actually get to yours later. Do you happen to know how four hundred million dollars has worked its way into my bank account?”
Mark laughs again. When he speaks, he sounds familiarly smug. “I was going to set up a savings account in your name, but this way seemed much cooler. Far more ostentatious. And...hang on...what? You’re coming to my place?”
Eduardo pushes away from the wall, testing to see if his legs are steady enough to hold him up yet. The gut-punching shock of finding the net worth of a small country in his bank account hasn’t quite worn off.
“Yes,” he says. “You’re going to have to text me your address.”
“I start my next load of treatment today,” Mark says. Eduardo doesn’t miss the way that his voice falters on the word treatment.
“I know,” Eduardo replies softly. “Obviously I am coming to take you to the hospital.”
There is a silence at the other end of the phone. Then he hears a chair creak as Mark sits down.
“Okay,” Mark says finally, a note of decision in his voice. “Okay. That’s cool. I’ll text you my address. Can you be here about noon?”
“I can be there,” Eduardo promises.
“Great. Right.”
Eduardo recognises the hesitance in Marks voice. He’s nervous, his brain supplies helpfully.
“What’s up, Mark?”
“Wardo-“ he cuts himself off, his breathing hitching, pained.
“Yes?”
Another pause. Then, “I’ll see you in a bit.”
Eduardo smiles to himself. “Okay.”
“And Eduardo --?”
Eduardo’s breath catches in his throat when he hears his full name. It sounds so intense. “Yes, Mark?”
Eduardo hears him take a deep breath. His body tenses up unconsciously.
“Thank you,” Mark says, and hangs up before Eduardo can reply.
A wave of something, some fantastic emotion, washes through Eduardo as he puts his phone away in the inside pocket of his blazer. He pushes a hand back through his hair, trying to pinpoint exactly why a lump has suddenly formed in his throat.
It isn’t until he gets in to his car and is buckling his seatbelt, that Eduardo realises that the surge of emotion was a response to the fact that that was the first time that Mark has ever thanked him for anything.
***
Eduardo has spent the past week holed up in his apartment, reading everything that Google can offer him about leukemia and chemotherapy, how it affects a person and a body, trying to catch up on what Mark is going through and what he has been through already. He ordered a stack of books from Amazon for next-day delivery, and spent seventeen straight hours poring through them, highlighting anything that he might be able to use to help Mark out. He knows that there is nothing that he can do to physically make Mark better, but there are so many different ways to save a person.
He recognises how obsessive he is quickly becoming, but it has been so long since Eduardo last let himself care about anything that he cannot help himself. And of course this is Mark that he is caring about; it is Mark that he is doing all this for. If he can’t let himself go a little bit crazy for Mark, who can he let himself do it for?
It has been difficult, these past few days, for Eduardo not to jump back into their old relationship with both feet. He has had to hold himself back. He doesn’t want to freak Mark out. He certainly doesn’t want Mark to know how suddenly and completely Eduardo has let himself forget everything that happened between them since that night that he agreed to put forward the thousand dollars to start Facebook. He doesn’t want to reveal how weak he is, or how much he needs Mark. And so he has had to consciously stop himself from calling him three times a day or driving round to his office to see how he is doing. He wants to try and be normal about this. He doesn’t want to be all emotional and pining and lovesick. But of course he is that, too.
And because it was always Eduardo who pushed for their friendship - Eduardo who invited himself over or who suggested they go out for a beer or who bought them pizza at three in the morning when he knew Mark was pulling an all-nighter - they haven’t spoken as much as he would have liked. But this is okay. This is what normal friends do. He’ll take this, for now.
He mulls over some of the heavier facts that he read about acute myeloid leukemia - Mark's leukemia - during his research as he drives down Palo Alto’s bustling streets later that morning on the way to Mark’s apartment. Everything that Eduardo thought he knew about leukemia came from having seen A Walk To Remember with a girl he had dated back in 2002. That had been bad enough. But he has been trying not to think about the real stuff too much, because the statistics freaked him way the fuck out. Everything he read wasn't about curing the patient, but instead trying to make them more likely to live the next five years. There was very little about becoming fully cured. It was so rare. Too rare. Of all adults diagnosed with acute myeloid leukemia, on average only eight to nine out of one hundred will live for at least five years. That is only eight or nine percent. Of course, because Mark was younger and because they had diagnosed him and started treatment quickly, he had a much bigger chance. But even that was only for the next five years.
And Mark had to get through the chemotherapy first. Chemotherapy that pumped poison through your body, that caused your nails to disintegrate and your hair to fall out. That left your body so weak you could die from catching a simple common cold. At one point during his research, Eduardo had pushed his books aside and let himself sob for a good hour, his body shaking with pain and grief. This wasn’t fair. How could he have just found Mark again, only to possibly lose him so soon? And even if he didn’t lose him now, how long could they really have? Five fucking years?
Eduardo pulls into the parking bay in front of Mark’s apartment building. He takes a moment to calm himself down, breathe deeply, try to relax because he has seen Mark thousands and thousands of times before, so why is this different now? Why does he feel so sick and jittery and excited and nervous?
He heads into the lobby and the doorman nods to him. “Good morning Mr Saverin.”
Eduardo blinks, surprised. “Um. Hi. You…know who I am?”
He doesn’t reply. He just nods again and looks back down at his computer screen as the elevator pings open and Mark comes out.
“Hey,” he says, looking a little shocked to see Eduardo. “You’re…here.”
Eduardo smiles. “I said I would be, didn’t I?”
“You did.” Mark puts his duffel bag down, as if carrying it has worn him out. Eduardo picks it up; it weighs barely anything.
“Can I ask you something?” Eduardo says as they go through the rotating glass doors at the front of the building.
“Go ahead.”
“How come your security guy knows who I am when I have never been here before in my life.”
Mark grins, but it doesn’t quite reach his eyes. Eduardo wants to reach out and touch him, anything, just for some real contact with him, but he holds himself back.
“My lawyers’ fault,” Mark explains. “As soon as the whole lawsuit thing started, they made sure that every security guard of every building I spend a lot of time in knew who you were and what you looked like. They were supposed to stop you if you came near me. I warned him off this morning when you called.”
“What the hell for?” Eduardo laughs. “Did they think I was going to come in a murder you while you slept?”
Mark shrugs. Eduardo’s eyebrows fly up.
“Seriously?” he says. “They thought I could do that?”
He realises too late that he said could, and not would, which implies that Eduardo couldn’t physically hurt Mark, even if he wanted to. Too intimate, Eduardo thinks. Control yourself.
“You were quite angry,” Mark says, winning the award for Understatement Of The Year.
Eduardo nods as he slings Mark’s bag in the trunk of his car.
“I’m not any more,” Eduardo says softly as he slides into the driver’s seat.
“Hmm? What did you say?”
He smiles slightly to himself. “Nothing.”
As he drives, Eduardo sneaks glances at Mark, who is giving him directions, trying to assess if he looks any better or worse than the last time he saw him. In the glaring midday sunshine, his pale skin looks almost translucent and his ocean eyes flash with gold. His hands resting on his knees are shaking a little and he keeps clenching them into fists, as if to stop them from trembling. His lips are cracked and dry and he keeps biting and licking them alternatively. Eduardo has to look away.
He doesn’t look worse, he thinks. He just doesn’t look any better. And he looks really, really tired.
“Have you slept?” Eduardo asks, and the memory of the hundreds of times that he has asked Mark this before hit him hard in the face. The morning light creeping through the gap in the curtains, illuminating Mark’s half-open eyes as he squinted at his laptop. Eduardo shakes his head quickly, trying to dislodge the memories.
“No,” Mark replies. His voice is quiet, barely a whisper.
“How come?”
Mark shrugs slightly. “Just couldn’t.”
He nods, accepting his answer. “So tell me what’s going to happen over the next few days.”
He is trying to distract Mark, trying to get him to think logically, about the process of his treatment, about the logistics. Not about how it is going to feel. Mark never did so well with feeling.
“Um. Okay. Well. First they’ll clean my catheter, which is this thing I’ve got in my chest that they wire me up to.” Mark lifts up his t-shirt and reveals a piece of Clingfilm taped over a square of his chest, under which a tiny tube attachment, about the size of the end of a pencil, is poking out from his skin.
But Eduardo barely glances at it. The few times that he has seen Mark shirtless - when he was getting changed to go out, or that time Dustin knocked into him and spilt beer down his front, or when he has walked into Mark’s room too early and found him sprawled out on his bed in only his boxer shorts - are etched permanently into Eduardo’s mind. If he lets himself think about those moments, which he doesn’t very frequently, he gets this feeling in the pit of his stomach, like he is about to dive off the high board into the swimming pool. A mixture of anticipation and anxiety and the faint tingling of excitement. But this Mark, sat up straight in his chair and now pulling his shirt back down, is different to Harvard Mark. Eduardo hasn’t realised until now just how much weight he has lost. He was always slim, kind of athletic from the fencing he used to do, but now he is thin. His ribs stick out and his stomach is almost concave. The pain in Eduardo's chest, in his heart, stabs again.
“So they have to clean it, disinfect it or whatever, I don’t know. Because I could get an infection really easily. So they do that, and then I have to take a load of medication, pills to stop me feeling sick, pills to stop me being sick - which don’t work, by the way. Then I sit back for a bit while they get everything sorted, the drip and everything. It’s complicated, I’ll have to show you when we get there. And then they wire me in.”
Eduardo smiles at the way he describes it. “Does everyone call it being ‘wired in’, or is that just you?”
“Just me, I think,” he says, smiling himself. “My nurse says attaching. I spoke to a guy last week who said he was going to get plugged in.”
“So are there other people in your room then?” Eduardo asks, turning left when Mark points.
“No. There’s a room where the people who are only in for day treatment go. Because I’m in for longer, I have my own room. I have a bed and a chair, like a dentist’s chair, and there is a sofa where you can stay.”
Eduardo looks at Mark and is surprised to find him staring back, his white cheeks faintly pink. Their gaze locks.
“I mean-“ Mark starts.
“I can stay?”
“You don’t have-“
“Does that mean I can come in with you?” Eduardo asks.
“Do you want to?”
“Do you want me to?”
Mark turns and looks out of the window, hiding his face. Eduardo sees the sign for the hospital and follows the road around to the car park. When he eventually finds a space, he pulls in and shuts the engine off.
He turns to look at Mark. His shoulders are hunched up, his hands are fists again.
“Mark?” he says softly, reaching out and touching his elbow, curling his fingers around his arm.
“Yes,” Mark murmurs. “I want you to.”
Eduardo lets go of him. “Okay.”
Mark nods. “Okay.”
***
Eduardo carries Mark’s bag for him again as they go inside. Mark walks slowly, his hands buried in his pockets, his head down. Eduardo watches him nervously, unsure what to say. There is something about Mark right now, an expression on his face and in his eyes that Eduardo has never seen before.
It’s fear, he realises as Mark reaches out a shaking hand to push the button for the elevator. He’s absolutely terrified.
The doors ping open and he watches Mark close his eyes and take a deep, shivery breath before pushing the fourth floor button. Eduardo didn’t know it was possible to hurt this much for someone else. The crushing feeling in his heart has expanded, and his lungs feel tight, too small, like he can’t get enough air into them. Panic wells up in him but he swallows it back. Mark trusts me; he said so himself, Eduardo thinks, and it helps him calm down a little.
Without thinking, and for once in his life without considering how his best friend is going to react, Eduardo reaches out and takes Mark’s hand, squeezing once, gently. He doesn’t miss the way that Mark’s eyes widen, how his head snaps round to stare at Eduardo, his mouth hanging open. He also doesn’t miss the way that Mark doesn’t pull back. He lets it happen. And Eduardo holds on to him until the lift shudders to a halt and the doors slide open.
He still looks a little shell-shocked as he leaves the elevator, and Eduardo, wanting to keep contact with him, to reassure him that he is still there, puts a hand lightly on the small of his back and follows him to the reception desk of Cancer Care.
A tall, wiry nurse with unruly auburn hair is leaning against the desk, filling out a chart. She looks up as they approach and smiles widely.
“Hello Mark. How are you doing today? It’s nice to see you again.”
“I wish I could say the same to you,” Mark mumbles, and Eduardo’s hand presses harder into his back.
But she laughs, her eyes sparkling. “And who do you have with you today?” She asks, turning to look at Eduardo.
“This is my, uh-Eduardo. This is my friend. Eduardo.”
His Eduardo smiles and holds out a hand.
“I’m Harriet, Mark’s day nurse,” she introduces herself, shaking his offered hand. “Do you guys want to come through? I’ve got your room all ready for you.”
“Sure.”
They follow Harriet down a brightly lit corridor. The walls are painted pale, summer flower yellow, and each wall panel is teeming with posters and leaflets that are spattered with positive mantras and are advertising support groups for every type of cancer imaginable. In one room off the corridor, Eduardo sees three or four teenage boys and girls ‘wired up’, sitting in reclining chairs, all gazing at a television that stands at one end of the room. In another he sees a worn old man lying asleep on his bed, a heart monitor beeping rhythmically. A third room is full of armchairs and coffee stables covered in magazines; a lone woman sits there staring blankly at the wall. It is all vaguely depressing. It smells like illness.
“Here we go,” Harriet says cheerily, holding the door open to a plush private room with a wide window that overlooks the city. Eduardo forgets sometimes that Mark is a billionaire. Not everyone with leukemia, he realises, gets this kind of treatment.
“I’ll leave you to get settled in, Mark, and when I get back we’ll get started. Okay?”
Mark nods. He is staring out of the window, his eyes glassed over in some kind of daze.
“Thank you,” Eduardo says to Harriet, who smiles and leaves.
“You okay, Mark?” he asks, going over to him.
“Yes.” He turns to Eduardo. “This is going to be unpleasant. Are you sure you want to stick around?”
Eduardo reaches out and rests a hand against the side of Mark’s face. He doesn’t move away; he doesn’t even flinch. This is not the Mark that Eduardo knows so well; this is someone softer and more gentle and nervous and maybe even a little shy. He is more accepting of Eduardo now than he ever was before. Is it time that has allowed this? Is it the fact that Mark has grown up a bit now? Perhaps it is because he is sick and needs some reassuring that somebody cares about it. Eduardo doesn’t know. All he knows is that he is willing to offer it - to give Mark anything he needs. He is willing to be whatever he needs.
“Are you scared?” Eduardo asks softly.
Mark’s body stiffens and he closes his eyes and steps back, turning away.
“No,” he says, and he is suddenly there, the icy, elusive Mark who shuts Eduardo out, who has shut him out for years.
And Eduardo knows that he is lying, but that is okay. If Mark needs someone to lie to, he can be that person. If Mark needs someone to be cold and cruel to, that is fine. Eduardo can do that. And when Mark needs someone to hold his hand, even for just a single moment of weakness, then great. Eduardo can be that person, too.
Continued
pairing: Mark/Eduardo
disclaimer: Based on the Social Network idea of Mark Eduardo, but in no way true. All from my own head.
notes: For this promt on the tsn_kinkmeme in which Mark is sick and Eduardo takes care of him.
A/N: OBVIOUSLY NOBODY KNOWS HOW MUCH EDUARDO GOT IN THE SETTLEMENT, I'M MAKING THIS SHIT UP.
PLEASE NOTE: Everything that I write about leukemia and chemotherapy comes from Wikipedia and copious Google searches, so it is no doubt entirely inaccurate. I'm trying to piece together bits from the research I've done, but I may very well have got it all twisted around. It's just a story, so no matter. Also, I've never seen A Walk To Remember, but somebody told me that it is kind of like this story, so I might watch it.
Follow up to: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3
Three years ago, only a few hours after his final lawyer up, asshole showdown with Mark, Eduardo had thrown his cell phone against the wall of his hotel room that he had hastily booked into - he should have been staying with Mark, he should be with Mark - in a fit of rage that left his body and mind aching, shuddering with anger and sobs. The phone shattered; everything was erased. He lost Mark's number, and every time after that when he saw the space where Mark's name should have been, he felt a pang of regret and that deep, trembling sense of loss that left him breathless if he let himself think about it too much.
Now, standing by an ATM machine, bracing himself against the wall with one hand, Eduardo scrolls through his contact list on his cell with the other. His heart does a little jump in his chest when he sees Zuckerberg, Mark, the same way it has done every time he has looked at it in the past few days, pulling his phone out of his pocket and checking to see that it was still there, that this was real. That they really had some vague concept of a friendship again. They had swapped numbers after they had signed the final settlement papers together and had exchanged several phone calls over the last week, talking together in hesitant voices about the mundane things, the safe things, steering well clear of Facebook and lawsuits and illnesses.
Eduardo presses dial.
“Hello?”
“It’s a little creepy, don’t you think, that you know and have access to my bank account details.”
Mark laughs, and the happy bubble of sound makes Eduardo’s head swim.
“Where are you?” he asks, his voice tired but amused.
“At an ATM on University Avenue. I needed money for gas so that I can actually get to yours later. Do you happen to know how four hundred million dollars has worked its way into my bank account?”
Mark laughs again. When he speaks, he sounds familiarly smug. “I was going to set up a savings account in your name, but this way seemed much cooler. Far more ostentatious. And...hang on...what? You’re coming to my place?”
Eduardo pushes away from the wall, testing to see if his legs are steady enough to hold him up yet. The gut-punching shock of finding the net worth of a small country in his bank account hasn’t quite worn off.
“Yes,” he says. “You’re going to have to text me your address.”
“I start my next load of treatment today,” Mark says. Eduardo doesn’t miss the way that his voice falters on the word treatment.
“I know,” Eduardo replies softly. “Obviously I am coming to take you to the hospital.”
There is a silence at the other end of the phone. Then he hears a chair creak as Mark sits down.
“Okay,” Mark says finally, a note of decision in his voice. “Okay. That’s cool. I’ll text you my address. Can you be here about noon?”
“I can be there,” Eduardo promises.
“Great. Right.”
Eduardo recognises the hesitance in Marks voice. He’s nervous, his brain supplies helpfully.
“What’s up, Mark?”
“Wardo-“ he cuts himself off, his breathing hitching, pained.
“Yes?”
Another pause. Then, “I’ll see you in a bit.”
Eduardo smiles to himself. “Okay.”
“And Eduardo --?”
Eduardo’s breath catches in his throat when he hears his full name. It sounds so intense. “Yes, Mark?”
Eduardo hears him take a deep breath. His body tenses up unconsciously.
“Thank you,” Mark says, and hangs up before Eduardo can reply.
A wave of something, some fantastic emotion, washes through Eduardo as he puts his phone away in the inside pocket of his blazer. He pushes a hand back through his hair, trying to pinpoint exactly why a lump has suddenly formed in his throat.
It isn’t until he gets in to his car and is buckling his seatbelt, that Eduardo realises that the surge of emotion was a response to the fact that that was the first time that Mark has ever thanked him for anything.
***
Eduardo has spent the past week holed up in his apartment, reading everything that Google can offer him about leukemia and chemotherapy, how it affects a person and a body, trying to catch up on what Mark is going through and what he has been through already. He ordered a stack of books from Amazon for next-day delivery, and spent seventeen straight hours poring through them, highlighting anything that he might be able to use to help Mark out. He knows that there is nothing that he can do to physically make Mark better, but there are so many different ways to save a person.
He recognises how obsessive he is quickly becoming, but it has been so long since Eduardo last let himself care about anything that he cannot help himself. And of course this is Mark that he is caring about; it is Mark that he is doing all this for. If he can’t let himself go a little bit crazy for Mark, who can he let himself do it for?
It has been difficult, these past few days, for Eduardo not to jump back into their old relationship with both feet. He has had to hold himself back. He doesn’t want to freak Mark out. He certainly doesn’t want Mark to know how suddenly and completely Eduardo has let himself forget everything that happened between them since that night that he agreed to put forward the thousand dollars to start Facebook. He doesn’t want to reveal how weak he is, or how much he needs Mark. And so he has had to consciously stop himself from calling him three times a day or driving round to his office to see how he is doing. He wants to try and be normal about this. He doesn’t want to be all emotional and pining and lovesick. But of course he is that, too.
And because it was always Eduardo who pushed for their friendship - Eduardo who invited himself over or who suggested they go out for a beer or who bought them pizza at three in the morning when he knew Mark was pulling an all-nighter - they haven’t spoken as much as he would have liked. But this is okay. This is what normal friends do. He’ll take this, for now.
He mulls over some of the heavier facts that he read about acute myeloid leukemia - Mark's leukemia - during his research as he drives down Palo Alto’s bustling streets later that morning on the way to Mark’s apartment. Everything that Eduardo thought he knew about leukemia came from having seen A Walk To Remember with a girl he had dated back in 2002. That had been bad enough. But he has been trying not to think about the real stuff too much, because the statistics freaked him way the fuck out. Everything he read wasn't about curing the patient, but instead trying to make them more likely to live the next five years. There was very little about becoming fully cured. It was so rare. Too rare. Of all adults diagnosed with acute myeloid leukemia, on average only eight to nine out of one hundred will live for at least five years. That is only eight or nine percent. Of course, because Mark was younger and because they had diagnosed him and started treatment quickly, he had a much bigger chance. But even that was only for the next five years.
And Mark had to get through the chemotherapy first. Chemotherapy that pumped poison through your body, that caused your nails to disintegrate and your hair to fall out. That left your body so weak you could die from catching a simple common cold. At one point during his research, Eduardo had pushed his books aside and let himself sob for a good hour, his body shaking with pain and grief. This wasn’t fair. How could he have just found Mark again, only to possibly lose him so soon? And even if he didn’t lose him now, how long could they really have? Five fucking years?
Eduardo pulls into the parking bay in front of Mark’s apartment building. He takes a moment to calm himself down, breathe deeply, try to relax because he has seen Mark thousands and thousands of times before, so why is this different now? Why does he feel so sick and jittery and excited and nervous?
He heads into the lobby and the doorman nods to him. “Good morning Mr Saverin.”
Eduardo blinks, surprised. “Um. Hi. You…know who I am?”
He doesn’t reply. He just nods again and looks back down at his computer screen as the elevator pings open and Mark comes out.
“Hey,” he says, looking a little shocked to see Eduardo. “You’re…here.”
Eduardo smiles. “I said I would be, didn’t I?”
“You did.” Mark puts his duffel bag down, as if carrying it has worn him out. Eduardo picks it up; it weighs barely anything.
“Can I ask you something?” Eduardo says as they go through the rotating glass doors at the front of the building.
“Go ahead.”
“How come your security guy knows who I am when I have never been here before in my life.”
Mark grins, but it doesn’t quite reach his eyes. Eduardo wants to reach out and touch him, anything, just for some real contact with him, but he holds himself back.
“My lawyers’ fault,” Mark explains. “As soon as the whole lawsuit thing started, they made sure that every security guard of every building I spend a lot of time in knew who you were and what you looked like. They were supposed to stop you if you came near me. I warned him off this morning when you called.”
“What the hell for?” Eduardo laughs. “Did they think I was going to come in a murder you while you slept?”
Mark shrugs. Eduardo’s eyebrows fly up.
“Seriously?” he says. “They thought I could do that?”
He realises too late that he said could, and not would, which implies that Eduardo couldn’t physically hurt Mark, even if he wanted to. Too intimate, Eduardo thinks. Control yourself.
“You were quite angry,” Mark says, winning the award for Understatement Of The Year.
Eduardo nods as he slings Mark’s bag in the trunk of his car.
“I’m not any more,” Eduardo says softly as he slides into the driver’s seat.
“Hmm? What did you say?”
He smiles slightly to himself. “Nothing.”
As he drives, Eduardo sneaks glances at Mark, who is giving him directions, trying to assess if he looks any better or worse than the last time he saw him. In the glaring midday sunshine, his pale skin looks almost translucent and his ocean eyes flash with gold. His hands resting on his knees are shaking a little and he keeps clenching them into fists, as if to stop them from trembling. His lips are cracked and dry and he keeps biting and licking them alternatively. Eduardo has to look away.
He doesn’t look worse, he thinks. He just doesn’t look any better. And he looks really, really tired.
“Have you slept?” Eduardo asks, and the memory of the hundreds of times that he has asked Mark this before hit him hard in the face. The morning light creeping through the gap in the curtains, illuminating Mark’s half-open eyes as he squinted at his laptop. Eduardo shakes his head quickly, trying to dislodge the memories.
“No,” Mark replies. His voice is quiet, barely a whisper.
“How come?”
Mark shrugs slightly. “Just couldn’t.”
He nods, accepting his answer. “So tell me what’s going to happen over the next few days.”
He is trying to distract Mark, trying to get him to think logically, about the process of his treatment, about the logistics. Not about how it is going to feel. Mark never did so well with feeling.
“Um. Okay. Well. First they’ll clean my catheter, which is this thing I’ve got in my chest that they wire me up to.” Mark lifts up his t-shirt and reveals a piece of Clingfilm taped over a square of his chest, under which a tiny tube attachment, about the size of the end of a pencil, is poking out from his skin.
But Eduardo barely glances at it. The few times that he has seen Mark shirtless - when he was getting changed to go out, or that time Dustin knocked into him and spilt beer down his front, or when he has walked into Mark’s room too early and found him sprawled out on his bed in only his boxer shorts - are etched permanently into Eduardo’s mind. If he lets himself think about those moments, which he doesn’t very frequently, he gets this feeling in the pit of his stomach, like he is about to dive off the high board into the swimming pool. A mixture of anticipation and anxiety and the faint tingling of excitement. But this Mark, sat up straight in his chair and now pulling his shirt back down, is different to Harvard Mark. Eduardo hasn’t realised until now just how much weight he has lost. He was always slim, kind of athletic from the fencing he used to do, but now he is thin. His ribs stick out and his stomach is almost concave. The pain in Eduardo's chest, in his heart, stabs again.
“So they have to clean it, disinfect it or whatever, I don’t know. Because I could get an infection really easily. So they do that, and then I have to take a load of medication, pills to stop me feeling sick, pills to stop me being sick - which don’t work, by the way. Then I sit back for a bit while they get everything sorted, the drip and everything. It’s complicated, I’ll have to show you when we get there. And then they wire me in.”
Eduardo smiles at the way he describes it. “Does everyone call it being ‘wired in’, or is that just you?”
“Just me, I think,” he says, smiling himself. “My nurse says attaching. I spoke to a guy last week who said he was going to get plugged in.”
“So are there other people in your room then?” Eduardo asks, turning left when Mark points.
“No. There’s a room where the people who are only in for day treatment go. Because I’m in for longer, I have my own room. I have a bed and a chair, like a dentist’s chair, and there is a sofa where you can stay.”
Eduardo looks at Mark and is surprised to find him staring back, his white cheeks faintly pink. Their gaze locks.
“I mean-“ Mark starts.
“I can stay?”
“You don’t have-“
“Does that mean I can come in with you?” Eduardo asks.
“Do you want to?”
“Do you want me to?”
Mark turns and looks out of the window, hiding his face. Eduardo sees the sign for the hospital and follows the road around to the car park. When he eventually finds a space, he pulls in and shuts the engine off.
He turns to look at Mark. His shoulders are hunched up, his hands are fists again.
“Mark?” he says softly, reaching out and touching his elbow, curling his fingers around his arm.
“Yes,” Mark murmurs. “I want you to.”
Eduardo lets go of him. “Okay.”
Mark nods. “Okay.”
***
Eduardo carries Mark’s bag for him again as they go inside. Mark walks slowly, his hands buried in his pockets, his head down. Eduardo watches him nervously, unsure what to say. There is something about Mark right now, an expression on his face and in his eyes that Eduardo has never seen before.
It’s fear, he realises as Mark reaches out a shaking hand to push the button for the elevator. He’s absolutely terrified.
The doors ping open and he watches Mark close his eyes and take a deep, shivery breath before pushing the fourth floor button. Eduardo didn’t know it was possible to hurt this much for someone else. The crushing feeling in his heart has expanded, and his lungs feel tight, too small, like he can’t get enough air into them. Panic wells up in him but he swallows it back. Mark trusts me; he said so himself, Eduardo thinks, and it helps him calm down a little.
Without thinking, and for once in his life without considering how his best friend is going to react, Eduardo reaches out and takes Mark’s hand, squeezing once, gently. He doesn’t miss the way that Mark’s eyes widen, how his head snaps round to stare at Eduardo, his mouth hanging open. He also doesn’t miss the way that Mark doesn’t pull back. He lets it happen. And Eduardo holds on to him until the lift shudders to a halt and the doors slide open.
He still looks a little shell-shocked as he leaves the elevator, and Eduardo, wanting to keep contact with him, to reassure him that he is still there, puts a hand lightly on the small of his back and follows him to the reception desk of Cancer Care.
A tall, wiry nurse with unruly auburn hair is leaning against the desk, filling out a chart. She looks up as they approach and smiles widely.
“Hello Mark. How are you doing today? It’s nice to see you again.”
“I wish I could say the same to you,” Mark mumbles, and Eduardo’s hand presses harder into his back.
But she laughs, her eyes sparkling. “And who do you have with you today?” She asks, turning to look at Eduardo.
“This is my, uh-Eduardo. This is my friend. Eduardo.”
His Eduardo smiles and holds out a hand.
“I’m Harriet, Mark’s day nurse,” she introduces herself, shaking his offered hand. “Do you guys want to come through? I’ve got your room all ready for you.”
“Sure.”
They follow Harriet down a brightly lit corridor. The walls are painted pale, summer flower yellow, and each wall panel is teeming with posters and leaflets that are spattered with positive mantras and are advertising support groups for every type of cancer imaginable. In one room off the corridor, Eduardo sees three or four teenage boys and girls ‘wired up’, sitting in reclining chairs, all gazing at a television that stands at one end of the room. In another he sees a worn old man lying asleep on his bed, a heart monitor beeping rhythmically. A third room is full of armchairs and coffee stables covered in magazines; a lone woman sits there staring blankly at the wall. It is all vaguely depressing. It smells like illness.
“Here we go,” Harriet says cheerily, holding the door open to a plush private room with a wide window that overlooks the city. Eduardo forgets sometimes that Mark is a billionaire. Not everyone with leukemia, he realises, gets this kind of treatment.
“I’ll leave you to get settled in, Mark, and when I get back we’ll get started. Okay?”
Mark nods. He is staring out of the window, his eyes glassed over in some kind of daze.
“Thank you,” Eduardo says to Harriet, who smiles and leaves.
“You okay, Mark?” he asks, going over to him.
“Yes.” He turns to Eduardo. “This is going to be unpleasant. Are you sure you want to stick around?”
Eduardo reaches out and rests a hand against the side of Mark’s face. He doesn’t move away; he doesn’t even flinch. This is not the Mark that Eduardo knows so well; this is someone softer and more gentle and nervous and maybe even a little shy. He is more accepting of Eduardo now than he ever was before. Is it time that has allowed this? Is it the fact that Mark has grown up a bit now? Perhaps it is because he is sick and needs some reassuring that somebody cares about it. Eduardo doesn’t know. All he knows is that he is willing to offer it - to give Mark anything he needs. He is willing to be whatever he needs.
“Are you scared?” Eduardo asks softly.
Mark’s body stiffens and he closes his eyes and steps back, turning away.
“No,” he says, and he is suddenly there, the icy, elusive Mark who shuts Eduardo out, who has shut him out for years.
And Eduardo knows that he is lying, but that is okay. If Mark needs someone to lie to, he can be that person. If Mark needs someone to be cold and cruel to, that is fine. Eduardo can do that. And when Mark needs someone to hold his hand, even for just a single moment of weakness, then great. Eduardo can be that person, too.
Continued