No to Your Key of Rust
Title: No to Your Key of Rust
Author: ifeelbetter
Disclaimer: I own nothing of value besides one kickass ukulele named Buttercup.
Word Count: 6,092
Summary: TSN + Star Trek AU. Eight years ago, Eduardo was captain of the USS Palo Alto and Mark was his second-in-command. Between then and now, Mark got Eduardo removed from duty and led the Palo Alto to fame and fortune; Eduardo ended up teaching Ethics at Starfleet. Mark shows up in his classroom one day and it might just be time to bury the hatchet.
Notes: I considered not even posting this. I don't know what this business is. I tried to stay anonymous while I was writing it on the tsn_kinkmeme, but I am apparently incapable of remembering things like pressing the "anonymous" button every time and whatnot. (I'm doing much better with the other two WIPs I have going there.) So don't judge me too harshly by this.
I was going to give this a whole adventurous side-plot about Eduardo having to take over the Palo Alto for some plot-heavy reason and then realize that he didn't actually want to be a captain anyway and then more plot for more plottiness...and then I wrote a Super Fluffy epilogue instead. So. There you go. But I ended up coming up with VERY intricate and plotty backstory for this fic, which is something I don't usually do. Go figure.
Oh, and the title comes from the song "How I Could Just Kill A Man."
There are some myths that students believe wholeheartedly because they can't expand their understanding of the world enough to encompass the fact that their professor is human. If pressed, they'd be willing to admit that a professor probably eats and drinks but--privately, subconsciously--they sort of can't picture it and they definitely can't imagine a professor seeing them, in the mass of faces before them.
Eduardo remembers how that felt when he puts effort into it. The students with their PADD blatantly beeping with their incoming messages, the scrolling texts packed with emoticons blinking obviously enough that even from across the lecture hall you'd have to be blind to miss it, the kids that don't even bother with the pretense at all and just drift off to sleep--Eduardo has to make an effort to think of himself in their place. It helps him maintain his empathy and empathy has always been his thing. When he had nothing else, at least he was still more empathetic than--
At least he was more human. Eduardo likes to leave the thought there.
What he doesn't expect is that Mark will still, eight years out of the Academy, still make those mistakes.
Because he's in the back of Eduardo's classroom--with a PADD, just like one of the idiot sixteen-year-olds pressed in around him--and Eduardo could honestly believe it if Mark thought he could escape detection by wearing a lumpy Starfleet sweatshirt with the hood pulled up.
I am not twenty-two anymore, Eduardo reminded himself as he pulled the Ethics textbook out of his briefcase, And I will not be goaded by him anymore.
"I'm changing the schedule slightly," he announced before he could stop his mouth from charging willy-nilly into catastrophe, "And today we'll be discussing mutual responsibility. Accountability." So much for not being goaded.
There's a murmur of panic through the lecture hall and Eduardo uses it to sweep his gaze across the room, to land the last word as his line of sight settles--just for the tiniest of moments--on Mark.
Mark squirmed a little and Eduardo (I'm not twenty-two or prone to irrational bouts of wanton destruction anymore) tried to believe that it didn't send a brief surge of happiness through him. (It was a lie and he knew it: watching Mark squirm was awesome.)
"Let's start with a simple concept: what is the value of loyalty between crew members?" Eduardo asked the class. He glanced down the roster--his course had expanded (which he was proud of) to the point that he couldn't learn everyone's name anymore (which he regretted)--and picked a name at random. "Cadet Young."
"Umm..." the girl with red hair who always sat near the back said, obviously flipping through her textbook for an answer, "It's...good?" She flipped a few more pages. "I'm sorry, sir, what chapter are we on?"
"I'm asking for your opinion, cadet. What is the value of loyalty between crew members?" he paused long enough to realize she would only panic more vehemently without guidance so he offered a buffer. "I mean, where on their list of priorities should crew members place loyalty to their fellow crew members?"
She still looked somewhat panicked but at least she could answer. "It should be a fairly important factor in any decision."
"Could someone support Cadet Young's assertion?" Eduardo asked.
A couple of hands began to rise tentatively. "Yes?" Eduardo said, pointing to the boy who liked to hear his own voice. Cadet...Hadry-something.
"It is an essential aspect to the crew's cohesion," the boy said, "Because without it, the crew can't trust their own safety to each other. They wouldn't have the ability to take risks."
"And this is important because...?" Eduardo prompted, decidedly not looking toward the back of the room where Mark was--was Mark smirking?
"Because exploration is a series of calculated risks, sir," said the boy automatically. It was a fundamental part of Eduardo's Ethics of Exploration course every year--if they learned anything from him, it was always that. Exploration is a series of calculated risks.
"Excellent answer," Eduardo said. "Can anyone counter?" (He always framed his classes as debates--if they didn't understand that they could be wrong, that someone else could be so much more right than they were, they had no business in Starfleet.)
A couple of hands rose but Mark's--that caught Eduardo's attention like a moth to the flame.
"Captain Zuckerberg. What an honor," he said stiffly. "Would you like to articulate the counter argument?"
There was another murmur across the lecture hall. The Palo Alto's return had been the only topic on anyone's mind for the past three days and the exploits of the crew--lead by Captain Zuckerberg--was going to be the stuff of legends.
Not many people remembered that it had been Eduardo's ship first. It had been too long and the Palo Alto had been so much more memorable after Eduardo had been recalled to Earth that even the tabloids hadn't bothered to ask him to comment. People didn't even know not to mention it to him anymore.
"I don't think the counter argument is that loyalty is not valuable," Mark said, leaning forward in his rickety student desk, his elbows pressed into the antique wood. "I just think there have to be limits. Loyalty cannot soften the risk factor. Exploration is a series of calculated risks, after all."
"Are you saying that risk is undermined by the security offered by crew loyalty?" Eduardo asked, aware that hands were rising rapidly around the room. He shouldn't respond to Mark. He should re-direct this--this was a stupid thing to do. He should have just ignored Mark and let him slink away after the lecture, just let him vanish back into the ether.
"Yes," Mark said firmly. "Too much romantic talk about loyalty blunts the sharp edges of a crew."
Eduardo swallowed, biting back something caustic and unsalvageable. It didn't blunt your fangs, you viper. It made you cut me.
"Can anyone counter Captain Zuckerberg's counter-argument?" he asked the room. There was a general buzz going now and students were whispering frantically and--yes, there it was. He could see it on one of the PADD's: Eduardo's own service record.
The suck-up in the first row--Cadet Marlon with the bright green hair--raised his hand in a ramrod straight line directly over his head, his fingers obviously itching to start waving Eduardo's attention towards him.
"Yes?" Eduardo asked. Marlon's answers were never brilliant--he didn't think for himself enough, he just parroted Eduardo back to him--but at least he could depend on him not to agree with Mark.
"Sir, it's like Plutarch said about the Sacred Band of Thebes," Marlon said and Eduardo blinked in surprise. He'd been expecting something blasé and Marlon had plucked obscurity instead.
"...Plutarch?" Eduardo repeated.
"Yes, sir. Plutarch said that the Sacred Band of Thebes was the most powerful because it was comprised of lovers, sir," Marlon said. "And so they would never be anything but their best--for fear of being shamed in front of their lover--and they never left anyone behind."
"That's...one viewpoint," Eduardo said, his brain stuck echoing "lovers"--like that had anything to do with what had happened--it wasn't--it just.
The rest of the class was nodding and goddamnit Mark was smirking again. If there was one good thing Eduardo had learned to wrench from the sorrow and pain of his re-assignment five years ago, it was to take comfort in the idea of never being subjected to one of Mark's goddamn smirks again and now here he was, smirking all over Eduardo's nice, clean lecture hall.
"Let's break into groups to discuss," Eduardo said. It was a stall for time--a stall to kick Mark out or give him the cold shoulder or something. Every teacher knows small group discussions is code for Fuck all if I know what to do next. "Debate the issue in your groups. You have ten minutes."
Of course they wouldn't actually debate. He could tell by the way their glances kept sidling between him and Mark and the covert way they were whispering over their PADDS.
Oh, well. Sometimes you have to take the bull by the horns, Eduardo thought and stepped down from his podium. There was a hiccup of silence because he never did that, not even when they were discussing in smaller groups. But he didn't pause by any of their groups--he passed by, heading up towards the back of the hall.
"Keep discussing, I'm just going to have a word with the Captain," Eduardo said, waving them back to their groups. The whispering got louder.
"If I may, Captain?" Eduardo said, indicating towards the door to the hallway. Mark shrugged and stood.
"OK," he said. "But I don't see the point."
Eduardo tried not to grind his teeth. He used to grind his teeth, back in command. His doctor had been positively overjoyed when the habit had evaporated when he came back to Earth. ("It's the relaxation," she'd claimed, "Goes to show how much you belong here." Eduardo knew better.)
When the door thunked close behind them, Eduardo narrowed his eyes at Mark. He tried to keep his voice low for basic manners but he couldn't help but let the venom he felt slip through.
"Do you need something, Captain?" he hissed.
"Do I need-- What the hell, Wardo?" Mark asked, having the utter cheek to look surprised.
"That's Professor Saverin to people I hate," Eduardo insisted.
"Then you must really hate a lot of students--"
"Dammit, you know what I meant."
Mark cocked his head to one side. It was almost like a bird and it never seemed quite human when he did that. Eduardo had thought--back then, back when Mark was his second-in-command--that he'd grow out of it.
"Can't I just sit in on the lecture?" Mark asked bluntly.
"You're disrupting the lecture," Eduardo pointed out.
"Actually, you called on me--and I saw your syllabus before I came in. You weren't going to have the loyalty discussion for another three weeks. So you disrupted the lecture." Mark finished with that curt finality--like, this is the point and there's no way to disagree. Like he got to set end stops where and when he wanted to and everyone else had to just take his word for it.
"I can change my own damn schedule!" Eduardo said, his voice rising. He could hear a dip in the rumble of conversation back in his lecture hall and knew his students--while too dignified to actually crowd around the doors with their ears pressed to the slots--were listening.
"Of course you can. But it's your own disruption. Like I said."
"Fine!" Eduardo shouted--another dip in the room behind him--and gathered his temper back. "Fine. So I disrupted my own class. I bet you're going to say I got myself re-assigned next."
Mark looked like he really was about to dutifully assert that, no, it wasn't Mark who stabbed him in the back and ruined his career, it was probably Eduardo's bad scheduling or something--and Eduardo really didn't want to hear that.
"Don't. Just." He scrubbed a hand down his face. "Godammit, Mark. Why the hell are you here?"
Mark grinned. "You called me Mark."
Eduardo desperately wanted to punch the wall just to the right of Mark's face. He could just imagine the cloud of plaster-dust, the shocked look on Mark's face.
"It is your name."
"I know, but you were calling me 'Captain' in there."
"I know."
"And then you called me 'Mark.'"
"Just answer the damn question."
Talking to Mark--and Eduardo had almost forgotten it--was like trying to juggle helium balloons. You'd be getting one point in line and, somehow, two other points had slid away and were heading skyward. And you only could manage the opening salvo--once you tossed an idea, he floated away with it.
Eduardo had been stupid enough--back when he was in command--to prize that in a First Officer. He'd thought the challenge would keep them both on their toes, that Mark would only push so far, that no First Officer wanted his captain's chair.
"I wanted to see you," Mark said, also bluntly. "I haven't heard much about you--you know, while I was gone." Anyone else, they would have had to decency to look at least abashed when confronted by the need to dodge around the mission Eduardo spent six years planning and then five more years hearing about. Anyone else would have meant "I cared about your state of being" when they said "I wanted to see you" but Mark...there was nothing but a blank face, as blank as the white plaster behind him.
Eduardo snorted.
"You look well," Mark said, crossing his arms and letting his gaze--clinically cold--travel up and down Eduardo. "I suppose you enjoy being a professor."
"Actually, yes." Eduardo tried to keep the fidgeting--and the fidgeting was undeniable--down to a minimum under Mark's oddly close inspection. "Yes, I enjoy it. Now."
"'Now' being a dig a me, I suppose," Mark said, dropping air quotes around the "now." "As if I chose a new career for you."
This time Eduardo did punch the white plaster just to the right of Mark's head. He was right: the dust, the shock--it was all as good as he imagined it.
"I don't need your sick games, Captain," Eduardo said, leaning into the fist still planted in the plaster by Mark's head. "I don't need your games, I don't need your snide comments, I don't need whatever-the-hell kind of goodwill gesture your twisted imagination thinks this. I just want you to leave me the hell alone."
He had his other hand splayed next to Mark's left ear, his fingers spread on the wall. Mark hadn't moved--hadn't blinked--and just kept Eduardo's gaze for a beat...then another. And Eduardo's breath was fast--gusting out in huffs right across Mark's cheek--but so was Mark's.
It was just a moment too long, Eduardo realized, and pushed back, massaging his hand.
Mark didn't follow him back into the lecture hall, thank goodness. And Eduardo managed to salvage the class, despite the hesitancy and simmering-just-below-the-surface curiosity. Maybe it was the way he was massaging his knuckles when he walked back through the doors--the whoosh of the doors suddenly audible as all conversation simultaneously evaporated and every set of eyes followed his steps as he tracked them back towards his podium--or maybe, and this was what Eduardo chose consciously to believe because it gave him hope for the future of the Federation, the students were just being nice.
He went into autopilot during the latter end of the lecture, letting his thoughts wander in dangerously backward material. He was supposed to be climbing the rungs towards an admiralty--his father had been so clear about that when he was a child. The uniform, back when he was a child, had seemed equal parts center-of-terror and the only hope for future. He'd never seen anything for himself outside of it, never bothered to consider anything else, never bothered to correct his father when he had said things like, "You'll have to man up for Starfleet" when Eduardo had cried over a scraped knee at 5 or "That won't do for Starfleet" when Eduardo had gotten an A- on a book report in 3rd grade.
He'd made good progress too, as long as he ducked his head under the expectations and just jumped through every hoop that appeared in front of him. He'd been so close--the captaincy of the Palo Alto would have meant five years gone and then, then he could have put his life in front of his father and then--
But that wasn't what had happened. Instead, his First Officer had collected a series of glitches--stupid, vapid little things--and had submitted a formal complaint. Mark--who had roomed with him in the Academy, who had found his own schoolwork so easy that he wouldn't bother but he'd sit with Eduardo as he sloughed stolidly, slowly through--his Mark and their plans, all gone in a flash. And for such utter stupidity.
His lecture was a thing of habit by that point--he recited things he had once felt so strongly about in the kind of rhetoric that had once meant something so integrally important to him. Only now they hardly meant anything. Because you can't actually tell the students how stupid it all is--how no friend is a friend, no shipmate will stay a shipmate, no one stays, nothing matters in the end. You can't just say that to them: they'll have to find it out for themselves later.
They probably wouldn't have believed him anyway. He could see the stars in their eyes.
And then Mark--and Sean, his brain added treacherously--had done so many things without him. That hurt too--not as much as the first wrench but a significant blow still. He hadn't even dreamed that a mission could go like that; that all of space would just open up and boundaries and novelty could just blossom for them like that. No mission had ever been so long before; no mission had ever accomplished so much before. The reports, as they came in, sounded like fairy tales.
Eduardo always drank too much after his father refused a hail--because he would never be forgiven, obviously, but that didn't stop him trying--and then (only then), Eduardo sometimes admitted to himself that he hadn't been that kind of Captain. Mark had turned out to have a stroke of genius in exploration. Eduardo--if he was being completely honest with himself, which was never a good idea--would have been a mediocre captain and the mission would have been a series of by-the-book, no-frills diplomatic quagmires.
The rest of the time Eduardo tried so very hard to keep all the blame on Mark. At least that way...at least that way the lies plastered over the giant, aching failure. And the thing that actually hurt more--the loss of his best friend.
After the lecture, Marlon came to the front of the room to ask a question about the next week's reading. It was a stupid question, beneath him, but then he shuffled his feet awkwardly and placed an obviously well-loved edition of Plutarch--an actual, real text--on the podium in front of Eduardo.
"I thought I'd lend it to you," Marlon said with a shrug and a blush.
"Thank you, cadet," Eduardo said. He'd probably read it back in his Academy says but he'd see it differently now, he knew, because of the affection Marlon obviously had for it.
Marlon retreated just as awkwardly, mission accomplished. He could be a very sweet boy sometimes--Eduardo would have to watch out for him. Crushes were a trial and Eduardo was close enough in age to his students that they plagued him.
The hall emptied and he stuffed his own PADDs into his briefcase and cleared the screen behind him. The muted click of the keys was the only sound in the empty hall.
He told the computer to turn off the lights when he reached the door and they clicked off one-by-one.
The doors slid open...and Mark was still there.
"Hi," Mark said, sitting on the floor of the hallway under the dent Eduardo's fist had left in the plaster earlier. "I didn't go into your lecture."
"Yet you're still here," Eduardo pointed out. "Mark, I don't want to talk to you." He really was quite angry--permanently so, he assured himself--but his tone just sounded exhausted.
"I need to talk to you, though," Mark said doggedly. "I don't think you understand."
"There are facts, right, and people understand those--but this is about feelings, Mark. This works differently." Eduardo sighed. Mark bit on his bottom lip but seemed to just be waiting--for permission? for Eduardo to concede? for what?
"You have office hours now," Mark informed him and then paused. It wasn't long enough for a reply to be required but it was a breath. Mark didn't leave pauses back then--he'd plowed through conversation like dominoes. "Can't you pretend I'm a student?" he finished.
Eduardo rubbed a hand down his face. "This is an ethics class, Mark. It's not the appropriate venue for playing pretend," was on the tip of his tongue but it echoed in his father's voice in his mind. He'd spent too long being a rosy, warped imitation of a parent to Mark and it had never worked out well.
"You want me to pretend I have something to offer you as a student?" he asked instead, raising an eyebrow. Snark. It was the safe choice.
Mark sighed. "You could phrase it like that, yes," he said resignedly.
"Fine," Eduardo said and blinked in surprise. It wasn't what he expected himself to say. "Let's go to my office. In case of real students with real student issues."
He gestured in front of them, letting Mark walk in front. Mark nodded sharply, staccato in all his movements, but moving purposefully. He didn't need Eduardo to lead (obviously, Eduardo's still-treacherous mind added) the way, he already knew where Eduardo's office was.
He wasn't high on the list of seniority in the department--though he made a decent showing in popularity polls with the students--so his office was nearly the size of a postage stamp. Two people could (technically) fit inside it at the same time but only if the guest allowed the back of his/her chair to stick out the door a little. Eduardo had to re-arrange the two chairs every time he opened the door. He was conscious of Mark standing statically in the hallway this time and it felt more awkward--more embarrassing--than it ever had before.
"Have a seat," he offered lamely, sinking into his own chair and nervously stacking some of the loose PADDs on the desk.
"Thanks," Mark said, keeping the chair as close to the wall as possible. Their knees were still very much in danger of bumping against each other.
There was another awkward pause. He had once been fascinated with re-creating the internal processes that filled these silent gaps for Mark, treating them like complex puzzles or delicate and extravagant pieces of art. Now it just seemed absurd--the whole thing seemed absurd.
"You came to me, Mark," he reminded him, "I can't make this conversation end any faster if you don't begin."
"See, that's what you don't understand--the conversation shouldn't e-- I never meant that," Mark said, frowning. "It's not what I meant."
"You said I don't understand," Eduardo clarified, abandoning all attempts to piece together the fragments of thought Mark was spewing. "What don't I understand?"
Mark's frown deepened. He opened and closed his mouth a couple of times--speechless, Eduardo gloated internally--and then sighed again. "What did you think would happen, Wardo?"
"When?"
"What did you think would happen with me as your second-in-command?"
The answer was easy--it had been the shining dream of Eduardo's youth, adjusted slightly to fit the particulars when he first got to the Academy. They'd be the perfect crew: they'd love him, they'd respect him, and he would never let them down. And Mark--because it hadn't been Mark when he was a child, it had been a perfectly Mark-shaped lacuna that Mark seemed to seamlessly slip into--would be impressed and proud and devoted and wonderful. Knowing the answer was the easy part; saying it was harder.
"I expected you to support and defend your captain," he said instead. "But you turned on me like a jackal."
"You were doing it wrong," Mark insisted mercilessly.
"That's the part you think I don't understand?" Eduardo asked quietly, looking down at his hands. They seemed small, sitting on his lap. "You thought you could come tell me that and I'd understand?"
"Fine!" Mark said, his voice getting louder, "I don't understand. Are you happy? I don't understand what it is that you understand that makes me a villain."
Eduardo was still looking at his own hands, small and still. He'd stared at his hands during that meeting with Admiral Summers eight years before. His hands shook through the whole meeting then.
"It's the way these things work, I suppose," he said finally. "You're my villain and I'm yours."
"It wasn't about you! It was about the ship!" Mark insisted stubbornly. "And you're not--it would be ridiculous to call you--It's just absurd."
Eduardo finally looked up at him. He really looked this time, not the avoided-sideways-not-quite once-over he'd given him in the lecture hall. He really looked...and Mark looked tired.
"People don't go on being friends after things like this," he said. It sounded weak even to him--but his anger had never needed bolstering before.
"Did you see the feeds about the Elorg Rift?" Mark asked suddenly. "It's near the border with the Ferengi Empire, in the Alterran Expanse. It looks like a heavy fog, sitting like a cloud in the middle of space. It's absurd, right, because it's--it's almost cute, like a cartoon of a cloud. And it's purple--which only makes it more ridiculous--but it's got these highlights of pink--it's almost--"
Mark struggled for the next word, his pace having become too rapid for the progression of such a foreign concept as an aesthetic appreciation for a natural phenomenon. Eduardo couldn't really help leaning a bit forward, catching the edges of Mark's enthusiasm.
"And there were alien invaders coming through the rift, obviously, so I couldn't stop to--I wanted to but it wouldn't have--" Mark grasped at words still, still pausing to bite at the corner of his bottom lip, "I thought you--I thought you would have. Stopped, I mean. You might have stopped, even with the dangerous alien invaders."
He looked at Eduardo so honestly and openly that--with a jolt of surprise--Eduardo realized that it was a compliment.
"I would...have...stopped?" he repeated. "For a purple cloud?"
"It was beautiful, Wardo," Mark said. "I was too occupied with the invaders to give time to contemplation; you would have stopped for the beauty of the thing."
It shouldn't be a compliment. It should be an insult wrapped in the thin veneer of a compliment, a painful truth dipped in chocolate to make it go down easier. From anyone else, that's what it would have been. From anyone else, this would mean, 'You lost your ship because you are the type of man to lose track of a mission when something sparkles.' From anyone else, this would mean, 'I'm better at this then you, don't you see?'
From Mark, though, it sounded like, 'I missed something there. You would have seen it, but I missed it.'
Mark's knee had been bouncing nervously for a while and it bumped up against Eduardo's and suddenly froze, pressed lightly against Eduardo's.
"I probably would have," Eduardo said finally, allowing the curve of a smile to tug at the corner of his lips. "I probably would have gotten us all killed."
"If you had seen it--" Mark said, his leg bouncing again, right against Eduardo's, "--it might have been worth--I don't know. I don't know if I did it right, Wardo, but you did it technically wrong."
Eduardo reached out and put a hand on Mark's knee, stopping the jittery bouncing. He hadn't really thought about the motion before doing it, nothing beyond a sense of sympathetic nerves beginning to build in himself. Stop the twitching, nerves decrease. There had been no thought beyond that.
But now his hand was on Mark's knee. And he couldn't--not for the life of him--think of a reason to remove it.
Mark made a small, nervous sound--halfway between an overly loud swallow and a sigh--and hovered a hand over Eduardo's. He could feel the warmth of Mark's hand, feel him like a ghost's touch.
Eduardo turned his hand upside down, his palm now definitively touching Mark's. Mark's hand sank into his slightly--not completely, just a bit--and Eduardo wrapped his thumb around the outer shell of Mark's hand and curled the tips of his fingers into Mark's pulse.
They had been--eight years ago, more, the whole time they shared that dorm room--somewhat more close than was necessarily typical of roommates. Eduardo had been lanky and tactile then. He had spent many evenings with his feet in Mark's lap or with an arm hooked around Mark's shoulder while Mark steadfastly ignored him. Mark had fixated on tasks then, intent on becoming a Science Officer and determined to memorize every single fact available. They came easily to him--the classes, that is, not the boundless stretches of information--but Eduardo hadn't envied him. He'd had plans, then. His feet in Mark's lap and his dreams stretching out into a perfect future...
This touching of hands wasn't like that. Eduardo had learned to shield himself better since then. He didn't assume the best anymore. He reached out tentatively.
Mark had always been tentative.
"I'm sorry," Mark said. It erupted out of him in a quiet gush, like he had hidden it away until he couldn't anymore. "I didn't want you to--I know your father--"
Eduardo started to draw back his hand but Mark caught it, curling his fingers into Eduardo's.
"I never wanted to go without you," he said, still in that quiet eruption of truth, "I was angry--or proud, I don't know--at first but I always wanted you there. With me. And I think--I hope--I'm different now."
Eduardo was still angry, he reminded himself, but that didn't mean he couldn't leave his hand in Mark's. And if Mark being his villain meant he had to be a villain too...maybe he didn't really want villains in their story. Maybe that was assuming too many primary colors where there should be thousands of shades of color in between. Maybe they could both be a mixture of hero and villain, expert and amateur, brave and shy.
"Yeah," he agreed, "me too."
There should have been another 45 minutes left in his office hours. He scribbled a note for the door--out for coffee--and left with Mark.
It was bright daylight outside. There were students and professors milling around, coating the landscape with their crimson uniforms. It was mundane and familiar but also earth-shatteringly different. The gut-gnaw of anger had evaporated and was replaced--what had always been there, under the simmer of anger--by the old affection, albeit diluted and hardened at the edges. It was really that easy, that much of a magic trick.
Nothing was changed, but it looked slightly better.
Mark paused a step below him--oh, Eduardo realized, he had stopped and Mark was waiting--and he looked up at him, squinting against the bright sunlight.
There was this too, Eduardo (finally) admitted, that had made the simmer of anger so much worse. Mark was right: Eduardo was the type of man who stopped to admire beauty, who had to pause when the face of the man he miraculously would not stop loving was lit in the perfect way by a perfect beam of light.
It had never seemed so easy to close the gap between them, take Mark's face in his hands, and press their lips together.
Mark made soft noise against Eduardo's lips.
Eduardo really smiled then. As angry as he had been--as angry as he had tried to stay--there had always been a part of him that would have been thoroughly content to have Mark come back and say just that. Only that. Sorry and I missed you were sometimes the best balms to a broken heart.
Eduardo pulled Mark closer, wrapped his arms around his waist.
"I missed you too," he said. Mark's head sank into the crook of Eduardo's neck with a sigh.
Perhaps it had been harder to be beyond the edges of known, your thoughts flying backwards always to the best friend you hurt so badly. Perhaps it hurt Mark more to know he'd been more wrong, that Eduardo was cut deeper by him than he had ever been by anyone else, that Mark turned out to be a viper and that there wasn't anywhere else to go when you lived in your own head with yourself. Perhaps it was harder to think you'd been wrong than to know you'd been wronged. Perhaps it was harder to apologize than it was to wait for the apology.
But, more importantly, maybe it was more important that both of them had simmered and suffered and been silent for enough time. It was time for something good--finally--to be good enough to dispel the gloom. Being angry was tiring, being guilty was awful. It was as simple as that, maybe.
It wasn't perfect. Eduardo had wanted the perfect victory eight years before. He'd been planning for everything to work out like he lived in a fairy tale. It couldn't. If it hadn't been Mark, it would have been something else. Life isn't perfect. And it's better that way.
So Eduardo kissed Mark again in the bright sunlight, with the throngs of people passing around them namelessly. It wasn't like a first kiss at all--it wasn't even like a second kiss or a third. It was like a hundred kisses--and then a thousand more. It was the countless beginning of unperfect, perfectly human, mundane, flawed, stupid, beautiful everything.
***
Epilogue
"I have to go," Mark said, pulling away again.
Eduardo raised an eyebrow. "The door hasn't moved," he pointed out. "I think you know the way."
Mark leaned back in and kissed him again, somewhat more deeply than was conducive to a speedy exit.
"No, I really have to go," he said, pulling away again.
"I'm honestly not even trying to stop you," Eduardo said. "Cross my heart."
Mark leaned back in again for another kiss.
"I really--" he started to say, right up against Eduardo's lips.
"--have to go, I heard," Eduardo said.
"Dustin needs me to approve the--" Mark said and kissed Eduardo, interrupting himself, "--plans for the--" another kiss, another pause "--new tachyon--" another kiss, another pause "--ring."
"No, hang on, what's a tachyon ring?" Eduardo asked, pulling back far enough to get a decent answer.
"I didn't say that," Mark said, frowning. "Did I say that? That's not a thing."
"You definitely said that," said Eduardo.
"Stop confusing me," Mark said, pressing kisses into Eduardo's neck since Eduardo insisted on keeping his mouth occupied.
"I'm not--seriously, though, what's a tachyon ring?"
Mark sighed. "It's not a--I misspoke. It's not even--Dustin is helping me find a ring. To ask you. You know."
Eduardo really didn't know.
"A ring. You know." Mark started to blush and tried to mask it with frustration. "To pick a--so I can ask you--you're really making me say the whole damn thing, aren't you? You're going to make me say all the words in a row right now."
Eduardo grinned. "If you're not old enough to say it, you're not old enough to do it."
"Dustin is helping me find a ring so I can ask you to. You know. Marry. me," Mark said. He began with the irritated slow tones of someone who has to explain something very, very simple to someone even simpler but ended unable to make eye contact.
Eduardo made a hmmm sound. It was very non-committal.
"Would that be something...you'd be...interested in?" Mark finally asked.
"Are you asking me whether shopping with you and Dustin is my idea of fun times for an afternoon's excursion? Because, no. No, it really isn't. I have never met such indecisive men besides you two," Eduardo said, chatting easily.
"Not that part. The other part. The...marrying part." Mark moved the collar of Eduardo's shirt, avoiding making eye contact. "The marrying me part."
Eduardo grinned and kissed Mark again, one of a thousand thousand kisses he had to offer.
"It sounds like a bit of a risk," he said.
"A calculated risk," Mark pointed out.
"Yeah," Eduardo agreed. "It is. Yeah."
Author: ifeelbetter
Disclaimer: I own nothing of value besides one kickass ukulele named Buttercup.
Word Count: 6,092
Summary: TSN + Star Trek AU. Eight years ago, Eduardo was captain of the USS Palo Alto and Mark was his second-in-command. Between then and now, Mark got Eduardo removed from duty and led the Palo Alto to fame and fortune; Eduardo ended up teaching Ethics at Starfleet. Mark shows up in his classroom one day and it might just be time to bury the hatchet.
Notes: I considered not even posting this. I don't know what this business is. I tried to stay anonymous while I was writing it on the tsn_kinkmeme, but I am apparently incapable of remembering things like pressing the "anonymous" button every time and whatnot. (I'm doing much better with the other two WIPs I have going there.) So don't judge me too harshly by this.
I was going to give this a whole adventurous side-plot about Eduardo having to take over the Palo Alto for some plot-heavy reason and then realize that he didn't actually want to be a captain anyway and then more plot for more plottiness...and then I wrote a Super Fluffy epilogue instead. So. There you go. But I ended up coming up with VERY intricate and plotty backstory for this fic, which is something I don't usually do. Go figure.
Oh, and the title comes from the song "How I Could Just Kill A Man."
There are some myths that students believe wholeheartedly because they can't expand their understanding of the world enough to encompass the fact that their professor is human. If pressed, they'd be willing to admit that a professor probably eats and drinks but--privately, subconsciously--they sort of can't picture it and they definitely can't imagine a professor seeing them, in the mass of faces before them.
Eduardo remembers how that felt when he puts effort into it. The students with their PADD blatantly beeping with their incoming messages, the scrolling texts packed with emoticons blinking obviously enough that even from across the lecture hall you'd have to be blind to miss it, the kids that don't even bother with the pretense at all and just drift off to sleep--Eduardo has to make an effort to think of himself in their place. It helps him maintain his empathy and empathy has always been his thing. When he had nothing else, at least he was still more empathetic than--
At least he was more human. Eduardo likes to leave the thought there.
What he doesn't expect is that Mark will still, eight years out of the Academy, still make those mistakes.
Because he's in the back of Eduardo's classroom--with a PADD, just like one of the idiot sixteen-year-olds pressed in around him--and Eduardo could honestly believe it if Mark thought he could escape detection by wearing a lumpy Starfleet sweatshirt with the hood pulled up.
I am not twenty-two anymore, Eduardo reminded himself as he pulled the Ethics textbook out of his briefcase, And I will not be goaded by him anymore.
"I'm changing the schedule slightly," he announced before he could stop his mouth from charging willy-nilly into catastrophe, "And today we'll be discussing mutual responsibility. Accountability." So much for not being goaded.
There's a murmur of panic through the lecture hall and Eduardo uses it to sweep his gaze across the room, to land the last word as his line of sight settles--just for the tiniest of moments--on Mark.
Mark squirmed a little and Eduardo (I'm not twenty-two or prone to irrational bouts of wanton destruction anymore) tried to believe that it didn't send a brief surge of happiness through him. (It was a lie and he knew it: watching Mark squirm was awesome.)
"Let's start with a simple concept: what is the value of loyalty between crew members?" Eduardo asked the class. He glanced down the roster--his course had expanded (which he was proud of) to the point that he couldn't learn everyone's name anymore (which he regretted)--and picked a name at random. "Cadet Young."
"Umm..." the girl with red hair who always sat near the back said, obviously flipping through her textbook for an answer, "It's...good?" She flipped a few more pages. "I'm sorry, sir, what chapter are we on?"
"I'm asking for your opinion, cadet. What is the value of loyalty between crew members?" he paused long enough to realize she would only panic more vehemently without guidance so he offered a buffer. "I mean, where on their list of priorities should crew members place loyalty to their fellow crew members?"
She still looked somewhat panicked but at least she could answer. "It should be a fairly important factor in any decision."
"Could someone support Cadet Young's assertion?" Eduardo asked.
A couple of hands began to rise tentatively. "Yes?" Eduardo said, pointing to the boy who liked to hear his own voice. Cadet...Hadry-something.
"It is an essential aspect to the crew's cohesion," the boy said, "Because without it, the crew can't trust their own safety to each other. They wouldn't have the ability to take risks."
"And this is important because...?" Eduardo prompted, decidedly not looking toward the back of the room where Mark was--was Mark smirking?
"Because exploration is a series of calculated risks, sir," said the boy automatically. It was a fundamental part of Eduardo's Ethics of Exploration course every year--if they learned anything from him, it was always that. Exploration is a series of calculated risks.
"Excellent answer," Eduardo said. "Can anyone counter?" (He always framed his classes as debates--if they didn't understand that they could be wrong, that someone else could be so much more right than they were, they had no business in Starfleet.)
A couple of hands rose but Mark's--that caught Eduardo's attention like a moth to the flame.
"Captain Zuckerberg. What an honor," he said stiffly. "Would you like to articulate the counter argument?"
There was another murmur across the lecture hall. The Palo Alto's return had been the only topic on anyone's mind for the past three days and the exploits of the crew--lead by Captain Zuckerberg--was going to be the stuff of legends.
Not many people remembered that it had been Eduardo's ship first. It had been too long and the Palo Alto had been so much more memorable after Eduardo had been recalled to Earth that even the tabloids hadn't bothered to ask him to comment. People didn't even know not to mention it to him anymore.
"I don't think the counter argument is that loyalty is not valuable," Mark said, leaning forward in his rickety student desk, his elbows pressed into the antique wood. "I just think there have to be limits. Loyalty cannot soften the risk factor. Exploration is a series of calculated risks, after all."
"Are you saying that risk is undermined by the security offered by crew loyalty?" Eduardo asked, aware that hands were rising rapidly around the room. He shouldn't respond to Mark. He should re-direct this--this was a stupid thing to do. He should have just ignored Mark and let him slink away after the lecture, just let him vanish back into the ether.
"Yes," Mark said firmly. "Too much romantic talk about loyalty blunts the sharp edges of a crew."
Eduardo swallowed, biting back something caustic and unsalvageable. It didn't blunt your fangs, you viper. It made you cut me.
"Can anyone counter Captain Zuckerberg's counter-argument?" he asked the room. There was a general buzz going now and students were whispering frantically and--yes, there it was. He could see it on one of the PADD's: Eduardo's own service record.
The suck-up in the first row--Cadet Marlon with the bright green hair--raised his hand in a ramrod straight line directly over his head, his fingers obviously itching to start waving Eduardo's attention towards him.
"Yes?" Eduardo asked. Marlon's answers were never brilliant--he didn't think for himself enough, he just parroted Eduardo back to him--but at least he could depend on him not to agree with Mark.
"Sir, it's like Plutarch said about the Sacred Band of Thebes," Marlon said and Eduardo blinked in surprise. He'd been expecting something blasé and Marlon had plucked obscurity instead.
"...Plutarch?" Eduardo repeated.
"Yes, sir. Plutarch said that the Sacred Band of Thebes was the most powerful because it was comprised of lovers, sir," Marlon said. "And so they would never be anything but their best--for fear of being shamed in front of their lover--and they never left anyone behind."
"That's...one viewpoint," Eduardo said, his brain stuck echoing "lovers"--like that had anything to do with what had happened--it wasn't--it just.
The rest of the class was nodding and goddamnit Mark was smirking again. If there was one good thing Eduardo had learned to wrench from the sorrow and pain of his re-assignment five years ago, it was to take comfort in the idea of never being subjected to one of Mark's goddamn smirks again and now here he was, smirking all over Eduardo's nice, clean lecture hall.
"Let's break into groups to discuss," Eduardo said. It was a stall for time--a stall to kick Mark out or give him the cold shoulder or something. Every teacher knows small group discussions is code for Fuck all if I know what to do next. "Debate the issue in your groups. You have ten minutes."
Of course they wouldn't actually debate. He could tell by the way their glances kept sidling between him and Mark and the covert way they were whispering over their PADDS.
Oh, well. Sometimes you have to take the bull by the horns, Eduardo thought and stepped down from his podium. There was a hiccup of silence because he never did that, not even when they were discussing in smaller groups. But he didn't pause by any of their groups--he passed by, heading up towards the back of the hall.
"Keep discussing, I'm just going to have a word with the Captain," Eduardo said, waving them back to their groups. The whispering got louder.
"If I may, Captain?" Eduardo said, indicating towards the door to the hallway. Mark shrugged and stood.
"OK," he said. "But I don't see the point."
Eduardo tried not to grind his teeth. He used to grind his teeth, back in command. His doctor had been positively overjoyed when the habit had evaporated when he came back to Earth. ("It's the relaxation," she'd claimed, "Goes to show how much you belong here." Eduardo knew better.)
When the door thunked close behind them, Eduardo narrowed his eyes at Mark. He tried to keep his voice low for basic manners but he couldn't help but let the venom he felt slip through.
"Do you need something, Captain?" he hissed.
"Do I need-- What the hell, Wardo?" Mark asked, having the utter cheek to look surprised.
"That's Professor Saverin to people I hate," Eduardo insisted.
"Then you must really hate a lot of students--"
"Dammit, you know what I meant."
Mark cocked his head to one side. It was almost like a bird and it never seemed quite human when he did that. Eduardo had thought--back then, back when Mark was his second-in-command--that he'd grow out of it.
"Can't I just sit in on the lecture?" Mark asked bluntly.
"You're disrupting the lecture," Eduardo pointed out.
"Actually, you called on me--and I saw your syllabus before I came in. You weren't going to have the loyalty discussion for another three weeks. So you disrupted the lecture." Mark finished with that curt finality--like, this is the point and there's no way to disagree. Like he got to set end stops where and when he wanted to and everyone else had to just take his word for it.
"I can change my own damn schedule!" Eduardo said, his voice rising. He could hear a dip in the rumble of conversation back in his lecture hall and knew his students--while too dignified to actually crowd around the doors with their ears pressed to the slots--were listening.
"Of course you can. But it's your own disruption. Like I said."
"Fine!" Eduardo shouted--another dip in the room behind him--and gathered his temper back. "Fine. So I disrupted my own class. I bet you're going to say I got myself re-assigned next."
Mark looked like he really was about to dutifully assert that, no, it wasn't Mark who stabbed him in the back and ruined his career, it was probably Eduardo's bad scheduling or something--and Eduardo really didn't want to hear that.
"Don't. Just." He scrubbed a hand down his face. "Godammit, Mark. Why the hell are you here?"
Mark grinned. "You called me Mark."
Eduardo desperately wanted to punch the wall just to the right of Mark's face. He could just imagine the cloud of plaster-dust, the shocked look on Mark's face.
"It is your name."
"I know, but you were calling me 'Captain' in there."
"I know."
"And then you called me 'Mark.'"
"Just answer the damn question."
Talking to Mark--and Eduardo had almost forgotten it--was like trying to juggle helium balloons. You'd be getting one point in line and, somehow, two other points had slid away and were heading skyward. And you only could manage the opening salvo--once you tossed an idea, he floated away with it.
Eduardo had been stupid enough--back when he was in command--to prize that in a First Officer. He'd thought the challenge would keep them both on their toes, that Mark would only push so far, that no First Officer wanted his captain's chair.
"I wanted to see you," Mark said, also bluntly. "I haven't heard much about you--you know, while I was gone." Anyone else, they would have had to decency to look at least abashed when confronted by the need to dodge around the mission Eduardo spent six years planning and then five more years hearing about. Anyone else would have meant "I cared about your state of being" when they said "I wanted to see you" but Mark...there was nothing but a blank face, as blank as the white plaster behind him.
Eduardo snorted.
"You look well," Mark said, crossing his arms and letting his gaze--clinically cold--travel up and down Eduardo. "I suppose you enjoy being a professor."
"Actually, yes." Eduardo tried to keep the fidgeting--and the fidgeting was undeniable--down to a minimum under Mark's oddly close inspection. "Yes, I enjoy it. Now."
"'Now' being a dig a me, I suppose," Mark said, dropping air quotes around the "now." "As if I chose a new career for you."
This time Eduardo did punch the white plaster just to the right of Mark's head. He was right: the dust, the shock--it was all as good as he imagined it.
"I don't need your sick games, Captain," Eduardo said, leaning into the fist still planted in the plaster by Mark's head. "I don't need your games, I don't need your snide comments, I don't need whatever-the-hell kind of goodwill gesture your twisted imagination thinks this. I just want you to leave me the hell alone."
He had his other hand splayed next to Mark's left ear, his fingers spread on the wall. Mark hadn't moved--hadn't blinked--and just kept Eduardo's gaze for a beat...then another. And Eduardo's breath was fast--gusting out in huffs right across Mark's cheek--but so was Mark's.
It was just a moment too long, Eduardo realized, and pushed back, massaging his hand.
Mark didn't follow him back into the lecture hall, thank goodness. And Eduardo managed to salvage the class, despite the hesitancy and simmering-just-below-the-surface curiosity. Maybe it was the way he was massaging his knuckles when he walked back through the doors--the whoosh of the doors suddenly audible as all conversation simultaneously evaporated and every set of eyes followed his steps as he tracked them back towards his podium--or maybe, and this was what Eduardo chose consciously to believe because it gave him hope for the future of the Federation, the students were just being nice.
He went into autopilot during the latter end of the lecture, letting his thoughts wander in dangerously backward material. He was supposed to be climbing the rungs towards an admiralty--his father had been so clear about that when he was a child. The uniform, back when he was a child, had seemed equal parts center-of-terror and the only hope for future. He'd never seen anything for himself outside of it, never bothered to consider anything else, never bothered to correct his father when he had said things like, "You'll have to man up for Starfleet" when Eduardo had cried over a scraped knee at 5 or "That won't do for Starfleet" when Eduardo had gotten an A- on a book report in 3rd grade.
He'd made good progress too, as long as he ducked his head under the expectations and just jumped through every hoop that appeared in front of him. He'd been so close--the captaincy of the Palo Alto would have meant five years gone and then, then he could have put his life in front of his father and then--
But that wasn't what had happened. Instead, his First Officer had collected a series of glitches--stupid, vapid little things--and had submitted a formal complaint. Mark--who had roomed with him in the Academy, who had found his own schoolwork so easy that he wouldn't bother but he'd sit with Eduardo as he sloughed stolidly, slowly through--his Mark and their plans, all gone in a flash. And for such utter stupidity.
His lecture was a thing of habit by that point--he recited things he had once felt so strongly about in the kind of rhetoric that had once meant something so integrally important to him. Only now they hardly meant anything. Because you can't actually tell the students how stupid it all is--how no friend is a friend, no shipmate will stay a shipmate, no one stays, nothing matters in the end. You can't just say that to them: they'll have to find it out for themselves later.
They probably wouldn't have believed him anyway. He could see the stars in their eyes.
And then Mark--and Sean, his brain added treacherously--had done so many things without him. That hurt too--not as much as the first wrench but a significant blow still. He hadn't even dreamed that a mission could go like that; that all of space would just open up and boundaries and novelty could just blossom for them like that. No mission had ever been so long before; no mission had ever accomplished so much before. The reports, as they came in, sounded like fairy tales.
Eduardo always drank too much after his father refused a hail--because he would never be forgiven, obviously, but that didn't stop him trying--and then (only then), Eduardo sometimes admitted to himself that he hadn't been that kind of Captain. Mark had turned out to have a stroke of genius in exploration. Eduardo--if he was being completely honest with himself, which was never a good idea--would have been a mediocre captain and the mission would have been a series of by-the-book, no-frills diplomatic quagmires.
The rest of the time Eduardo tried so very hard to keep all the blame on Mark. At least that way...at least that way the lies plastered over the giant, aching failure. And the thing that actually hurt more--the loss of his best friend.
After the lecture, Marlon came to the front of the room to ask a question about the next week's reading. It was a stupid question, beneath him, but then he shuffled his feet awkwardly and placed an obviously well-loved edition of Plutarch--an actual, real text--on the podium in front of Eduardo.
"I thought I'd lend it to you," Marlon said with a shrug and a blush.
"Thank you, cadet," Eduardo said. He'd probably read it back in his Academy says but he'd see it differently now, he knew, because of the affection Marlon obviously had for it.
Marlon retreated just as awkwardly, mission accomplished. He could be a very sweet boy sometimes--Eduardo would have to watch out for him. Crushes were a trial and Eduardo was close enough in age to his students that they plagued him.
The hall emptied and he stuffed his own PADDs into his briefcase and cleared the screen behind him. The muted click of the keys was the only sound in the empty hall.
He told the computer to turn off the lights when he reached the door and they clicked off one-by-one.
The doors slid open...and Mark was still there.
"Hi," Mark said, sitting on the floor of the hallway under the dent Eduardo's fist had left in the plaster earlier. "I didn't go into your lecture."
"Yet you're still here," Eduardo pointed out. "Mark, I don't want to talk to you." He really was quite angry--permanently so, he assured himself--but his tone just sounded exhausted.
"I need to talk to you, though," Mark said doggedly. "I don't think you understand."
"There are facts, right, and people understand those--but this is about feelings, Mark. This works differently." Eduardo sighed. Mark bit on his bottom lip but seemed to just be waiting--for permission? for Eduardo to concede? for what?
"You have office hours now," Mark informed him and then paused. It wasn't long enough for a reply to be required but it was a breath. Mark didn't leave pauses back then--he'd plowed through conversation like dominoes. "Can't you pretend I'm a student?" he finished.
Eduardo rubbed a hand down his face. "This is an ethics class, Mark. It's not the appropriate venue for playing pretend," was on the tip of his tongue but it echoed in his father's voice in his mind. He'd spent too long being a rosy, warped imitation of a parent to Mark and it had never worked out well.
"You want me to pretend I have something to offer you as a student?" he asked instead, raising an eyebrow. Snark. It was the safe choice.
Mark sighed. "You could phrase it like that, yes," he said resignedly.
"Fine," Eduardo said and blinked in surprise. It wasn't what he expected himself to say. "Let's go to my office. In case of real students with real student issues."
He gestured in front of them, letting Mark walk in front. Mark nodded sharply, staccato in all his movements, but moving purposefully. He didn't need Eduardo to lead (obviously, Eduardo's still-treacherous mind added) the way, he already knew where Eduardo's office was.
He wasn't high on the list of seniority in the department--though he made a decent showing in popularity polls with the students--so his office was nearly the size of a postage stamp. Two people could (technically) fit inside it at the same time but only if the guest allowed the back of his/her chair to stick out the door a little. Eduardo had to re-arrange the two chairs every time he opened the door. He was conscious of Mark standing statically in the hallway this time and it felt more awkward--more embarrassing--than it ever had before.
"Have a seat," he offered lamely, sinking into his own chair and nervously stacking some of the loose PADDs on the desk.
"Thanks," Mark said, keeping the chair as close to the wall as possible. Their knees were still very much in danger of bumping against each other.
There was another awkward pause. He had once been fascinated with re-creating the internal processes that filled these silent gaps for Mark, treating them like complex puzzles or delicate and extravagant pieces of art. Now it just seemed absurd--the whole thing seemed absurd.
"You came to me, Mark," he reminded him, "I can't make this conversation end any faster if you don't begin."
"See, that's what you don't understand--the conversation shouldn't e-- I never meant that," Mark said, frowning. "It's not what I meant."
"You said I don't understand," Eduardo clarified, abandoning all attempts to piece together the fragments of thought Mark was spewing. "What don't I understand?"
Mark's frown deepened. He opened and closed his mouth a couple of times--speechless, Eduardo gloated internally--and then sighed again. "What did you think would happen, Wardo?"
"When?"
"What did you think would happen with me as your second-in-command?"
The answer was easy--it had been the shining dream of Eduardo's youth, adjusted slightly to fit the particulars when he first got to the Academy. They'd be the perfect crew: they'd love him, they'd respect him, and he would never let them down. And Mark--because it hadn't been Mark when he was a child, it had been a perfectly Mark-shaped lacuna that Mark seemed to seamlessly slip into--would be impressed and proud and devoted and wonderful. Knowing the answer was the easy part; saying it was harder.
"I expected you to support and defend your captain," he said instead. "But you turned on me like a jackal."
"You were doing it wrong," Mark insisted mercilessly.
"That's the part you think I don't understand?" Eduardo asked quietly, looking down at his hands. They seemed small, sitting on his lap. "You thought you could come tell me that and I'd understand?"
"Fine!" Mark said, his voice getting louder, "I don't understand. Are you happy? I don't understand what it is that you understand that makes me a villain."
Eduardo was still looking at his own hands, small and still. He'd stared at his hands during that meeting with Admiral Summers eight years before. His hands shook through the whole meeting then.
"It's the way these things work, I suppose," he said finally. "You're my villain and I'm yours."
"It wasn't about you! It was about the ship!" Mark insisted stubbornly. "And you're not--it would be ridiculous to call you--It's just absurd."
Eduardo finally looked up at him. He really looked this time, not the avoided-sideways-not-quite once-over he'd given him in the lecture hall. He really looked...and Mark looked tired.
"People don't go on being friends after things like this," he said. It sounded weak even to him--but his anger had never needed bolstering before.
"Did you see the feeds about the Elorg Rift?" Mark asked suddenly. "It's near the border with the Ferengi Empire, in the Alterran Expanse. It looks like a heavy fog, sitting like a cloud in the middle of space. It's absurd, right, because it's--it's almost cute, like a cartoon of a cloud. And it's purple--which only makes it more ridiculous--but it's got these highlights of pink--it's almost--"
Mark struggled for the next word, his pace having become too rapid for the progression of such a foreign concept as an aesthetic appreciation for a natural phenomenon. Eduardo couldn't really help leaning a bit forward, catching the edges of Mark's enthusiasm.
"And there were alien invaders coming through the rift, obviously, so I couldn't stop to--I wanted to but it wouldn't have--" Mark grasped at words still, still pausing to bite at the corner of his bottom lip, "I thought you--I thought you would have. Stopped, I mean. You might have stopped, even with the dangerous alien invaders."
He looked at Eduardo so honestly and openly that--with a jolt of surprise--Eduardo realized that it was a compliment.
"I would...have...stopped?" he repeated. "For a purple cloud?"
"It was beautiful, Wardo," Mark said. "I was too occupied with the invaders to give time to contemplation; you would have stopped for the beauty of the thing."
It shouldn't be a compliment. It should be an insult wrapped in the thin veneer of a compliment, a painful truth dipped in chocolate to make it go down easier. From anyone else, that's what it would have been. From anyone else, this would mean, 'You lost your ship because you are the type of man to lose track of a mission when something sparkles.' From anyone else, this would mean, 'I'm better at this then you, don't you see?'
From Mark, though, it sounded like, 'I missed something there. You would have seen it, but I missed it.'
Mark's knee had been bouncing nervously for a while and it bumped up against Eduardo's and suddenly froze, pressed lightly against Eduardo's.
"I probably would have," Eduardo said finally, allowing the curve of a smile to tug at the corner of his lips. "I probably would have gotten us all killed."
"If you had seen it--" Mark said, his leg bouncing again, right against Eduardo's, "--it might have been worth--I don't know. I don't know if I did it right, Wardo, but you did it technically wrong."
Eduardo reached out and put a hand on Mark's knee, stopping the jittery bouncing. He hadn't really thought about the motion before doing it, nothing beyond a sense of sympathetic nerves beginning to build in himself. Stop the twitching, nerves decrease. There had been no thought beyond that.
But now his hand was on Mark's knee. And he couldn't--not for the life of him--think of a reason to remove it.
Mark made a small, nervous sound--halfway between an overly loud swallow and a sigh--and hovered a hand over Eduardo's. He could feel the warmth of Mark's hand, feel him like a ghost's touch.
Eduardo turned his hand upside down, his palm now definitively touching Mark's. Mark's hand sank into his slightly--not completely, just a bit--and Eduardo wrapped his thumb around the outer shell of Mark's hand and curled the tips of his fingers into Mark's pulse.
They had been--eight years ago, more, the whole time they shared that dorm room--somewhat more close than was necessarily typical of roommates. Eduardo had been lanky and tactile then. He had spent many evenings with his feet in Mark's lap or with an arm hooked around Mark's shoulder while Mark steadfastly ignored him. Mark had fixated on tasks then, intent on becoming a Science Officer and determined to memorize every single fact available. They came easily to him--the classes, that is, not the boundless stretches of information--but Eduardo hadn't envied him. He'd had plans, then. His feet in Mark's lap and his dreams stretching out into a perfect future...
This touching of hands wasn't like that. Eduardo had learned to shield himself better since then. He didn't assume the best anymore. He reached out tentatively.
Mark had always been tentative.
"I'm sorry," Mark said. It erupted out of him in a quiet gush, like he had hidden it away until he couldn't anymore. "I didn't want you to--I know your father--"
Eduardo started to draw back his hand but Mark caught it, curling his fingers into Eduardo's.
"I never wanted to go without you," he said, still in that quiet eruption of truth, "I was angry--or proud, I don't know--at first but I always wanted you there. With me. And I think--I hope--I'm different now."
Eduardo was still angry, he reminded himself, but that didn't mean he couldn't leave his hand in Mark's. And if Mark being his villain meant he had to be a villain too...maybe he didn't really want villains in their story. Maybe that was assuming too many primary colors where there should be thousands of shades of color in between. Maybe they could both be a mixture of hero and villain, expert and amateur, brave and shy.
"Yeah," he agreed, "me too."
There should have been another 45 minutes left in his office hours. He scribbled a note for the door--out for coffee--and left with Mark.
It was bright daylight outside. There were students and professors milling around, coating the landscape with their crimson uniforms. It was mundane and familiar but also earth-shatteringly different. The gut-gnaw of anger had evaporated and was replaced--what had always been there, under the simmer of anger--by the old affection, albeit diluted and hardened at the edges. It was really that easy, that much of a magic trick.
Nothing was changed, but it looked slightly better.
Mark paused a step below him--oh, Eduardo realized, he had stopped and Mark was waiting--and he looked up at him, squinting against the bright sunlight.
There was this too, Eduardo (finally) admitted, that had made the simmer of anger so much worse. Mark was right: Eduardo was the type of man who stopped to admire beauty, who had to pause when the face of the man he miraculously would not stop loving was lit in the perfect way by a perfect beam of light.
It had never seemed so easy to close the gap between them, take Mark's face in his hands, and press their lips together.
Mark made soft noise against Eduardo's lips.
Eduardo really smiled then. As angry as he had been--as angry as he had tried to stay--there had always been a part of him that would have been thoroughly content to have Mark come back and say just that. Only that. Sorry and I missed you were sometimes the best balms to a broken heart.
Eduardo pulled Mark closer, wrapped his arms around his waist.
"I missed you too," he said. Mark's head sank into the crook of Eduardo's neck with a sigh.
Perhaps it had been harder to be beyond the edges of known, your thoughts flying backwards always to the best friend you hurt so badly. Perhaps it hurt Mark more to know he'd been more wrong, that Eduardo was cut deeper by him than he had ever been by anyone else, that Mark turned out to be a viper and that there wasn't anywhere else to go when you lived in your own head with yourself. Perhaps it was harder to think you'd been wrong than to know you'd been wronged. Perhaps it was harder to apologize than it was to wait for the apology.
But, more importantly, maybe it was more important that both of them had simmered and suffered and been silent for enough time. It was time for something good--finally--to be good enough to dispel the gloom. Being angry was tiring, being guilty was awful. It was as simple as that, maybe.
It wasn't perfect. Eduardo had wanted the perfect victory eight years before. He'd been planning for everything to work out like he lived in a fairy tale. It couldn't. If it hadn't been Mark, it would have been something else. Life isn't perfect. And it's better that way.
So Eduardo kissed Mark again in the bright sunlight, with the throngs of people passing around them namelessly. It wasn't like a first kiss at all--it wasn't even like a second kiss or a third. It was like a hundred kisses--and then a thousand more. It was the countless beginning of unperfect, perfectly human, mundane, flawed, stupid, beautiful everything.
***
Epilogue
"I have to go," Mark said, pulling away again.
Eduardo raised an eyebrow. "The door hasn't moved," he pointed out. "I think you know the way."
Mark leaned back in and kissed him again, somewhat more deeply than was conducive to a speedy exit.
"No, I really have to go," he said, pulling away again.
"I'm honestly not even trying to stop you," Eduardo said. "Cross my heart."
Mark leaned back in again for another kiss.
"I really--" he started to say, right up against Eduardo's lips.
"--have to go, I heard," Eduardo said.
"Dustin needs me to approve the--" Mark said and kissed Eduardo, interrupting himself, "--plans for the--" another kiss, another pause "--new tachyon--" another kiss, another pause "--ring."
"No, hang on, what's a tachyon ring?" Eduardo asked, pulling back far enough to get a decent answer.
"I didn't say that," Mark said, frowning. "Did I say that? That's not a thing."
"You definitely said that," said Eduardo.
"Stop confusing me," Mark said, pressing kisses into Eduardo's neck since Eduardo insisted on keeping his mouth occupied.
"I'm not--seriously, though, what's a tachyon ring?"
Mark sighed. "It's not a--I misspoke. It's not even--Dustin is helping me find a ring. To ask you. You know."
Eduardo really didn't know.
"A ring. You know." Mark started to blush and tried to mask it with frustration. "To pick a--so I can ask you--you're really making me say the whole damn thing, aren't you? You're going to make me say all the words in a row right now."
Eduardo grinned. "If you're not old enough to say it, you're not old enough to do it."
"Dustin is helping me find a ring so I can ask you to. You know. Marry. me," Mark said. He began with the irritated slow tones of someone who has to explain something very, very simple to someone even simpler but ended unable to make eye contact.
Eduardo made a hmmm sound. It was very non-committal.
"Would that be something...you'd be...interested in?" Mark finally asked.
"Are you asking me whether shopping with you and Dustin is my idea of fun times for an afternoon's excursion? Because, no. No, it really isn't. I have never met such indecisive men besides you two," Eduardo said, chatting easily.
"Not that part. The other part. The...marrying part." Mark moved the collar of Eduardo's shirt, avoiding making eye contact. "The marrying me part."
Eduardo grinned and kissed Mark again, one of a thousand thousand kisses he had to offer.
"It sounds like a bit of a risk," he said.
"A calculated risk," Mark pointed out.
"Yeah," Eduardo agreed. "It is. Yeah."