Fic: How One Thing Leads to Another, A Story of Coincidence [The Social Network][1/2]
Title: How One Thing Leads to Another, A Story of Coincidence
Fandom: The Social Network
Characters/Pairings: Mark/Eduardo, OC
Summary: At 42, Eduardo Saverin has three things to his name: a plane ticket, one half of a formerly conjugal bank account, and a list.
Word Count: 11,380
Notes: Written for this prompt over at the mark_eduardo prompt fest. Or, it's not until they have a lot more life experience and altogether different priorities that Mark and Eduardo are able to reconcile.
I wonder what it's like to write short fic. It must be nice. /rolls over
[read @ AO3]
i.
There's a checklist.
It's not written down, or prioritized, or even consciously acknowledged, like so much of Eduardo's daily routine is, but it exists. It makes itself known whenever he needs to add something to it, or when something is satisfyingly crossed off.
At any given time, it probably looks a little something like this:
1. become more successful than parents
2. go skydiving. everyone should try skydiving at least once.
3. go to New Orleans for Mardi Gras (this was actually one of Dustin's lingering desires, and its place on the list mostly just serves as a memorial, as Eduardo would probably feel incredibly skeevy going now)
4. surprise Moira with a trip to Paris
5. kiss her at the top of the Eiffel Tower, because she is your wife and it doesn't matter where you are, you want her to know she's the only thing you truly NEED
6. have a burger at In-and-Out
7. be a better father than yours was
Etc, etc, and so forth.
Basically, it is Eduardo's bucket list.
Everyone's got one of those, right?
ii.
At midnight, in a city Eduardo's never been to before and won't be here long enough to properly appreciate (which depresses him, even after all this time -- what's the point of coming all this way, to somebody else's soil, if he doesn't get to see it? It's like saying, oh, sure, I've been there, beautiful place, when all you've ever done is gone from one end of the airport to the other) he checks off an item from his bucket list that is either #15 or #16, depending on if he's willing to admit that one about blacklisting First National Bank is really there.
There's an employee standing across the aisle, and she keeps eyeballing him as she sticker-tapes price labels onto plastic-wrapped classic board games, slowly lining them up on their shelves. She doesn't come over, only settles for the occasional disapproving look, and Eduardo's fairly certain that the people who work at Wal*Mart have to be blessed with the patience of a Catholic saint (it's the Catholics who have saints, right? He could never keep those straight.)
But, as these things go, there are only three good places to have a cathartic breakdown: in your own home; in your therapist's tastefully-decorated office, where you're at least promised a steady supply of tissues should you start crying; and in the middle of a Wal*Mart at a strange hour of the night, trying on every single hat on the rack because why not, you're a human being and you've worked your ass off to get this far in life and so if all you want to do is try on all those hats and see what you look like, well, you go, honey.
He's got a green-and-white scarf wrapped around his neck and is just pulling a wide-brim gardening hat on his head, complete with complimentary green ribbon, when he notices a girl standing at the end of the aisle, watching him curiously.
Eduardo turns to her, putting a hand on his hip and asking her, "Well? What do you think?"
There's probably some universal rule that men over a certain age should never approach little girls to whom they are not related, but this one just mirrors his hand-on-hip stance and appraises him with the openness of someone who's been protected from those kinds of stories.
She's just a kid, old enough to be in school and young enough that she probably doesn't hate it yet, with shoes that light up when she stomps her way over to him and a flashy belt so tiny that it probably wouldn't even go around one of Eduardo's thighs. There's no one else nearby, which makes Eduardo's pulse spike with worry.
"It's not a good look on you," she says decisively, and holds out her hand for the hat.
So they work their way back down the rack, Eduardo modeling each one of the hats for her while she taps her chin and looks thoughtful and tells him to tilt his head this way or that, plainly lost in the pretend fashion-designer role she's made for herself. She winds up with a scarf of her own, pink with sequined edges, carelessly tossed over one shoulder and almost dangling to the floor. She favors the bigger, showy bowler caps and pirate hats -- personally, Eduardo's kind of fond of them too. They make him feel adventurous, like the kind of guy who goes out and completes all the things on his bucket list, even the little things, like:
15/16. do something weird in a Wal*Mart and stop caring what people think of you for awhile.
"Excellent choice," he tells her, sweeping the latest one from his head (it's even got a pheasant feather -- perfect for sweeping) and taking a bow.
"I know," she says sagely, as if this is her due.
She's black, her hair pulled back into two low ponytails and her part zig-zagging crookedly in a way that might be intentional, but probably isn't; it looks too similar to the few, futile times he tried to part Lydia's hair in a straight line when she was little. When she studies him, he sees that her eyes are more on the blue side than brown, which, combined with the shape of her face, tells him that (like him) she's probably mixed-race.
At some point, just as Eduardo's stomach is starting to knot at the idea that nobody knows where their child has gotten off to and it's midnight, this is not a good combination of circumstances at all, a loud, jingling ring comes from one of her pockets. She fishes out a phone more complicated than Eduardo's earliest desktop set-up and taps at the screen, putting it to her ear with an impatient "hello?"
She meets Eduardo's gaze and rolls her eyes at whatever's being demanded of her from the other end. "You told me to go play!"
"I didn't mean all the way across the store!" Eduardo hears loud and clear, even standing all the way over here.
He smiles, setting the last hat -- a pinstripe newsie -- back on the rack.
"Well, be more specific next time!" the girl says with an expressive huff. And, "Fine. Geez."
She pulls her phone away from her ear, tapping at it again and giving Eduardo a sorely put-upon look. "Thanks for not letting me get kidnapped by anyone, mister," she tells him, making Eduardo blink -- had he really been hovering that protectively? "Bye!"
She ducks sideways, out into the aisle, and Eduardo leans out over the top of the display to remind her that she's still wearing the pink scarf and she should probably give it back, and finds himself face-to-face with Mark Zuckerberg, who is rounding the corner that very second.
The words die in his throat.
Mark (it's always Mark in his head, though out loud he says Zuckerberg right along with the rest of the world, and just Zuck after the third gin-and-tonic) is greyer and less Photoshopped-looking than the last magazine article Eduardo saw him in; curls not quite coiling up thick enough to hide the way he's balding on top, his goatee more salt-and-pepper up close, and the utter thunderstruck expression on his face is not his most attractive look. He has a bag from the in-store Taco Bell in one hand, and a plastic camera slung on a strap over his shoulder, one of the toy ones that makes convincing noises but doesn't actually take pictures, as pink and glitter-studded as the girl who fits in at his side, tucking her hand into his with the heavy, long-suffering look of someone with a newly-applied ankle monitor.
"Hi," goes Eduardo, kneejerk. He steps out from behind the rack of hats. "Hey, hello," he adds, for no real reason. And then -- because while Eduardo's list of contacts is long enough that he has, in fact, unexpectedly run into acquaintances in airports on foreign soil before, it's never happened in the middle of store on foreign soil before, the world is not that small -- "What are you doing here?"
Mark holds up the bag of Taco Bell. "Chalupas," he goes, flat. "This is the closest Taco Bell for miles."
"And I wanted churros!" the girl adds, and stretches up, making grabby hands for the food. The movement sends the sequins of her scarf cascading off one shoulder, and she catches it and goes, "oh!"
Scarf outstretched, she comes back to Eduardo, who ducks down to her level out of instinct and lets her wrap the scarf around his neck, where the satiny fabric settles against the knit green-and-white one he's already wearing, the price tags dangling off to one side.
"What about you?" goes Mark stiltedly, when she returns to him.
He reaches out with one hand, catching her head against his palm and tugging her in, instinctive, the way parents do when they need to reassure themselves after their children have disappeared on them. Eduardo can see the resemblance now; it's in their thin eyes, their cheekbones, the way they pull their shoulders back.
He blinks some, still crouched down, and then holds up the scarves.
"Bucket list," he answers.
This startles Mark into smiling, seemingly without any permission from his brain -- a spastic twitch at the corners of his mouth. "You ..." he says slowly, the smile making his voice come out warmer. "You came to Wal*Mart to try on scarves because it was on your bucket list?"
Eduardo opens his mouth to add, and to not care what people think while doing it, because that was more the bucket list part. It's harder than he thought; Eduardo never wanted to live in a world where nobody cared what anybody else was thinking. He's not that kind of person. It sounds like a very lonely existence, to not care. (And besides, the first thing he'd done was turn around and ask Mark Zuckerberg's daughter for her opinion, so he's not sure if he can cross #15/16 off yet.)
But before he can say anything, the girl interrupts, easily, like she's sure of the attention, "And hats! We were trying on hats, too."
This distracts Mark, who looks down at her, a reproving furrow to his eyebrows. "Why were you trying on hats with strangers?"
"Because stasistically --" and neither of them correct her pronunciation of the word. "-- I am more likely to be kidnapped and sold to the circus by someone I know, so it's safer for me to talk to strangers."
"What even --" Mark tugs on one of her ponytails. "Your logic is a little flawed there," he tells her, his tone as dry as bone.
"Dad," she goes, shaking him off and speaking slowly, like she's trying to be reasonable. "I'm almost ten. That means I'll have two digits in my age, just like you and Mom and everybody else, so maybe you should start treating me like everybody else."
"I don't think so." He sounds amused.
She turns her head and widens her eyes at Eduardo, all, can you believe this guy?
He grins back at her, double-wrapped in scarves and trying his hardest not to look like someone who kidnaps girls in nifty light-up shoes and sells them to the circus.
"You're in luck," he tells her. "I'm not someone you know, but nor am I a stranger. I'm Eduardo, and I went to school with your dad."
In his peripheral, he catches a glimpse of Mark's responding smile, quick and fleeting, because that's the identifier Eduardo uses to describe the two of them, Eduardo-and-Mark, even now; not we started a company together, not I sued him for control of everything but we settled out of court and then I was politely told to disappear, but rather, we went to school together, like that's the most important way of looking at it, the most important thing to remember.
She nods, accepting this in stride, and then she asks solemnly, "Did he snore then, too?"
"Alicia!" says Mark, startled, and the name pings familiarly in the back of Eduardo's mind. He knew that already, read it somewhere and tucked it into his brain for safe-keeping, but didn't remember until right this second. Alicia Zuckerberg, born at the height of the wartime economic boom; around the time that Eduardo and Moira had moved into their last house, the ranch-style with the swingset in the back that Lydia had been so excited about.
"No," he tells her, a grin spreading. "No, the snoring must be a recent development."
"Oh my god," he hears faintly from somewhere above their heads.
"My name's Alicia," she tells him approvingly. "But I call myself Desarae for short."
Eduardo blinks, not quite sure how you get Desarae out of Alicia, but a quick glance up at Mark's face tells him this is a frequent occurrence, like maybe she tries on fashionable names the same way she had Eduardo change hats.
"Pleased to meet you," he tells her gamely. "You have excellent fashion sense. I don't know how I would have gotten on without you."
"I like pretty things," she volunteers, shrugging her shoulders. Her idea of pretty seems to primarily include anything that's pink and covered in a sparkly veneer, but that's okay; he's pretty sure the second part of that statement includes, and I like telling people what to do.
"Do you want a ride?" Mark offers, cutting right over them.
Eduardo looks up at him, startled, half-expecting Mark to be talking to someone else entirely, because that's an absurd thing to hear out of anybody you meet in a Wal*Mart, regardless of how you previously knew them. But no, Mark's looking right at him. He's wearing a pair of cargo pants, the kind with enough pockets that he's probably carrying Waldo, Carmen Sandiego, and the Lindberg baby without anyone being the wiser, but they're an old pair; the hems are frayed where he's walked on them, and his wallet has worn a square, white outline of itself onto his back pocket after many years of being tucked into the same spot.
"Umm," Eduardo goes, because he got here via cab, and isn't sure he remembers how to get back to his hotel, or even where, exactly, his hotel is.
Alicia-Desarae looks equally nonplussed, blinking upwards, owlish.
"We'll need to stop at home first, of course," Mark continues, and catches the back of his daughter's shirt, reining her in again. "It'll probably be out of the way, but somebody here is already out way past her curfew."
She really has that eye-roll down pat, Eduardo will give her that.
"Does he do that a lot?" he asks her in an exaggerated undertone.
It's her turn to look at him with that undisguised impatience. Like she has to say it more often than she likes, she rattles off, "I get my full servings of fruits and vegetables, I get plenty of sleep every night, I am never left home alone, and I do not play video games that aren't appropriate for my age group. This is a treat. Us being here is a treat. Don't you have treats?"
Eduardo holds up his hands in acquiescence, glancing up at Mark, who looks completely unruffled by the fact he has his offspring trained to offer evidence on command that she is being raised properly, all of which Eduardo already knows: it's in Alicia's attitude and the way she holds herself like she's sure of the support behind her. He'd always known that while Mark is absolute crap at taking care of himself, he never neglects the things that are most important to him.
"A ride would be great," he manages.
Mark's lips twitch at the corners, the closest to a smile he's willing to give. When he sidles past, close enough that Eduardo catches the smell of aftershave and fast food, he plucks up one of the hats -- a dark brown bowler, with a little Irish flag cheerily pinned to the brim -- and drops it onto Eduardo's head.
"If you've come all this way to do the bucket list thing, you should at least get some kind of touristy memorabilia to remember it by," he goes, and bares his teeth.
iii.
This is what Eduardo knows about Mark Zuckerberg.
Founder and CEO of Facebook, he's one of the richest, most privileged men in the world, with all the arrogance to match, and a long, long time ago, he had a best friend named Eduardo Saverin.
There isn't a lot of evidence of this, no easy paper trail that proves one boy met another boy and became friends, because they didn't share the same dorm, didn't have any of the same classes, didn't join the same clubs (with the exception of AEPi, but Eduardo doubts the reliability of their records; he's pretty sure they spelled his name Edwardo on everything) and before he came to California and signed the kind of business contracts that no twenty-year-old even dreams of signing, the only way his name and Mark Zuckerberg's were linked was in a very strange, scathing article in the school newspaper involving a chicken.
But they were friends, up until Facebook happened and Eduardo Saverin was left alone in his apartment in New York, breathing slowly, the ash of one relationship in the trash can and phone to his ear, unable to do anything but listen as Sean Parker of all fucking people did exactly what Eduardo could not; he got them the money.
Eduardo can't define a certain moment where their friendship began, but he knows where it ended; over the phone, with the entire length of a country between them.
There'd been some stuff after that, of course; a semester-long lie of I need my CFO, a stab in the back, depositions and a quiet settlement and a lifelong distrust of written contracts, but that was the moment Eduardo figured out that their friendship had fractured beyond repair.
It wasn't until many years later, standing behind Moira with a bowl of soup in his hand, looking over her shoulder at the profile of her client and wondering out loud, "why do they keep this guy in such a powerful position? He's contributed absolutely nothing of substance and at this point, it looks like he's more harm than help," that he finally found himself on the outside of what happened, and thought, oh, as the last of the rage fell away. It's not a matter of apologizing and forgiving, not really -- that's what you do when you bump into someone at the airport and knock their coffee out of their hands -- but rather of just doing other things, until you turn around and the memory doesn't loom at you like it's going to consume you. Until you and the memory are okay with each other.
Sometimes Eduardo feels weird to be part of the generation that remembers a time before Facebook, when most everybody he works with these days takes it for granted, like it's always been around.
Mark went on to make himself a walking Guinness World Record, becoming richer even faster than he would have if he'd tripped over a Persian Gulf's worth of oil.
Weirdly enough, it's his money that makes him such an endless source of fascination to other people, Eduardo included. The average person works hard to earn enough to keep themselves on the right side of comfortable, and even in the business world, where it is very strongly go big or go home, they put their heads down and they mutter quietly if you've got yourself a billion-dollar evaluation before you've got grey in your hair -- even Eduardo, who arguably cheated to get his share of fortune with that lawsuit (nobody believes he filed it for any other reason than the money, and it's not worth the effort anymore to keep correcting the assumption,) was thirty-five before he hit the billionaire mark.
Go cry some more, right?
But when you're Mark Zuckerberg, and you become that rich, that young, while most people your age are still trying to contemplate a job that doesn't involve the words do you want fries with that?, then what else is there? What is there left to do?
You are rich, you are famous, you are successful; what next?
Apparently, if you're Mark, your lasting legacy is this:
You spend money like water, like it's as breathable as air and you never have to worry about running out. When you're not working to the bone for your company and playing pretend at business like you have the faintest idea what you're doing, you focus your attention on everything that nobody else has the time for, because if you with all your money cannot bring yourself to care, then who will?
Around the time you are able to consume alcohol -- legally -- you steal Sean Parker's girlfriend right out from under him, a Victoria's Secret model named Cara (can you hear the echo of Eduardo's vindictive pleasure at that, even through the years?) You date her like you mean it, like you're serious, like you're not a billionaire with a model girlfriend and one of you is always the other's accessory. When, a surprising amount of time later, she breaks up with you in a fairly dramatic fashion (Eduardo remembers reading about it in the back of the company car, fingering glossy magazine pages and feeling like maybe he should make the driver stop for popcorn or something,) then you turn around and you marry the woman you love instead.
Mazel tov.
She's a US soldier, with cornrows twisted artfully on top of her head and a serpent earring anchored by a gauge through her earlobe and creeping up the cartilage, and your wedding is lavish, held in Nigeria with all her extended family -- you look incredibly awkward in all your wedding photos, and she's taller than you when she wears heels. The two of you have a daughter, who is demanding because she is spoiled and confident because she is loved, and she adores the color pink and telling other people what to do, and the two of you go to Wal*Mart to get a midnight snack at Taco Bell because you can.
You are Mark Zuckerberg, and your life is printed out in magazines and books and on the Internet for anyone to pick up at any point, and when you retire, many many years from now -- you will probably aim for another world record for how long one person can conceivably be CEO of a company, because that's the kind of thing you do -- then Facebook will go to your chairman, a willowy, hard-eyed woman named Ashleigh, who, like you, was put on academic probation in college and dropped out before her sentence was complete (Sean's fault, of course -- always with the underage sorority girls.) She's one of the few interns who started with Facebook that you haven't managed to drive off; she's outlasted Chris Hughes and Andrew McCallum and even Dustin Moskovitz. She runs the Palo Alto office now, and she will be CEO when you are finished.
Eduardo met her, twice. (Technically, three times: she held the front door open for him when he stalked out of the Facebook offices, security on his heels, but he hadn't really been paying attention then.) The last time, she knocked back a flute of champagne, wiped at the line of her mouth with a knuckle, and told him that Mark was probably training his spawn to be CEO instead.
"I'd be angrier about it, but he's been using her as a shield at press conferences since she was six and 'none of your business' was her favorite thing to say," her smile crept across her mouth, genuine.
And Eduardo, who knows what it's like when fathers seriously train their children to be their successors, brought her another flute of champagne. "To children in the workplace, big and small," he offered, making Ashleigh smirk, and they touched glasses.
He's been patiently living Mark's life through other people and the interviews he finds in the back pages of newspapers for so long that it's jarring, following him and Alicia-Desarae-whatever out of the store.
They cross the semi-empty parking lot, Mark still carrying his daughter's plastic camera by the strap and her dogging his heels, munching happily on her churros (Eduardo's fairly sure they aren't supposed to crunch like that.)
"Oh," she goes abruptly, like she's just remembering. "Thank you, Dad."
Mark glances over his shoulder, mouth pulled to one side in amusement. Eduardo trails behind them, his brand-new cheap felt bowler cap perched at a jaunty angle on top of his head. "She says when she's almost reached the bottom of the bag," Mark comments, dry.
Crunch, replies Alicia-Desarae, making a face at him. Cinnamon and sugar coat the ends of her fingers.
Where a lifestyle of expensive alcohol and good dinners has broadened Eduardo's waist and given him a thickness to carry around the belly ("have you thought about suspenders, sweetheart?" Moira had asked him innocently, outside court, and Eduardo made upset noises at her, even though there are so many worse things she could have said. He's only 42, he's not ready to graduate from using belts -- which he doesn't really need, either, to be honest, but he feels like if he wears them still, it'll somehow give the impression that his pants will slide off his hips any moment,) Mark seems to have gone in the opposite direction.
He's lost all the babyish padding Eduardo remembers from the college freshman, along with most of his muscle mass, leaving a skinny someone who might appear diminished if you hadn't seen him snort down interviewers like they weren't worth his time. If he was taller, Eduardo would call him a scarecrow, but as is, he looks at this middle-aged man, and it's easy to see the ghost of Harvard Mark and the premonition of the spindly, broomstick senior he will be, another thirty years down the line.
Alicia-Desarae gets shotgun as soon as they reach the car, climbing into the left-side passenger seat like it doesn't occur to her that she could possibly sit anywhere else, leaving Eduardo to shuffle into the backseat like he's going to jail.
From the front, Mark passes a chalupa back to him from the Taco Bell bag, saying, "I don't even know if you like these."
"I feel like I'm insulting the entire country of Mexico and their idea of cuisine by even thinking about eating this," Eduardo remarks, weighing the chalupa in his palm the way people do with newborn babies when they have no idea how to hold them.
"Why?" goes Alicia-Desarae curiously, simultaneous with Mark's, "well, see if I ever offer you my hard-earned food again."
Ignoring Mark, Eduardo answers the little girl, "This bears absolutely no resemblance to a real chalupa, or anything Mexican, really."
"But I don't eat it because it's Mexican," she retorts, twisting around in her seat to face him and earning a snappy, hey, seatbelt! I will be very upset if you go through the windshield from Mark. "I eat it because it's tasty."
Eduardo can't really argue with that one, and with a quiet mental apology to everybody south of the Rio Grande, he sinks back to eat, not realizing until the smell of cheese and sour cream hits his nose that he hasn't really eaten since the plane. Never mind that he has eaten chalupas that were arguably more authentic, growing up on the fringes of Miami's largest immigrant neighborhood -- at this moment in time, it's the best damn thing he's ever eaten.
He crunches away at the shell as they drive. It's rained recently, and the car goes hissing across slick roads, its windows fogging along the edges and the night-time colors pulled a shade darker with damp. Up front, Mark and Alicia-Desarae bicker quietly about somebody Eduardo doesn't know.
They pass his hotel, actually; he recognizes the front facade with a surprised jolt, all decadent old marble, the name unfolding across it in curling cursive script.
He doesn't say anything, obstinately because his mouth is full of food at the opportune moment to tell Mark he needs to take a left, but also because he's curious. You don't meet former friends in foreign cities every day.
As if reading his mind, Mark's eyes catch his in the rearview mirror. "Why are you in Dublin?" he asks.
Eduardo swallows his last mouthful of food and answers, "Business." He doesn't know what to do with the wrapper, so he just crumples it into his fist and holds onto it, and then corrects himself with the more honest answer, "Divorce."
Both are true; this trip has been in his calendar for awhile, and tomorrow (later today) he's going to have to talk to a bunch of local suits about economic forecasting and smile through his jetlag and sleep deprivation. But it hadn't felt necessary until two days ago, standing next to Moira in divorce court, the both of them carrying separate, thick manilla envelopes. They'd even been smiling at each other, Eduardo remembers, because by that point relief at breaking their long stalemate had made them more amicable than anything else. She was going to keep his last name, she told him, because Moira's the kind of person who doesn't quail from the decisions she made, up to and especially her marriage. (Although he's fairly certain the fact she didn't want to go back to her maiden name of Seaman probably had something to do with it.)
This lasted until the filing clerk responsible for getting them out of there hit a long sequence of keys and then smiled up at them, saying, "There! All done! It's a good thing the two of you didn't have any children, or this all could have taken a lot longer."
Moira twisted away, as jerkily as if she had been slapped. It remains, to this day, one of the worst things anyone had ever said to Eduardo, including it was probably a diversity thing, and he's paying a hundred thousand more than you asked for, Mr. Saverin, provided you sign a nondisclosure agreement, and do you know Lydia's favorite kind of waffle, Ed? I was thinking about it this morning and I just couldn't remember.
"Technically," he says, voice directed at the passing landscape. "The house is hers, so I needed to move anyway, but we're both execs working with the same kinds of venture capitals, so the likelihood that I'll run into her no matter where I go makes it feel like she's kept the entire country."
Mark snorts, and Alicia-Desarae cranes her neck around to look at him again. "What's her name?" she asks curiously. "Your wife?"
"It's Moira."
She brightens. "That's my mom's --"
Noticing the immediate discomfort that blanches across Mark's face, Eduardo talks over her. "What about you guys? Why are you Dublin?"
She huffs, and Mark answers, "Because it's more convenient to live and work where our headquarters are than try to run it from our private island in the Philippines," so dryly that Eduardo can't tell if he's joking or not. Almost without pause, he continues, this time to Alicia-Desarae, "and don't think I didn't see that. Here," he pushes himself up in his seat a little bit to dig in one of his many pockets, producing a Kleenex seemingly by summoning it and handing it over. "Blow your nose, and stop wiping it on your sleeve. This is why we invented modern civilization."
Eduardo, who distinctly remembers Mark always wiping his running nose on the cuffs of his sweatshirts, stifles a laugh into the back of his fist.
"I think it's because you have a complex," Alicia-Desarae says to him confidently. "You think that because you're rich and can do it, you should move to the opposite side of the globe from where your responsibilities are. It's the most rebellious you'll allow yourself to be, since you can't actually, like, disappear. At least," she adds as they roll to a stop at a streetlight and Mark takes the opportunity to turn his head slowly and stare at her. The confidence wavers a little bit. "That's what Mr. Moskovitz says."
Eduardo can't help it this time -- he barks laughter.
Sounding mildly amused, Mark says, "You can call him Dustin, honey."
"I know!" she goes, with full knowledge of how precocious she sounds. "But he likes Mr. Moskovitz better. Says he likes pretending at least one person respects him."
Mark's eyes snap to Eduardo's again in the rearview, and they share identical grins.
"Yeah, that would be a first," Mark goes sarcastically.
Floating at the bottom of Eduardo's list, hazy and nebulous with all the desires he's willing to forget for long periods of time, one comes floating back to the surface, clearly etched in his mind's eye.
24. Make Mark smile again. You know which one.
part two -->
Fandom: The Social Network
Characters/Pairings: Mark/Eduardo, OC
Summary: At 42, Eduardo Saverin has three things to his name: a plane ticket, one half of a formerly conjugal bank account, and a list.
Word Count: 11,380
Notes: Written for this prompt over at the mark_eduardo prompt fest. Or, it's not until they have a lot more life experience and altogether different priorities that Mark and Eduardo are able to reconcile.
I wonder what it's like to write short fic. It must be nice. /rolls over
[read @ AO3]
i.
There's a checklist.
It's not written down, or prioritized, or even consciously acknowledged, like so much of Eduardo's daily routine is, but it exists. It makes itself known whenever he needs to add something to it, or when something is satisfyingly crossed off.
At any given time, it probably looks a little something like this:
1. become more successful than parents
2. go skydiving. everyone should try skydiving at least once.
3. go to New Orleans for Mardi Gras (this was actually one of Dustin's lingering desires, and its place on the list mostly just serves as a memorial, as Eduardo would probably feel incredibly skeevy going now)
4. surprise Moira with a trip to Paris
5. kiss her at the top of the Eiffel Tower, because she is your wife and it doesn't matter where you are, you want her to know she's the only thing you truly NEED
6. have a burger at In-and-Out
7. be a better father than yours was
Etc, etc, and so forth.
Basically, it is Eduardo's bucket list.
Everyone's got one of those, right?
ii.
At midnight, in a city Eduardo's never been to before and won't be here long enough to properly appreciate (which depresses him, even after all this time -- what's the point of coming all this way, to somebody else's soil, if he doesn't get to see it? It's like saying, oh, sure, I've been there, beautiful place, when all you've ever done is gone from one end of the airport to the other) he checks off an item from his bucket list that is either #15 or #16, depending on if he's willing to admit that one about blacklisting First National Bank is really there.
There's an employee standing across the aisle, and she keeps eyeballing him as she sticker-tapes price labels onto plastic-wrapped classic board games, slowly lining them up on their shelves. She doesn't come over, only settles for the occasional disapproving look, and Eduardo's fairly certain that the people who work at Wal*Mart have to be blessed with the patience of a Catholic saint (it's the Catholics who have saints, right? He could never keep those straight.)
But, as these things go, there are only three good places to have a cathartic breakdown: in your own home; in your therapist's tastefully-decorated office, where you're at least promised a steady supply of tissues should you start crying; and in the middle of a Wal*Mart at a strange hour of the night, trying on every single hat on the rack because why not, you're a human being and you've worked your ass off to get this far in life and so if all you want to do is try on all those hats and see what you look like, well, you go, honey.
He's got a green-and-white scarf wrapped around his neck and is just pulling a wide-brim gardening hat on his head, complete with complimentary green ribbon, when he notices a girl standing at the end of the aisle, watching him curiously.
Eduardo turns to her, putting a hand on his hip and asking her, "Well? What do you think?"
There's probably some universal rule that men over a certain age should never approach little girls to whom they are not related, but this one just mirrors his hand-on-hip stance and appraises him with the openness of someone who's been protected from those kinds of stories.
She's just a kid, old enough to be in school and young enough that she probably doesn't hate it yet, with shoes that light up when she stomps her way over to him and a flashy belt so tiny that it probably wouldn't even go around one of Eduardo's thighs. There's no one else nearby, which makes Eduardo's pulse spike with worry.
"It's not a good look on you," she says decisively, and holds out her hand for the hat.
So they work their way back down the rack, Eduardo modeling each one of the hats for her while she taps her chin and looks thoughtful and tells him to tilt his head this way or that, plainly lost in the pretend fashion-designer role she's made for herself. She winds up with a scarf of her own, pink with sequined edges, carelessly tossed over one shoulder and almost dangling to the floor. She favors the bigger, showy bowler caps and pirate hats -- personally, Eduardo's kind of fond of them too. They make him feel adventurous, like the kind of guy who goes out and completes all the things on his bucket list, even the little things, like:
15/16. do something weird in a Wal*Mart and stop caring what people think of you for awhile.
"Excellent choice," he tells her, sweeping the latest one from his head (it's even got a pheasant feather -- perfect for sweeping) and taking a bow.
"I know," she says sagely, as if this is her due.
She's black, her hair pulled back into two low ponytails and her part zig-zagging crookedly in a way that might be intentional, but probably isn't; it looks too similar to the few, futile times he tried to part Lydia's hair in a straight line when she was little. When she studies him, he sees that her eyes are more on the blue side than brown, which, combined with the shape of her face, tells him that (like him) she's probably mixed-race.
At some point, just as Eduardo's stomach is starting to knot at the idea that nobody knows where their child has gotten off to and it's midnight, this is not a good combination of circumstances at all, a loud, jingling ring comes from one of her pockets. She fishes out a phone more complicated than Eduardo's earliest desktop set-up and taps at the screen, putting it to her ear with an impatient "hello?"
She meets Eduardo's gaze and rolls her eyes at whatever's being demanded of her from the other end. "You told me to go play!"
"I didn't mean all the way across the store!" Eduardo hears loud and clear, even standing all the way over here.
He smiles, setting the last hat -- a pinstripe newsie -- back on the rack.
"Well, be more specific next time!" the girl says with an expressive huff. And, "Fine. Geez."
She pulls her phone away from her ear, tapping at it again and giving Eduardo a sorely put-upon look. "Thanks for not letting me get kidnapped by anyone, mister," she tells him, making Eduardo blink -- had he really been hovering that protectively? "Bye!"
She ducks sideways, out into the aisle, and Eduardo leans out over the top of the display to remind her that she's still wearing the pink scarf and she should probably give it back, and finds himself face-to-face with Mark Zuckerberg, who is rounding the corner that very second.
The words die in his throat.
Mark (it's always Mark in his head, though out loud he says Zuckerberg right along with the rest of the world, and just Zuck after the third gin-and-tonic) is greyer and less Photoshopped-looking than the last magazine article Eduardo saw him in; curls not quite coiling up thick enough to hide the way he's balding on top, his goatee more salt-and-pepper up close, and the utter thunderstruck expression on his face is not his most attractive look. He has a bag from the in-store Taco Bell in one hand, and a plastic camera slung on a strap over his shoulder, one of the toy ones that makes convincing noises but doesn't actually take pictures, as pink and glitter-studded as the girl who fits in at his side, tucking her hand into his with the heavy, long-suffering look of someone with a newly-applied ankle monitor.
"Hi," goes Eduardo, kneejerk. He steps out from behind the rack of hats. "Hey, hello," he adds, for no real reason. And then -- because while Eduardo's list of contacts is long enough that he has, in fact, unexpectedly run into acquaintances in airports on foreign soil before, it's never happened in the middle of store on foreign soil before, the world is not that small -- "What are you doing here?"
Mark holds up the bag of Taco Bell. "Chalupas," he goes, flat. "This is the closest Taco Bell for miles."
"And I wanted churros!" the girl adds, and stretches up, making grabby hands for the food. The movement sends the sequins of her scarf cascading off one shoulder, and she catches it and goes, "oh!"
Scarf outstretched, she comes back to Eduardo, who ducks down to her level out of instinct and lets her wrap the scarf around his neck, where the satiny fabric settles against the knit green-and-white one he's already wearing, the price tags dangling off to one side.
"What about you?" goes Mark stiltedly, when she returns to him.
He reaches out with one hand, catching her head against his palm and tugging her in, instinctive, the way parents do when they need to reassure themselves after their children have disappeared on them. Eduardo can see the resemblance now; it's in their thin eyes, their cheekbones, the way they pull their shoulders back.
He blinks some, still crouched down, and then holds up the scarves.
"Bucket list," he answers.
This startles Mark into smiling, seemingly without any permission from his brain -- a spastic twitch at the corners of his mouth. "You ..." he says slowly, the smile making his voice come out warmer. "You came to Wal*Mart to try on scarves because it was on your bucket list?"
Eduardo opens his mouth to add, and to not care what people think while doing it, because that was more the bucket list part. It's harder than he thought; Eduardo never wanted to live in a world where nobody cared what anybody else was thinking. He's not that kind of person. It sounds like a very lonely existence, to not care. (And besides, the first thing he'd done was turn around and ask Mark Zuckerberg's daughter for her opinion, so he's not sure if he can cross #15/16 off yet.)
But before he can say anything, the girl interrupts, easily, like she's sure of the attention, "And hats! We were trying on hats, too."
This distracts Mark, who looks down at her, a reproving furrow to his eyebrows. "Why were you trying on hats with strangers?"
"Because stasistically --" and neither of them correct her pronunciation of the word. "-- I am more likely to be kidnapped and sold to the circus by someone I know, so it's safer for me to talk to strangers."
"What even --" Mark tugs on one of her ponytails. "Your logic is a little flawed there," he tells her, his tone as dry as bone.
"Dad," she goes, shaking him off and speaking slowly, like she's trying to be reasonable. "I'm almost ten. That means I'll have two digits in my age, just like you and Mom and everybody else, so maybe you should start treating me like everybody else."
"I don't think so." He sounds amused.
She turns her head and widens her eyes at Eduardo, all, can you believe this guy?
He grins back at her, double-wrapped in scarves and trying his hardest not to look like someone who kidnaps girls in nifty light-up shoes and sells them to the circus.
"You're in luck," he tells her. "I'm not someone you know, but nor am I a stranger. I'm Eduardo, and I went to school with your dad."
In his peripheral, he catches a glimpse of Mark's responding smile, quick and fleeting, because that's the identifier Eduardo uses to describe the two of them, Eduardo-and-Mark, even now; not we started a company together, not I sued him for control of everything but we settled out of court and then I was politely told to disappear, but rather, we went to school together, like that's the most important way of looking at it, the most important thing to remember.
She nods, accepting this in stride, and then she asks solemnly, "Did he snore then, too?"
"Alicia!" says Mark, startled, and the name pings familiarly in the back of Eduardo's mind. He knew that already, read it somewhere and tucked it into his brain for safe-keeping, but didn't remember until right this second. Alicia Zuckerberg, born at the height of the wartime economic boom; around the time that Eduardo and Moira had moved into their last house, the ranch-style with the swingset in the back that Lydia had been so excited about.
"No," he tells her, a grin spreading. "No, the snoring must be a recent development."
"Oh my god," he hears faintly from somewhere above their heads.
"My name's Alicia," she tells him approvingly. "But I call myself Desarae for short."
Eduardo blinks, not quite sure how you get Desarae out of Alicia, but a quick glance up at Mark's face tells him this is a frequent occurrence, like maybe she tries on fashionable names the same way she had Eduardo change hats.
"Pleased to meet you," he tells her gamely. "You have excellent fashion sense. I don't know how I would have gotten on without you."
"I like pretty things," she volunteers, shrugging her shoulders. Her idea of pretty seems to primarily include anything that's pink and covered in a sparkly veneer, but that's okay; he's pretty sure the second part of that statement includes, and I like telling people what to do.
"Do you want a ride?" Mark offers, cutting right over them.
Eduardo looks up at him, startled, half-expecting Mark to be talking to someone else entirely, because that's an absurd thing to hear out of anybody you meet in a Wal*Mart, regardless of how you previously knew them. But no, Mark's looking right at him. He's wearing a pair of cargo pants, the kind with enough pockets that he's probably carrying Waldo, Carmen Sandiego, and the Lindberg baby without anyone being the wiser, but they're an old pair; the hems are frayed where he's walked on them, and his wallet has worn a square, white outline of itself onto his back pocket after many years of being tucked into the same spot.
"Umm," Eduardo goes, because he got here via cab, and isn't sure he remembers how to get back to his hotel, or even where, exactly, his hotel is.
Alicia-Desarae looks equally nonplussed, blinking upwards, owlish.
"We'll need to stop at home first, of course," Mark continues, and catches the back of his daughter's shirt, reining her in again. "It'll probably be out of the way, but somebody here is already out way past her curfew."
She really has that eye-roll down pat, Eduardo will give her that.
"Does he do that a lot?" he asks her in an exaggerated undertone.
It's her turn to look at him with that undisguised impatience. Like she has to say it more often than she likes, she rattles off, "I get my full servings of fruits and vegetables, I get plenty of sleep every night, I am never left home alone, and I do not play video games that aren't appropriate for my age group. This is a treat. Us being here is a treat. Don't you have treats?"
Eduardo holds up his hands in acquiescence, glancing up at Mark, who looks completely unruffled by the fact he has his offspring trained to offer evidence on command that she is being raised properly, all of which Eduardo already knows: it's in Alicia's attitude and the way she holds herself like she's sure of the support behind her. He'd always known that while Mark is absolute crap at taking care of himself, he never neglects the things that are most important to him.
"A ride would be great," he manages.
Mark's lips twitch at the corners, the closest to a smile he's willing to give. When he sidles past, close enough that Eduardo catches the smell of aftershave and fast food, he plucks up one of the hats -- a dark brown bowler, with a little Irish flag cheerily pinned to the brim -- and drops it onto Eduardo's head.
"If you've come all this way to do the bucket list thing, you should at least get some kind of touristy memorabilia to remember it by," he goes, and bares his teeth.
iii.
This is what Eduardo knows about Mark Zuckerberg.
Founder and CEO of Facebook, he's one of the richest, most privileged men in the world, with all the arrogance to match, and a long, long time ago, he had a best friend named Eduardo Saverin.
There isn't a lot of evidence of this, no easy paper trail that proves one boy met another boy and became friends, because they didn't share the same dorm, didn't have any of the same classes, didn't join the same clubs (with the exception of AEPi, but Eduardo doubts the reliability of their records; he's pretty sure they spelled his name Edwardo on everything) and before he came to California and signed the kind of business contracts that no twenty-year-old even dreams of signing, the only way his name and Mark Zuckerberg's were linked was in a very strange, scathing article in the school newspaper involving a chicken.
But they were friends, up until Facebook happened and Eduardo Saverin was left alone in his apartment in New York, breathing slowly, the ash of one relationship in the trash can and phone to his ear, unable to do anything but listen as Sean Parker of all fucking people did exactly what Eduardo could not; he got them the money.
Eduardo can't define a certain moment where their friendship began, but he knows where it ended; over the phone, with the entire length of a country between them.
There'd been some stuff after that, of course; a semester-long lie of I need my CFO, a stab in the back, depositions and a quiet settlement and a lifelong distrust of written contracts, but that was the moment Eduardo figured out that their friendship had fractured beyond repair.
It wasn't until many years later, standing behind Moira with a bowl of soup in his hand, looking over her shoulder at the profile of her client and wondering out loud, "why do they keep this guy in such a powerful position? He's contributed absolutely nothing of substance and at this point, it looks like he's more harm than help," that he finally found himself on the outside of what happened, and thought, oh, as the last of the rage fell away. It's not a matter of apologizing and forgiving, not really -- that's what you do when you bump into someone at the airport and knock their coffee out of their hands -- but rather of just doing other things, until you turn around and the memory doesn't loom at you like it's going to consume you. Until you and the memory are okay with each other.
Sometimes Eduardo feels weird to be part of the generation that remembers a time before Facebook, when most everybody he works with these days takes it for granted, like it's always been around.
Mark went on to make himself a walking Guinness World Record, becoming richer even faster than he would have if he'd tripped over a Persian Gulf's worth of oil.
Weirdly enough, it's his money that makes him such an endless source of fascination to other people, Eduardo included. The average person works hard to earn enough to keep themselves on the right side of comfortable, and even in the business world, where it is very strongly go big or go home, they put their heads down and they mutter quietly if you've got yourself a billion-dollar evaluation before you've got grey in your hair -- even Eduardo, who arguably cheated to get his share of fortune with that lawsuit (nobody believes he filed it for any other reason than the money, and it's not worth the effort anymore to keep correcting the assumption,) was thirty-five before he hit the billionaire mark.
Go cry some more, right?
But when you're Mark Zuckerberg, and you become that rich, that young, while most people your age are still trying to contemplate a job that doesn't involve the words do you want fries with that?, then what else is there? What is there left to do?
You are rich, you are famous, you are successful; what next?
Apparently, if you're Mark, your lasting legacy is this:
You spend money like water, like it's as breathable as air and you never have to worry about running out. When you're not working to the bone for your company and playing pretend at business like you have the faintest idea what you're doing, you focus your attention on everything that nobody else has the time for, because if you with all your money cannot bring yourself to care, then who will?
Around the time you are able to consume alcohol -- legally -- you steal Sean Parker's girlfriend right out from under him, a Victoria's Secret model named Cara (can you hear the echo of Eduardo's vindictive pleasure at that, even through the years?) You date her like you mean it, like you're serious, like you're not a billionaire with a model girlfriend and one of you is always the other's accessory. When, a surprising amount of time later, she breaks up with you in a fairly dramatic fashion (Eduardo remembers reading about it in the back of the company car, fingering glossy magazine pages and feeling like maybe he should make the driver stop for popcorn or something,) then you turn around and you marry the woman you love instead.
Mazel tov.
She's a US soldier, with cornrows twisted artfully on top of her head and a serpent earring anchored by a gauge through her earlobe and creeping up the cartilage, and your wedding is lavish, held in Nigeria with all her extended family -- you look incredibly awkward in all your wedding photos, and she's taller than you when she wears heels. The two of you have a daughter, who is demanding because she is spoiled and confident because she is loved, and she adores the color pink and telling other people what to do, and the two of you go to Wal*Mart to get a midnight snack at Taco Bell because you can.
You are Mark Zuckerberg, and your life is printed out in magazines and books and on the Internet for anyone to pick up at any point, and when you retire, many many years from now -- you will probably aim for another world record for how long one person can conceivably be CEO of a company, because that's the kind of thing you do -- then Facebook will go to your chairman, a willowy, hard-eyed woman named Ashleigh, who, like you, was put on academic probation in college and dropped out before her sentence was complete (Sean's fault, of course -- always with the underage sorority girls.) She's one of the few interns who started with Facebook that you haven't managed to drive off; she's outlasted Chris Hughes and Andrew McCallum and even Dustin Moskovitz. She runs the Palo Alto office now, and she will be CEO when you are finished.
Eduardo met her, twice. (Technically, three times: she held the front door open for him when he stalked out of the Facebook offices, security on his heels, but he hadn't really been paying attention then.) The last time, she knocked back a flute of champagne, wiped at the line of her mouth with a knuckle, and told him that Mark was probably training his spawn to be CEO instead.
"I'd be angrier about it, but he's been using her as a shield at press conferences since she was six and 'none of your business' was her favorite thing to say," her smile crept across her mouth, genuine.
And Eduardo, who knows what it's like when fathers seriously train their children to be their successors, brought her another flute of champagne. "To children in the workplace, big and small," he offered, making Ashleigh smirk, and they touched glasses.
He's been patiently living Mark's life through other people and the interviews he finds in the back pages of newspapers for so long that it's jarring, following him and Alicia-Desarae-whatever out of the store.
They cross the semi-empty parking lot, Mark still carrying his daughter's plastic camera by the strap and her dogging his heels, munching happily on her churros (Eduardo's fairly sure they aren't supposed to crunch like that.)
"Oh," she goes abruptly, like she's just remembering. "Thank you, Dad."
Mark glances over his shoulder, mouth pulled to one side in amusement. Eduardo trails behind them, his brand-new cheap felt bowler cap perched at a jaunty angle on top of his head. "She says when she's almost reached the bottom of the bag," Mark comments, dry.
Crunch, replies Alicia-Desarae, making a face at him. Cinnamon and sugar coat the ends of her fingers.
Where a lifestyle of expensive alcohol and good dinners has broadened Eduardo's waist and given him a thickness to carry around the belly ("have you thought about suspenders, sweetheart?" Moira had asked him innocently, outside court, and Eduardo made upset noises at her, even though there are so many worse things she could have said. He's only 42, he's not ready to graduate from using belts -- which he doesn't really need, either, to be honest, but he feels like if he wears them still, it'll somehow give the impression that his pants will slide off his hips any moment,) Mark seems to have gone in the opposite direction.
He's lost all the babyish padding Eduardo remembers from the college freshman, along with most of his muscle mass, leaving a skinny someone who might appear diminished if you hadn't seen him snort down interviewers like they weren't worth his time. If he was taller, Eduardo would call him a scarecrow, but as is, he looks at this middle-aged man, and it's easy to see the ghost of Harvard Mark and the premonition of the spindly, broomstick senior he will be, another thirty years down the line.
Alicia-Desarae gets shotgun as soon as they reach the car, climbing into the left-side passenger seat like it doesn't occur to her that she could possibly sit anywhere else, leaving Eduardo to shuffle into the backseat like he's going to jail.
From the front, Mark passes a chalupa back to him from the Taco Bell bag, saying, "I don't even know if you like these."
"I feel like I'm insulting the entire country of Mexico and their idea of cuisine by even thinking about eating this," Eduardo remarks, weighing the chalupa in his palm the way people do with newborn babies when they have no idea how to hold them.
"Why?" goes Alicia-Desarae curiously, simultaneous with Mark's, "well, see if I ever offer you my hard-earned food again."
Ignoring Mark, Eduardo answers the little girl, "This bears absolutely no resemblance to a real chalupa, or anything Mexican, really."
"But I don't eat it because it's Mexican," she retorts, twisting around in her seat to face him and earning a snappy, hey, seatbelt! I will be very upset if you go through the windshield from Mark. "I eat it because it's tasty."
Eduardo can't really argue with that one, and with a quiet mental apology to everybody south of the Rio Grande, he sinks back to eat, not realizing until the smell of cheese and sour cream hits his nose that he hasn't really eaten since the plane. Never mind that he has eaten chalupas that were arguably more authentic, growing up on the fringes of Miami's largest immigrant neighborhood -- at this moment in time, it's the best damn thing he's ever eaten.
He crunches away at the shell as they drive. It's rained recently, and the car goes hissing across slick roads, its windows fogging along the edges and the night-time colors pulled a shade darker with damp. Up front, Mark and Alicia-Desarae bicker quietly about somebody Eduardo doesn't know.
They pass his hotel, actually; he recognizes the front facade with a surprised jolt, all decadent old marble, the name unfolding across it in curling cursive script.
He doesn't say anything, obstinately because his mouth is full of food at the opportune moment to tell Mark he needs to take a left, but also because he's curious. You don't meet former friends in foreign cities every day.
As if reading his mind, Mark's eyes catch his in the rearview mirror. "Why are you in Dublin?" he asks.
Eduardo swallows his last mouthful of food and answers, "Business." He doesn't know what to do with the wrapper, so he just crumples it into his fist and holds onto it, and then corrects himself with the more honest answer, "Divorce."
Both are true; this trip has been in his calendar for awhile, and tomorrow (later today) he's going to have to talk to a bunch of local suits about economic forecasting and smile through his jetlag and sleep deprivation. But it hadn't felt necessary until two days ago, standing next to Moira in divorce court, the both of them carrying separate, thick manilla envelopes. They'd even been smiling at each other, Eduardo remembers, because by that point relief at breaking their long stalemate had made them more amicable than anything else. She was going to keep his last name, she told him, because Moira's the kind of person who doesn't quail from the decisions she made, up to and especially her marriage. (Although he's fairly certain the fact she didn't want to go back to her maiden name of Seaman probably had something to do with it.)
This lasted until the filing clerk responsible for getting them out of there hit a long sequence of keys and then smiled up at them, saying, "There! All done! It's a good thing the two of you didn't have any children, or this all could have taken a lot longer."
Moira twisted away, as jerkily as if she had been slapped. It remains, to this day, one of the worst things anyone had ever said to Eduardo, including it was probably a diversity thing, and he's paying a hundred thousand more than you asked for, Mr. Saverin, provided you sign a nondisclosure agreement, and do you know Lydia's favorite kind of waffle, Ed? I was thinking about it this morning and I just couldn't remember.
"Technically," he says, voice directed at the passing landscape. "The house is hers, so I needed to move anyway, but we're both execs working with the same kinds of venture capitals, so the likelihood that I'll run into her no matter where I go makes it feel like she's kept the entire country."
Mark snorts, and Alicia-Desarae cranes her neck around to look at him again. "What's her name?" she asks curiously. "Your wife?"
"It's Moira."
She brightens. "That's my mom's --"
Noticing the immediate discomfort that blanches across Mark's face, Eduardo talks over her. "What about you guys? Why are you Dublin?"
She huffs, and Mark answers, "Because it's more convenient to live and work where our headquarters are than try to run it from our private island in the Philippines," so dryly that Eduardo can't tell if he's joking or not. Almost without pause, he continues, this time to Alicia-Desarae, "and don't think I didn't see that. Here," he pushes himself up in his seat a little bit to dig in one of his many pockets, producing a Kleenex seemingly by summoning it and handing it over. "Blow your nose, and stop wiping it on your sleeve. This is why we invented modern civilization."
Eduardo, who distinctly remembers Mark always wiping his running nose on the cuffs of his sweatshirts, stifles a laugh into the back of his fist.
"I think it's because you have a complex," Alicia-Desarae says to him confidently. "You think that because you're rich and can do it, you should move to the opposite side of the globe from where your responsibilities are. It's the most rebellious you'll allow yourself to be, since you can't actually, like, disappear. At least," she adds as they roll to a stop at a streetlight and Mark takes the opportunity to turn his head slowly and stare at her. The confidence wavers a little bit. "That's what Mr. Moskovitz says."
Eduardo can't help it this time -- he barks laughter.
Sounding mildly amused, Mark says, "You can call him Dustin, honey."
"I know!" she goes, with full knowledge of how precocious she sounds. "But he likes Mr. Moskovitz better. Says he likes pretending at least one person respects him."
Mark's eyes snap to Eduardo's again in the rearview, and they share identical grins.
"Yeah, that would be a first," Mark goes sarcastically.
Floating at the bottom of Eduardo's list, hazy and nebulous with all the desires he's willing to forget for long periods of time, one comes floating back to the surface, clearly etched in his mind's eye.
24. Make Mark smile again. You know which one.
part two -->