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mooging(masterpost // part one // art)
//
ii.
Eduardo's camped out in a cinema projection room. It's good, Mark thinks, turning on his heel to take it all in. It's high up, has good views of the building below and there's only one way in. There are great acoustics in the corridors outside so they'll be able to hear anything coming. There's a huge window down one wall; the room is well lit in the day, easy to keep watch from at night.
"It's great," Mark says, and Eduardo nods like he already knows.
"Thanks," he says.
These are the last words they say to each other for the next two days.
//
It's strange, Mark thinks: he's been on his own for so long now that he'd have thought the second he found someone else alive he'd have to keep talking, like using up the backlog of words in his throat. There are plenty of things people say every day that they don't need to; Mark invented a whole website for people to reach out to each other. If Mark were ever to reach out, this would be the time.
Instead, Mark finds that it's enough to look over from his sleeping bag to see Eduardo passed out in his own, enough to know that when he shakes Eduardo awake, there'll be someone keeping watch as Mark sleeps.
Eduardo's doing the smart thing, the thing that Mark should have done the moment he left the safety of his panic room. He keeps nocturnal hours, sleeping in the day when the zombies don't venture out into the sun; wakeful at night, when there's risk of attack. The hours either side of the night, the first shift into darkness, the first blush of light on the horizon, they're the worst times. They're the moments between safety and peril. They make Mark think about the man he saw turn in Palo Alto, waiting for the moment he'd rise.
There were rumours -- though where they came from, Mark has no fucking clue -- that when your fever got that high, just before you flatlined, that you knew. That you passed through the delirium and into lucidity. Mark thinks about that at the points of the day that are neither one thing nor the other, sky dark blue in change. He thinks about knowing you're living your last conscious moments, that each next breath could be the one that turns you into something else, the one that you lose yourself in. There's no way to know if this is true or not, obviously -- and it's not exactly something Mark would care to speculate on for any length of time -- but he still thinks about it.
The next thing he says, hard-edged and determined five minutes after sunrise on the second day, is: "I'd want you to kill me."
Eduardo nods, getting it. "I would."
Mark isn't sure if he could, if it were Eduardo.
//
On Mark's third evening in Lake Worth, they wake up curled right around each other, Mark's head on Eduardo's chest, Eduardo's arms around Mark's waist, their legs tangled together in the bottom of the zipped-together sleeping bags.
Mark freezes as soon as he's awake enough to notice. While his inner monologue is running something along the lines of what what what, the more collected part of him - the part that has helped him survive thus far in the zombie apocalypse, because while what what what might be a rational response to seeing people being eaten by drooling, coagulating, grey monsters, it's not exactly a helpful strategy for survival or anything - is busy realising that Eduardo's breathing is too irregular for him to be asleep. Mark's not going to move if Eduardo isn't, and Eduardo isn't pulling away, and so they lie there, listening to each other breathe, holding on to each other, and waiting for the other to be the first one to move.
//
They're caught off guard in a grocery store a few days after Mark hits Florida. They're scooping boxes of crackers, bottles of water into their backpacks, when the door bangs and there are three zombies between them and the exit. Eduardo's mouth straightens out into a hard, unfamiliar line and he pulls his handgun from the waistband of his jeans. Mark's still uncomfortable with his gun, even now, but Eduardo looks at ease with his, doesn't hesitate before going to fucking town with it. Mark doesn't have time to dwell on how disconcerting it is to see Eduardo firing a gun, just pulls his own and aims, heart pounding. Eduardo takes down one, Mark another, but the third lunges when they aren't expecting it, snapping out, snarling, and Mark gets trapped between a fridge and the zombie, straining away from its mouth.
There's an awful hot moment where Mark thinks this is it. This, right here, is how he's going to die, pressed against a broken cold cabinet with a zombie straining to get to his jugular and no way to get his gun up between them. His heart is beating jackrabbit-fast, and his palms are sweating, and his gun is slipping through his fingers, gone panic-slack. There are no matches in his pockets; there's no way for him to get purchase, to push away from the fridge, to do anything. He's craning as far back as he can but there's no more back he can go. He's going to die here, and he's going to die afraid, and he can't see Eduardo anywhere. They were making a pretty good team up till this point, Mark thinks, a little hysterical. It kind of makes sense that they'd work well together at shooting things down: they obviously sucked at building things up.
He hopes Eduardo meant it, when he said he'd kill him if --
Mark doesn't get to finish that thought. Eduardo reaches between Mark and the corpse with packing wire and forces the zombie back by the throat, and Mark's senses clear enough that he can shoot it in the fucking head, and he's shaking but he's alive.
"Thanks," he says, and his voice is shaking too. He puts the back of his hand against his mouth, swallows a couple of times, getting it back together. He'd have died, then, if it hadn't been for Eduardo. He would actually have died, and he couldn't have done anything to stop it. He fumbles his gun between his sweat-slick fingers when he tries to push it back into his jeans, and swears.
"Not yet," Eduardo says, on the other side of the aisle. His voice is steel-calm, held that way. It's how he sounded in Palo Alto, do you want to talk to me alone for a minute, determinedly steady. Mark wants to grab him, hold onto him, press his fingers against Eduardo's pulse and feel life under his hands. He wants to push Eduardo down and get his hands on all of him, vitality warm and tangible, leave fingerprints on his skin. He wants -- he doesn't know what he wants, and his breath is coming too fast, his head is spinning. He takes a breath in.
"Fuck," Mark says again, quietly, trying to zip up his rucksack over slightly too many cans, and Eduardo looks over.
"Not yet," Eduardo bites, and Mark latches onto how level his is voice like a lifeline to keep himself steady, gets to his feet.
Out of the two of them, Mark never thought he'd be the one to lose it like this. Maybe it's because he was the one cornered by the undead. Maybe Eduardo's always been the stronger one. Mark doesn't know.
But then, as soon as they're back in the projection room, Eduardo shoves Mark against the wall so hard that it forces the breath from Mark's lungs and he drops the rucksack in his hand, relieved he's already put down his gun.
"Did it bite you?" Eduardo demands, running his hands all down Mark's sides, running his eyes all over Mark like he thinks if he looks hard enough some of the blood on Mark's clothes will turn fresh. "Mark, did it fucking bite you?"
Mark grabs Eduardo's wrists, stilling his hands where they've reached Mark's hips. "Wardo, I'm fine, I'm good, I'm - "
Eduardo kisses him, all of a sudden, and Mark gives this involuntary noise, like he's been punched. He gets his hands up to Eduardo's face, hauls him in closer, touch-starved, and Eduardo yanks Mark in by his hips until there isn't an inch of them that isn't touching, adrenaline-hot. The kiss is almost savage, almost all teeth, almost too far this side of painful, nothing like Mark might have expected. At Kirkland, Mark would have expected Eduardo to be gentle, but this Eduardo is anything but.
Eduardo moves his mouth to Mark's jaw line, his neck, getting his hands up under Mark's grimy tee. People used to say that Mark wasn't the brightest emotion-recognizing crayon in the box, but he's not dim enough to fail to notice Eduardo's hands shaking when they're pressed against his skin, Eduardo desperate with his mouth on Mark's. Eduardo is losing it too, Mark thinks, and is nearly sick with relief for it, guilty and glad.
"Hey," Mark says, panting, drawing back in the little space he has. "Wardo. Wardo. I'm okay."
"Don't you fucking dare - " spits Eduardo, but he bites off the rest of whatever it was he was going to say, kisses Mark again like it's their last day on earth.
It could be. Tomorrow could be. Mark doesn't think about finite things like last if he can help it.
Eduardo is fumbling with Mark's belt, and Mark thumps his head back painfully hard against some pointy part of the projector and groans. He's hard, because it's been fucking ages, and because it's Eduardo, Eduardo dragging Mark's jeans down, Eduardo sucking hickeys onto Mark's collarbone like they are teenagers again -- but Mark gets it, the kiss, the hickeys; he gets it.
"I'm not going anywhere," he says, rough, as Eduardo gets his hand inside Mark's boxers. "Fuck - I'm not -- "
"Shut up," Eduardo tells him, fiercer than Mark's ever heard him sound. "Mark -- "
"I'm shutting up," Mark says, a little strangled, hips tilting up. "But Wardo -- don't you --" -- it's been a really long time, so if Mark doesn't last for more than a minute of this, he thinks that's probably okay if he can just get this point across first -- "don't you go anywhere either - fuck - "
Mark doesn't know how much of this is them and how much of it is survival, the last two people and the last two choices there are, but he still pulls Eduardo in, scrabbling cold fingers under the hem of his ratty t-shirt, clumsily pushing his thigh between Eduardo's legs. Eduardo makes these choked noises, slams a hand loud on the wall next to Mark's ear, braces himself and keeps working Mark with the other. Mark rocks his head back, mouth open, and cants his hips up into Eduardo's hand, thigh against Eduardo's dick, and it's over in a few rough minutes, definitely the sore side of frantic.
"Do we," Mark manages, short of breath, with Eduardo slumped against him, mouth pressed wet against the side of Mark's neck. "I mean, do we need to talk about this?"
"Let's say no," Eduardo suggests. There's nothing angry about his voice: now, he just sounds tired. He wipes his hand on Mark's jeans, but they're dirty enough now that one more stain won't make much of a difference. Mark's life is so glamorous, he thinks, and tamps down hard on the laugh that threatens with it, entirely misplaced.
Mark tugs his fly closed, turns his face in to Eduardo. "Better?" he asks, sardonic.
"Fuck off," Eduardo says, heatless, and Mark grins down into Eduardo's hair.
It's his first smile since the end of the world.
//
"Why Lake Worth?" Mark asks, as Eduardo is heating up a can of beans in the cinema office microwave one night. The power is working for a change and they've blocked out the huge projection room window with old cardboard popcorn boxes, so they can turn on the lights without making themselves too much of a living beacon. Both of them are sick of the dark. Mark finds himself staring at how different Eduardo looks under the bright strip lighting, how his face is shadowed differently this way than under the early morning sun or the dim dusk glow.
Mark used to be able to tell the time of day from the way his office was lit, the quality of the light across his keyboard, but now he just looks to Eduardo. In the midst of an unchanging, undead landscape, Mark can't keep his eyes away from life.
"What?" Eduardo asks, distracted.
"Lake Worth," Mark repeats, and watches the way Eduardo's filthy tee moves as he bends down to retrieve their forks from a rucksack pocket. "Why did you come here? You don't live here, you don't have any family here: why are you here?"
"The plane I was on couldn't make it to Miami," Eduardo tells him, matter-of-fact, and hands Mark his fork. "It landed near here instead."
"You were flying to Miami?"
Eduardo shrugs, evasive in an unfamiliar way. Mark is used to Eduardo telling him what he wants to know. Mark is not used to Eduardo keeping any of himself back.
"When?" Mark asks, instead, and Eduardo dips his head.
"Too late," he says, and Mark's throat constricts around his food, imagining it. Eduardo flying back from Singapore to his family, maybe on the last flight out, the emergency landing away from the city and Eduardo knowing what that meant.
Mark lost hope the day he sealed himself up in his panic room, but hope had never been one of his driving emotions. Mark relies on facts, on determination. He thinks about open-hearted Eduardo on a plane that never made it to his family, and goes cold.
Eduardo pulls a sleeping bag over Mark's lap, like Mark had shivered. "Lake Worth was nearest," he says. "So I stayed here."
"I had a panic room," Mark blurts, a non-sequitur. He's thinking about Eduardo eking out his life here, fighting by himself, for himself. He's thinking about you set me up, but then, these days, he thinks about that more often than he'd like.
"So did I," Eduardo tells him, a little wry. "In Singapore."
//
Another night, Mark asks if other people from the plane made it to Lake Worth.
"Yes," says Eduardo, plainly, and doesn't say anything else about it.
//
Another night, near morning, with Eduardo curled all around him under the sleeping bags like he's afraid Mark will fly apart without a border, it all tips out of Mark, what it was like in California at the end. He talks until the sun is streaming in high through the window, until his voice goes hoarse. He talks about the blood in the streets, about not knowing what's happened to Dustin, to Chris, to his family. He talks about being alone and frozen and afraid in his cold metal panic room, about things he doesn't want to admit.
"I was so scared, Wardo," he croaks, into their makeshift pillows, and feels wrung-out and uncomfortable; acutely, hotly stupid.
Eduardo kisses the back of his neck, dry and chaste. He pushes a hand through the back of Mark's hair, tells him to go to sleep, and Mark can, when Eduardo tells him, can let himself stop.
When he wakes, Eduardo is poring over Mark's stolen map of Florida and won't explain why.
//
They're scouting for fresh water at the tail end of one night, guns crossed against their chests. The first flush of the day is hitting the sky ahead of the sun. They're on edge a lot of the time now; Lake Worth might not be the most metropolitan of places, but apparently there's some kind of zombie radar that's letting all the zombies on the fucking continent know where they are. Summer is running out and the nights are getting longer, and Mark wants to know if Eduardo is worried. Obviously, Mark is worried.
"I'm not worried," he insists, as they step into a gym. Empty buildings never stop being creepy, especially not when they're horror movie dark inside.
Eduardo doesn't look at him, but Mark figures that's probably less to avoid holding his gaze than it is to make sure they're not about to get eaten, so that's fine. He's not about to quibble.
"Neither am I," Eduardo says, turning slowly around the dusty elliptical machines. "We'll be fine."
"I have serious problems with your definition of fine," says Mark, but he watches Eduardo's back as they cross into the changing rooms. "And why are we here, anyway? The water tanks aren't in the locker room, Wardo."
"No," agrees Eduardo, but he keeps going. Mark follows him, and it's been fucking months but his heart still pounds when he reaches a corner he can't see round, his hands still shake when he whips around it, gun-first. Eduardo doesn't look like he's shaking.
"That's not an answer," Mark tells him, a little petulant, and then almost walks into Eduardo's back when he stops short in front of the showers. "Wardo?"
"Yeah?"
"Why are we here?"
"Running water," Eduardo says, and his eyes are glittering when he turns back to Mark.
Mark suddenly gets it. "Oh," he says, in lieu of anything more intelligent, and then, trying to sound mildly irritated, more than he actually is: "If I get eaten because you wanted to fuck in a shower --"
"Shut up, Mark," says Eduardo, equally mildly, and reaches for Mark's belt. Mark drops his gun to the floor, gets his mouth on Eduardo's.
They strip fast and get in the little cubicle together, skin catching on the wet tiles; there's not quite enough room for them both. It's starting to light up outside but inside the gym is all shadow. Both of them are uneasy and hyped up without direct sunlight, but there's clean running fresh water right here. Mark thinks back to being the youngest billionaire in the world and having an unlimited supply of hot water entirely at his disposal. Now he looks at the working shower like it's a fucking miracle. They should probably find the water tank or something, conserve what they've found, or at least use it to shower, but Mark can't stop looking at Eduardo's tan skin turning slick under the spray, Eduardo's eyes dark as he takes hold of Mark's hips. He bites Mark's lip when they kiss, and Mark turns him round with rough, shaking hands, presses his face between Eduardo's shoulder blades. They fuck up against the wall, and Mark presses his hands against Eduardo's, their fingers splayed together, Eduardo's palms out against the cold, wet tiles.
Dressing afterwards, there's a purpling bruise dark on the join between Eduardo's neck and his shoulder, and Mark is shaking so badly he can't fasten his jeans on the first two goes.
//
They swing in and out of the arguments they should have had years ago, like the depositions had only been the first bitter, bloodless rounds and here, in this new undead world where Mark's clothes smell like copper and sweat, there is room for the bloodlust, for the teeth and fists and fury.
They argue through days, weeks, like it's as raw as it was when they were younger and vital, when sunrise wasn't the signal of safety, when nights didn't echo with the groans of the dead. Eduardo balls up his fists and swears, and Mark grits his teeth and shouts back, and it drags on, and out, and consumes them even after all this time. Mark thinks, sometimes, they're hanging on it to remind themselves that there was something other than this; sometimes, he thinks they're just hanging on.
Eduardo's angry; Mark thinks maybe Eduardo is just angry at everything now, that it's his way to cope.
"You cut me out," Eduardo is screaming at him, one night. "I was your friend and you cut me out!"
"You froze the accounts!" Mark yells back, for the hundredth time. "You wanted ads on the site! You didn't come out to California!"
"I was your friend!" Eduardo spits at him, and it would be a non-sequitur but everything about these fights follows on; it's the same hurts over and over, losing meaning. Mark thinks about Facebook less and less now, like learning to live with a limp, a physical, debilitating loss. It was part of him. It wasn't all he had, but it fucking well might have been for how it feels to be without it.
Mark misses computers. He doesn't know what Eduardo misses.
"It didn't seem like it when you sued me," Mark shoots back.
Eduardo throws up his hands, laughs loud and furious. "Yeah, and then I moved to Singapore!" he shouts, tight-faced. "Do you know what that was like?"
"Like Singapore, I imagine," Mark snaps back, facetious, angry. "But I don't imagine that's what you meant."
Eduardo snorts a little mean exhale of a noise. "No," he says, rubbing the curve of his shoulder, absent-minded. "I mean," he says, and laughs again, humourless. Mark thinks, unbidden, you had one friend. Eduardo says, "I mean, you don't know what I was like in Singapore. What I was like -- after."
Mark has always thought of Facebook as having two definable periods to its existence, even in its mass of change and redevelopment. For Facebook, there was always Before Eduardo and After Eduardo. It has never occurred to him that Eduardo might have had an After Mark. That Eduardo might have tried to move on.
Mark has never had an After Eduardo, he realises, sudden and shocked, because he has never been over Eduardo. He feels like the wind has been punched out of him. His anger comes and goes like that, these days, like the break of waves he can hear when they're falling asleep, the sea so nearby.
"But you signed the settlement," he says, emptily, like that means anything. He wants to say, young and selfish, don't be over me, but he's not twenty any more. He keeps it in, leans back against the wall.
"You signed the settlement too, Mark," Eduardo says, and looks him in the eyes. "But you still drove across the country when I called."
Mark tips his chin up, and he's tired but he doesn't back down. "Yeah," he says, defiant. "But you called me."
They stare at each other, drawn out, until the sound of something falling outside the door snaps both their gazes away, Eduardo aiming his shotgun like it's second-nature, the unthinking, reflexive way Mark used to shut off his alarm in the mornings. They wait out a long minute, but there's nothing.
Eduardo puts down his gun. "Probably just a rat," he says.
Mark breathes out, clicks the safety back on the revolver in his hand. "Probably."
They don't resume the conversation. Mark falls asleep about an hour afterwards, and half-wakes, disorientated, some unknown time later to Eduardo pulling the sleeping bags up over Mark's shoulders.
"Go back to sleep," Eduardo tells him, soft, like Mark is crashing after a two day code binge in Harvard, like nothing has changed at all, and Mark means to say something back but falls asleep before he can.
//
Neither of them ever apologises.
//
It's not like Mark never thought about kissing Eduardo, back at Harvard. It would have been easy, really, to turn at the right moment and put their mouths together, or to turn away from his laptop when Eduardo was studying on Mark's bedroom floor, come in close between Eduardo's spread legs and kiss him, get him to drop his textbook, pull Mark in by his waist. The nights Eduardo was too buzzed or too tired to go back to his own room, the nights Eduardo pressed Mark into his bed, pulling him away from his keyboard, the nights they fell asleep in the early hours on the sofa, game controllers slipping from their hands -- any of these nights, Mark could have kissed him. Maybe he wanted to kiss him.
But then there was Facebook, and there wasn't time to think about it again.
Mark had crushed it down, cowardly, and mostly it seemed almost like he could have made it up. But then, every so often, he would be brought out of a coding tear by Eduardo's hand on his shoulder and a sandwich on his keyboard, and the light would fall just so across Eduardo's open, hopeful face, and Mark would remember, and grow sour on it.
//
Mark asks Eduardo why he called him, once, and Eduardo just says, "Because I knew, if you could, you'd answer."
//
They kiss properly for the first time one dusk, sitting on the edges of their air mattresses around eight one evening, tired and wrung out even though they're just waking up. Mark is peeling with sunburn despite mostly being nocturnal these days, and his skin feels tight after sleep. Possibly he's focusing on the wrong things, if he's living a day to day life that involves killing zombies and he's still hung up on the fact that he can't lie on his back to sleep without rubbing his skin off, but whatever, Mark's a little details kind of guy.
It's so simple, finally: Mark touching Eduardo's leg to get his attention, to ask if there's after-sun or something (a long shot) and Eduardo turning in; both of them suddenly kiss-close and frozen. Mark thinks about all the times he'd turned from his computer screen in Kirkland to see Eduardo leaning over his shoulder, this distance from his mouth, and all the times he'd just turned back to the laptop. If he had a time machine, he would go back and kick his younger self in the shins.
Eduardo, always the one to give, leans in first. Maybe he's thinking about Kirkland too, Mark thinks, wildly, his hand still just above Eduardo's knee, because he stops an inch from Mark's mouth.
"I can't," he says, on a little punched-out breath that Mark feels against his own lips. "Mark, it can't be me this - " but he's cut off. Mark inhales and does it, reaches out, kisses him.
It's not a prelude to anything. It's not about anything else. Maybe this is the kiss they would have had at Kirkland, if either one of them had taken it.
Eduardo makes this terrible little sound of relief, and kisses him back, getting his hands on Mark's shoulders, the back of Mark's neck. Mark thinks of all the their time at Harvard and of Eduardo smashing his laptop. He thinks of hearing Wardo's voice, breaking across the table in the depositions and when he wasn't sure there was anyone else left, of Eduardo's face when Mark had leapt out of the SUV and Eduardo standing wet and angry in a hallway in Palo Alto. He thinks about driving three thousand miles terrified and wanting, and the way they curled into each other the first time they shared a sleeping bag, and Mark's throat burns until he finds himself crying hot and ashamed into their kiss.
Eduardo pulls back. "Hey," he says, while Mark is busy going red and trying to hide his face, "Mark, hey." He cups his hand around Mark's cheek, makes him look back. "Mark."
Mark can't look at him. He swallows, trying to get himself back together, but he's driven the width of the country, he's exhausted and wrung out and sunburned, and he aches. The undead are out there walking the fucking earth and he's sitting in a dark cinema projection booth with Eduardo, who sued him, who's still his best friend, who's pulling him in and holding him close.
People used to say when Mark Zuckerberg cried it would probably be the end of the world and now it actually is the end of the world, so, fuck it.
"All right," says Eduardo, sounding just as tired as Mark feels. "All right."
Mark hiccups, and angrily wipes his eyes. "It's not, though, is it?"
Eduardo doesn't say anything for a while after that.
//
Just after dawn, one day in early Fall, they leave their clothes under an upside-down sun-lounger and wade out into the shallows of the sea. They're ostensibly there to get themselves clean but neither of them start washing, just let the waves push and pull at the sand beneath their toes, watch the sun idle up out of the horizon, lazy pink.
The beach is long, empty, open. Mark can see all around him, if he looks. There are no corners for something to be waiting behind. It probably doesn't count as claustrophobia if you're only afraid of being enclosed with zombies, but something about small spaces makes Mark's skin itch now, like the sand sticking wet to the back of his calves will do when it dries.
It's too early for the sun to have much heat to it, but Mark relishes the touch of it on the back of his neck, the tops of his shoulders. It doesn't make him feel safe -- he hasn't felt safe for months -- but it lets something in him go, lets him breathe a little easier. He's been breathing easier since he's been here, letting himself sleep a little deeper with his back pressed against Eduardo's crossed legs, the knowledge that someone's watching over him. It's like there's only so much fear a person can live with and Mark has reached his limit, like the days alone in the panic room or the nights alone in his stolen car have edged the terror out, and there's nothing as intense to take its place.
They're waist-deep, and the waves are dawn-cold where they fold in against the tops of Mark's hips. His breath hitches with it and there are goosebumps rising on his skin.
Eduardo takes his hand, a press of palms beneath the surface of the water, and Mark jumps, comes back out of his thoughts.
"Wardo?"
Eduardo hesitates. Mark waits.
"How do you feel about the sea?" Eduardo asks. It sounds like the edge of another question, but Eduardo's not elaborating and Mark can't guess at it.
"Ambivalent?" Mark hazards, honestly, working with what he's got. He looks at Eduardo, at the way he's looking at the waves, sees a kid from Brazil growing up in Miami, sees weekends on the beach, maybe surf lessons. "You?"
"I like it," Eduardo says, in the same kind of way Mark might say he likes computers, understated, all-encompassing. He looks away from the horizon, morning blue, sea blue, and looks back at Mark. "We might have to -- "
"Yeah," says Mark, tired. "I know, Wardo. Don't -- don't say it yet, okay?"
He knows what Eduardo means though. There's no might about it. One day, there're going to be too many zombies here for them to cope with; one day, the winter nights are going to draw in and steal away the sun; one day, that day, there's going to be nowhere else to run.
Except the sea.
Mark doesn't think much of their chances of surviving that.
"There are islands off the coast," Eduardo says, perfectly level, looking out at the horizon.
"Populated islands," Mark reminds him.
"Nature preserves, too, though," says Eduardo, as mild as -- and Mark would say as mild as though they're discussing the weather but Wardo likes the weather, lets his voice go low and fired-up about it, and that's not what this is at all, deliberately dispassionate. "Like Key West. We could make it there; I've been looking at the maps."
There's a note of something in voice that hits Mark hard in his chest, a visceral, physical pang.
Eduardo sounds hopeful again.
"Well," says Mark, keeping his own voice even, "we don't have a boat."
Eduardo laughs, shifts his weight like something's lifted off his shoulders, like he'd been expecting Mark to fight him on it. He tightens his fingers around Mark's and Mark clutches back, unashamed of it.
"We could find a boat," Eduardo says. "We are in Florida." He turns to Mark, raises an eyebrow. "Up for it?"
Mark is tired, and the days are getting shorter, and Eduardo is smiling at him like he used to do, crinkly-eyed and fond. Mark's throat gets tight: embarrassed, a little angry, he has to look at the new sunlight catching on Eduardo's shoulders, can't look up at Eduardo's face.
He says, seeking out old, toneless habits, "I think that should be fairly self-evident," and Eduardo laughs again.
The sea laps up at where their forearms disappear under the waves. Mark thinks, if he's going to do this, it's probably best done on a beach. There's something unnecessarily dramatic about it. Maybe it speaks to Eduardo's unnecessarily dramatic, laptop-smashing spirit. Maybe Mark's just stalling by thinking stupid things about the sea.
"I missed you," he says, very quietly, to the water lapping at his waist. "I really missed you, Wardo."
Eduardo looks at him like he's seeing something in Mark's face that Mark is pretty sure he'd rather wasn't showing.
"I'm glad," he says, and there's an edge to it but he holds fast to Mark's hand Mark looks down at their linked fingers, the outline of their hands water-blurred, and then up at the side of Eduardo's face, the soft line of his rising smile. Good. It's good. They're good.
Eduardo says, "I missed you too," and leans over and down to kiss Mark on the cheek, a quick touch of his mouth to Mark's stubbled skin. Mark leans into it, feels the brush of Eduardo's eyelashes on the line of his cheekbone.
It's been six years since Eduardo signed the deposition settlement, six weeks since Mark found him again and six months since the end of the world, and Eduardo is holding Mark's hand under the Floridian sea.
Over Eduardo's shoulder, sunrise gives way to early morning and Mark thinks, determined: we're going to be fine.
/end/
(OPTIONAL CRACKTASTIC AND RIDICULOUS EPILOGUE)
(BEAUTIFUL ART AND EP by![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
aqualined)
//
ii.
Eduardo's camped out in a cinema projection room. It's good, Mark thinks, turning on his heel to take it all in. It's high up, has good views of the building below and there's only one way in. There are great acoustics in the corridors outside so they'll be able to hear anything coming. There's a huge window down one wall; the room is well lit in the day, easy to keep watch from at night.
"It's great," Mark says, and Eduardo nods like he already knows.
"Thanks," he says.
These are the last words they say to each other for the next two days.
//
It's strange, Mark thinks: he's been on his own for so long now that he'd have thought the second he found someone else alive he'd have to keep talking, like using up the backlog of words in his throat. There are plenty of things people say every day that they don't need to; Mark invented a whole website for people to reach out to each other. If Mark were ever to reach out, this would be the time.
Instead, Mark finds that it's enough to look over from his sleeping bag to see Eduardo passed out in his own, enough to know that when he shakes Eduardo awake, there'll be someone keeping watch as Mark sleeps.
Eduardo's doing the smart thing, the thing that Mark should have done the moment he left the safety of his panic room. He keeps nocturnal hours, sleeping in the day when the zombies don't venture out into the sun; wakeful at night, when there's risk of attack. The hours either side of the night, the first shift into darkness, the first blush of light on the horizon, they're the worst times. They're the moments between safety and peril. They make Mark think about the man he saw turn in Palo Alto, waiting for the moment he'd rise.
There were rumours -- though where they came from, Mark has no fucking clue -- that when your fever got that high, just before you flatlined, that you knew. That you passed through the delirium and into lucidity. Mark thinks about that at the points of the day that are neither one thing nor the other, sky dark blue in change. He thinks about knowing you're living your last conscious moments, that each next breath could be the one that turns you into something else, the one that you lose yourself in. There's no way to know if this is true or not, obviously -- and it's not exactly something Mark would care to speculate on for any length of time -- but he still thinks about it.
The next thing he says, hard-edged and determined five minutes after sunrise on the second day, is: "I'd want you to kill me."
Eduardo nods, getting it. "I would."
Mark isn't sure if he could, if it were Eduardo.
//
On Mark's third evening in Lake Worth, they wake up curled right around each other, Mark's head on Eduardo's chest, Eduardo's arms around Mark's waist, their legs tangled together in the bottom of the zipped-together sleeping bags.
Mark freezes as soon as he's awake enough to notice. While his inner monologue is running something along the lines of what what what, the more collected part of him - the part that has helped him survive thus far in the zombie apocalypse, because while what what what might be a rational response to seeing people being eaten by drooling, coagulating, grey monsters, it's not exactly a helpful strategy for survival or anything - is busy realising that Eduardo's breathing is too irregular for him to be asleep. Mark's not going to move if Eduardo isn't, and Eduardo isn't pulling away, and so they lie there, listening to each other breathe, holding on to each other, and waiting for the other to be the first one to move.
//
They're caught off guard in a grocery store a few days after Mark hits Florida. They're scooping boxes of crackers, bottles of water into their backpacks, when the door bangs and there are three zombies between them and the exit. Eduardo's mouth straightens out into a hard, unfamiliar line and he pulls his handgun from the waistband of his jeans. Mark's still uncomfortable with his gun, even now, but Eduardo looks at ease with his, doesn't hesitate before going to fucking town with it. Mark doesn't have time to dwell on how disconcerting it is to see Eduardo firing a gun, just pulls his own and aims, heart pounding. Eduardo takes down one, Mark another, but the third lunges when they aren't expecting it, snapping out, snarling, and Mark gets trapped between a fridge and the zombie, straining away from its mouth.
There's an awful hot moment where Mark thinks this is it. This, right here, is how he's going to die, pressed against a broken cold cabinet with a zombie straining to get to his jugular and no way to get his gun up between them. His heart is beating jackrabbit-fast, and his palms are sweating, and his gun is slipping through his fingers, gone panic-slack. There are no matches in his pockets; there's no way for him to get purchase, to push away from the fridge, to do anything. He's craning as far back as he can but there's no more back he can go. He's going to die here, and he's going to die afraid, and he can't see Eduardo anywhere. They were making a pretty good team up till this point, Mark thinks, a little hysterical. It kind of makes sense that they'd work well together at shooting things down: they obviously sucked at building things up.
He hopes Eduardo meant it, when he said he'd kill him if --
Mark doesn't get to finish that thought. Eduardo reaches between Mark and the corpse with packing wire and forces the zombie back by the throat, and Mark's senses clear enough that he can shoot it in the fucking head, and he's shaking but he's alive.
"Thanks," he says, and his voice is shaking too. He puts the back of his hand against his mouth, swallows a couple of times, getting it back together. He'd have died, then, if it hadn't been for Eduardo. He would actually have died, and he couldn't have done anything to stop it. He fumbles his gun between his sweat-slick fingers when he tries to push it back into his jeans, and swears.
"Not yet," Eduardo says, on the other side of the aisle. His voice is steel-calm, held that way. It's how he sounded in Palo Alto, do you want to talk to me alone for a minute, determinedly steady. Mark wants to grab him, hold onto him, press his fingers against Eduardo's pulse and feel life under his hands. He wants to push Eduardo down and get his hands on all of him, vitality warm and tangible, leave fingerprints on his skin. He wants -- he doesn't know what he wants, and his breath is coming too fast, his head is spinning. He takes a breath in.
"Fuck," Mark says again, quietly, trying to zip up his rucksack over slightly too many cans, and Eduardo looks over.
"Not yet," Eduardo bites, and Mark latches onto how level his is voice like a lifeline to keep himself steady, gets to his feet.
Out of the two of them, Mark never thought he'd be the one to lose it like this. Maybe it's because he was the one cornered by the undead. Maybe Eduardo's always been the stronger one. Mark doesn't know.
But then, as soon as they're back in the projection room, Eduardo shoves Mark against the wall so hard that it forces the breath from Mark's lungs and he drops the rucksack in his hand, relieved he's already put down his gun.
"Did it bite you?" Eduardo demands, running his hands all down Mark's sides, running his eyes all over Mark like he thinks if he looks hard enough some of the blood on Mark's clothes will turn fresh. "Mark, did it fucking bite you?"
Mark grabs Eduardo's wrists, stilling his hands where they've reached Mark's hips. "Wardo, I'm fine, I'm good, I'm - "
Eduardo kisses him, all of a sudden, and Mark gives this involuntary noise, like he's been punched. He gets his hands up to Eduardo's face, hauls him in closer, touch-starved, and Eduardo yanks Mark in by his hips until there isn't an inch of them that isn't touching, adrenaline-hot. The kiss is almost savage, almost all teeth, almost too far this side of painful, nothing like Mark might have expected. At Kirkland, Mark would have expected Eduardo to be gentle, but this Eduardo is anything but.
Eduardo moves his mouth to Mark's jaw line, his neck, getting his hands up under Mark's grimy tee. People used to say that Mark wasn't the brightest emotion-recognizing crayon in the box, but he's not dim enough to fail to notice Eduardo's hands shaking when they're pressed against his skin, Eduardo desperate with his mouth on Mark's. Eduardo is losing it too, Mark thinks, and is nearly sick with relief for it, guilty and glad.
"Hey," Mark says, panting, drawing back in the little space he has. "Wardo. Wardo. I'm okay."
"Don't you fucking dare - " spits Eduardo, but he bites off the rest of whatever it was he was going to say, kisses Mark again like it's their last day on earth.
It could be. Tomorrow could be. Mark doesn't think about finite things like last if he can help it.
Eduardo is fumbling with Mark's belt, and Mark thumps his head back painfully hard against some pointy part of the projector and groans. He's hard, because it's been fucking ages, and because it's Eduardo, Eduardo dragging Mark's jeans down, Eduardo sucking hickeys onto Mark's collarbone like they are teenagers again -- but Mark gets it, the kiss, the hickeys; he gets it.
"I'm not going anywhere," he says, rough, as Eduardo gets his hand inside Mark's boxers. "Fuck - I'm not -- "
"Shut up," Eduardo tells him, fiercer than Mark's ever heard him sound. "Mark -- "
"I'm shutting up," Mark says, a little strangled, hips tilting up. "But Wardo -- don't you --" -- it's been a really long time, so if Mark doesn't last for more than a minute of this, he thinks that's probably okay if he can just get this point across first -- "don't you go anywhere either - fuck - "
Mark doesn't know how much of this is them and how much of it is survival, the last two people and the last two choices there are, but he still pulls Eduardo in, scrabbling cold fingers under the hem of his ratty t-shirt, clumsily pushing his thigh between Eduardo's legs. Eduardo makes these choked noises, slams a hand loud on the wall next to Mark's ear, braces himself and keeps working Mark with the other. Mark rocks his head back, mouth open, and cants his hips up into Eduardo's hand, thigh against Eduardo's dick, and it's over in a few rough minutes, definitely the sore side of frantic.
"Do we," Mark manages, short of breath, with Eduardo slumped against him, mouth pressed wet against the side of Mark's neck. "I mean, do we need to talk about this?"
"Let's say no," Eduardo suggests. There's nothing angry about his voice: now, he just sounds tired. He wipes his hand on Mark's jeans, but they're dirty enough now that one more stain won't make much of a difference. Mark's life is so glamorous, he thinks, and tamps down hard on the laugh that threatens with it, entirely misplaced.
Mark tugs his fly closed, turns his face in to Eduardo. "Better?" he asks, sardonic.
"Fuck off," Eduardo says, heatless, and Mark grins down into Eduardo's hair.
It's his first smile since the end of the world.
//
"Why Lake Worth?" Mark asks, as Eduardo is heating up a can of beans in the cinema office microwave one night. The power is working for a change and they've blocked out the huge projection room window with old cardboard popcorn boxes, so they can turn on the lights without making themselves too much of a living beacon. Both of them are sick of the dark. Mark finds himself staring at how different Eduardo looks under the bright strip lighting, how his face is shadowed differently this way than under the early morning sun or the dim dusk glow.
Mark used to be able to tell the time of day from the way his office was lit, the quality of the light across his keyboard, but now he just looks to Eduardo. In the midst of an unchanging, undead landscape, Mark can't keep his eyes away from life.
"What?" Eduardo asks, distracted.
"Lake Worth," Mark repeats, and watches the way Eduardo's filthy tee moves as he bends down to retrieve their forks from a rucksack pocket. "Why did you come here? You don't live here, you don't have any family here: why are you here?"
"The plane I was on couldn't make it to Miami," Eduardo tells him, matter-of-fact, and hands Mark his fork. "It landed near here instead."
"You were flying to Miami?"
Eduardo shrugs, evasive in an unfamiliar way. Mark is used to Eduardo telling him what he wants to know. Mark is not used to Eduardo keeping any of himself back.
"When?" Mark asks, instead, and Eduardo dips his head.
"Too late," he says, and Mark's throat constricts around his food, imagining it. Eduardo flying back from Singapore to his family, maybe on the last flight out, the emergency landing away from the city and Eduardo knowing what that meant.
Mark lost hope the day he sealed himself up in his panic room, but hope had never been one of his driving emotions. Mark relies on facts, on determination. He thinks about open-hearted Eduardo on a plane that never made it to his family, and goes cold.
Eduardo pulls a sleeping bag over Mark's lap, like Mark had shivered. "Lake Worth was nearest," he says. "So I stayed here."
"I had a panic room," Mark blurts, a non-sequitur. He's thinking about Eduardo eking out his life here, fighting by himself, for himself. He's thinking about you set me up, but then, these days, he thinks about that more often than he'd like.
"So did I," Eduardo tells him, a little wry. "In Singapore."
//
Another night, Mark asks if other people from the plane made it to Lake Worth.
"Yes," says Eduardo, plainly, and doesn't say anything else about it.
//
Another night, near morning, with Eduardo curled all around him under the sleeping bags like he's afraid Mark will fly apart without a border, it all tips out of Mark, what it was like in California at the end. He talks until the sun is streaming in high through the window, until his voice goes hoarse. He talks about the blood in the streets, about not knowing what's happened to Dustin, to Chris, to his family. He talks about being alone and frozen and afraid in his cold metal panic room, about things he doesn't want to admit.
"I was so scared, Wardo," he croaks, into their makeshift pillows, and feels wrung-out and uncomfortable; acutely, hotly stupid.
Eduardo kisses the back of his neck, dry and chaste. He pushes a hand through the back of Mark's hair, tells him to go to sleep, and Mark can, when Eduardo tells him, can let himself stop.
When he wakes, Eduardo is poring over Mark's stolen map of Florida and won't explain why.
//
They're scouting for fresh water at the tail end of one night, guns crossed against their chests. The first flush of the day is hitting the sky ahead of the sun. They're on edge a lot of the time now; Lake Worth might not be the most metropolitan of places, but apparently there's some kind of zombie radar that's letting all the zombies on the fucking continent know where they are. Summer is running out and the nights are getting longer, and Mark wants to know if Eduardo is worried. Obviously, Mark is worried.
"I'm not worried," he insists, as they step into a gym. Empty buildings never stop being creepy, especially not when they're horror movie dark inside.
Eduardo doesn't look at him, but Mark figures that's probably less to avoid holding his gaze than it is to make sure they're not about to get eaten, so that's fine. He's not about to quibble.
"Neither am I," Eduardo says, turning slowly around the dusty elliptical machines. "We'll be fine."
"I have serious problems with your definition of fine," says Mark, but he watches Eduardo's back as they cross into the changing rooms. "And why are we here, anyway? The water tanks aren't in the locker room, Wardo."
"No," agrees Eduardo, but he keeps going. Mark follows him, and it's been fucking months but his heart still pounds when he reaches a corner he can't see round, his hands still shake when he whips around it, gun-first. Eduardo doesn't look like he's shaking.
"That's not an answer," Mark tells him, a little petulant, and then almost walks into Eduardo's back when he stops short in front of the showers. "Wardo?"
"Yeah?"
"Why are we here?"
"Running water," Eduardo says, and his eyes are glittering when he turns back to Mark.
Mark suddenly gets it. "Oh," he says, in lieu of anything more intelligent, and then, trying to sound mildly irritated, more than he actually is: "If I get eaten because you wanted to fuck in a shower --"
"Shut up, Mark," says Eduardo, equally mildly, and reaches for Mark's belt. Mark drops his gun to the floor, gets his mouth on Eduardo's.
They strip fast and get in the little cubicle together, skin catching on the wet tiles; there's not quite enough room for them both. It's starting to light up outside but inside the gym is all shadow. Both of them are uneasy and hyped up without direct sunlight, but there's clean running fresh water right here. Mark thinks back to being the youngest billionaire in the world and having an unlimited supply of hot water entirely at his disposal. Now he looks at the working shower like it's a fucking miracle. They should probably find the water tank or something, conserve what they've found, or at least use it to shower, but Mark can't stop looking at Eduardo's tan skin turning slick under the spray, Eduardo's eyes dark as he takes hold of Mark's hips. He bites Mark's lip when they kiss, and Mark turns him round with rough, shaking hands, presses his face between Eduardo's shoulder blades. They fuck up against the wall, and Mark presses his hands against Eduardo's, their fingers splayed together, Eduardo's palms out against the cold, wet tiles.
Dressing afterwards, there's a purpling bruise dark on the join between Eduardo's neck and his shoulder, and Mark is shaking so badly he can't fasten his jeans on the first two goes.
//
They swing in and out of the arguments they should have had years ago, like the depositions had only been the first bitter, bloodless rounds and here, in this new undead world where Mark's clothes smell like copper and sweat, there is room for the bloodlust, for the teeth and fists and fury.
They argue through days, weeks, like it's as raw as it was when they were younger and vital, when sunrise wasn't the signal of safety, when nights didn't echo with the groans of the dead. Eduardo balls up his fists and swears, and Mark grits his teeth and shouts back, and it drags on, and out, and consumes them even after all this time. Mark thinks, sometimes, they're hanging on it to remind themselves that there was something other than this; sometimes, he thinks they're just hanging on.
Eduardo's angry; Mark thinks maybe Eduardo is just angry at everything now, that it's his way to cope.
"You cut me out," Eduardo is screaming at him, one night. "I was your friend and you cut me out!"
"You froze the accounts!" Mark yells back, for the hundredth time. "You wanted ads on the site! You didn't come out to California!"
"I was your friend!" Eduardo spits at him, and it would be a non-sequitur but everything about these fights follows on; it's the same hurts over and over, losing meaning. Mark thinks about Facebook less and less now, like learning to live with a limp, a physical, debilitating loss. It was part of him. It wasn't all he had, but it fucking well might have been for how it feels to be without it.
Mark misses computers. He doesn't know what Eduardo misses.
"It didn't seem like it when you sued me," Mark shoots back.
Eduardo throws up his hands, laughs loud and furious. "Yeah, and then I moved to Singapore!" he shouts, tight-faced. "Do you know what that was like?"
"Like Singapore, I imagine," Mark snaps back, facetious, angry. "But I don't imagine that's what you meant."
Eduardo snorts a little mean exhale of a noise. "No," he says, rubbing the curve of his shoulder, absent-minded. "I mean," he says, and laughs again, humourless. Mark thinks, unbidden, you had one friend. Eduardo says, "I mean, you don't know what I was like in Singapore. What I was like -- after."
Mark has always thought of Facebook as having two definable periods to its existence, even in its mass of change and redevelopment. For Facebook, there was always Before Eduardo and After Eduardo. It has never occurred to him that Eduardo might have had an After Mark. That Eduardo might have tried to move on.
Mark has never had an After Eduardo, he realises, sudden and shocked, because he has never been over Eduardo. He feels like the wind has been punched out of him. His anger comes and goes like that, these days, like the break of waves he can hear when they're falling asleep, the sea so nearby.
"But you signed the settlement," he says, emptily, like that means anything. He wants to say, young and selfish, don't be over me, but he's not twenty any more. He keeps it in, leans back against the wall.
"You signed the settlement too, Mark," Eduardo says, and looks him in the eyes. "But you still drove across the country when I called."
Mark tips his chin up, and he's tired but he doesn't back down. "Yeah," he says, defiant. "But you called me."
They stare at each other, drawn out, until the sound of something falling outside the door snaps both their gazes away, Eduardo aiming his shotgun like it's second-nature, the unthinking, reflexive way Mark used to shut off his alarm in the mornings. They wait out a long minute, but there's nothing.
Eduardo puts down his gun. "Probably just a rat," he says.
Mark breathes out, clicks the safety back on the revolver in his hand. "Probably."
They don't resume the conversation. Mark falls asleep about an hour afterwards, and half-wakes, disorientated, some unknown time later to Eduardo pulling the sleeping bags up over Mark's shoulders.
"Go back to sleep," Eduardo tells him, soft, like Mark is crashing after a two day code binge in Harvard, like nothing has changed at all, and Mark means to say something back but falls asleep before he can.
//
Neither of them ever apologises.
//
It's not like Mark never thought about kissing Eduardo, back at Harvard. It would have been easy, really, to turn at the right moment and put their mouths together, or to turn away from his laptop when Eduardo was studying on Mark's bedroom floor, come in close between Eduardo's spread legs and kiss him, get him to drop his textbook, pull Mark in by his waist. The nights Eduardo was too buzzed or too tired to go back to his own room, the nights Eduardo pressed Mark into his bed, pulling him away from his keyboard, the nights they fell asleep in the early hours on the sofa, game controllers slipping from their hands -- any of these nights, Mark could have kissed him. Maybe he wanted to kiss him.
But then there was Facebook, and there wasn't time to think about it again.
Mark had crushed it down, cowardly, and mostly it seemed almost like he could have made it up. But then, every so often, he would be brought out of a coding tear by Eduardo's hand on his shoulder and a sandwich on his keyboard, and the light would fall just so across Eduardo's open, hopeful face, and Mark would remember, and grow sour on it.
//
Mark asks Eduardo why he called him, once, and Eduardo just says, "Because I knew, if you could, you'd answer."
//
They kiss properly for the first time one dusk, sitting on the edges of their air mattresses around eight one evening, tired and wrung out even though they're just waking up. Mark is peeling with sunburn despite mostly being nocturnal these days, and his skin feels tight after sleep. Possibly he's focusing on the wrong things, if he's living a day to day life that involves killing zombies and he's still hung up on the fact that he can't lie on his back to sleep without rubbing his skin off, but whatever, Mark's a little details kind of guy.
It's so simple, finally: Mark touching Eduardo's leg to get his attention, to ask if there's after-sun or something (a long shot) and Eduardo turning in; both of them suddenly kiss-close and frozen. Mark thinks about all the times he'd turned from his computer screen in Kirkland to see Eduardo leaning over his shoulder, this distance from his mouth, and all the times he'd just turned back to the laptop. If he had a time machine, he would go back and kick his younger self in the shins.
Eduardo, always the one to give, leans in first. Maybe he's thinking about Kirkland too, Mark thinks, wildly, his hand still just above Eduardo's knee, because he stops an inch from Mark's mouth.
"I can't," he says, on a little punched-out breath that Mark feels against his own lips. "Mark, it can't be me this - " but he's cut off. Mark inhales and does it, reaches out, kisses him.
It's not a prelude to anything. It's not about anything else. Maybe this is the kiss they would have had at Kirkland, if either one of them had taken it.
Eduardo makes this terrible little sound of relief, and kisses him back, getting his hands on Mark's shoulders, the back of Mark's neck. Mark thinks of all the their time at Harvard and of Eduardo smashing his laptop. He thinks of hearing Wardo's voice, breaking across the table in the depositions and when he wasn't sure there was anyone else left, of Eduardo's face when Mark had leapt out of the SUV and Eduardo standing wet and angry in a hallway in Palo Alto. He thinks about driving three thousand miles terrified and wanting, and the way they curled into each other the first time they shared a sleeping bag, and Mark's throat burns until he finds himself crying hot and ashamed into their kiss.
Eduardo pulls back. "Hey," he says, while Mark is busy going red and trying to hide his face, "Mark, hey." He cups his hand around Mark's cheek, makes him look back. "Mark."
Mark can't look at him. He swallows, trying to get himself back together, but he's driven the width of the country, he's exhausted and wrung out and sunburned, and he aches. The undead are out there walking the fucking earth and he's sitting in a dark cinema projection booth with Eduardo, who sued him, who's still his best friend, who's pulling him in and holding him close.
People used to say when Mark Zuckerberg cried it would probably be the end of the world and now it actually is the end of the world, so, fuck it.
"All right," says Eduardo, sounding just as tired as Mark feels. "All right."
Mark hiccups, and angrily wipes his eyes. "It's not, though, is it?"
Eduardo doesn't say anything for a while after that.
//
Just after dawn, one day in early Fall, they leave their clothes under an upside-down sun-lounger and wade out into the shallows of the sea. They're ostensibly there to get themselves clean but neither of them start washing, just let the waves push and pull at the sand beneath their toes, watch the sun idle up out of the horizon, lazy pink.
The beach is long, empty, open. Mark can see all around him, if he looks. There are no corners for something to be waiting behind. It probably doesn't count as claustrophobia if you're only afraid of being enclosed with zombies, but something about small spaces makes Mark's skin itch now, like the sand sticking wet to the back of his calves will do when it dries.
It's too early for the sun to have much heat to it, but Mark relishes the touch of it on the back of his neck, the tops of his shoulders. It doesn't make him feel safe -- he hasn't felt safe for months -- but it lets something in him go, lets him breathe a little easier. He's been breathing easier since he's been here, letting himself sleep a little deeper with his back pressed against Eduardo's crossed legs, the knowledge that someone's watching over him. It's like there's only so much fear a person can live with and Mark has reached his limit, like the days alone in the panic room or the nights alone in his stolen car have edged the terror out, and there's nothing as intense to take its place.
They're waist-deep, and the waves are dawn-cold where they fold in against the tops of Mark's hips. His breath hitches with it and there are goosebumps rising on his skin.
Eduardo takes his hand, a press of palms beneath the surface of the water, and Mark jumps, comes back out of his thoughts.
"Wardo?"
Eduardo hesitates. Mark waits.
"How do you feel about the sea?" Eduardo asks. It sounds like the edge of another question, but Eduardo's not elaborating and Mark can't guess at it.
"Ambivalent?" Mark hazards, honestly, working with what he's got. He looks at Eduardo, at the way he's looking at the waves, sees a kid from Brazil growing up in Miami, sees weekends on the beach, maybe surf lessons. "You?"
"I like it," Eduardo says, in the same kind of way Mark might say he likes computers, understated, all-encompassing. He looks away from the horizon, morning blue, sea blue, and looks back at Mark. "We might have to -- "
"Yeah," says Mark, tired. "I know, Wardo. Don't -- don't say it yet, okay?"
He knows what Eduardo means though. There's no might about it. One day, there're going to be too many zombies here for them to cope with; one day, the winter nights are going to draw in and steal away the sun; one day, that day, there's going to be nowhere else to run.
Except the sea.
Mark doesn't think much of their chances of surviving that.
"There are islands off the coast," Eduardo says, perfectly level, looking out at the horizon.
"Populated islands," Mark reminds him.
"Nature preserves, too, though," says Eduardo, as mild as -- and Mark would say as mild as though they're discussing the weather but Wardo likes the weather, lets his voice go low and fired-up about it, and that's not what this is at all, deliberately dispassionate. "Like Key West. We could make it there; I've been looking at the maps."
There's a note of something in voice that hits Mark hard in his chest, a visceral, physical pang.
Eduardo sounds hopeful again.
"Well," says Mark, keeping his own voice even, "we don't have a boat."
Eduardo laughs, shifts his weight like something's lifted off his shoulders, like he'd been expecting Mark to fight him on it. He tightens his fingers around Mark's and Mark clutches back, unashamed of it.
"We could find a boat," Eduardo says. "We are in Florida." He turns to Mark, raises an eyebrow. "Up for it?"
Mark is tired, and the days are getting shorter, and Eduardo is smiling at him like he used to do, crinkly-eyed and fond. Mark's throat gets tight: embarrassed, a little angry, he has to look at the new sunlight catching on Eduardo's shoulders, can't look up at Eduardo's face.
He says, seeking out old, toneless habits, "I think that should be fairly self-evident," and Eduardo laughs again.
The sea laps up at where their forearms disappear under the waves. Mark thinks, if he's going to do this, it's probably best done on a beach. There's something unnecessarily dramatic about it. Maybe it speaks to Eduardo's unnecessarily dramatic, laptop-smashing spirit. Maybe Mark's just stalling by thinking stupid things about the sea.
"I missed you," he says, very quietly, to the water lapping at his waist. "I really missed you, Wardo."
Eduardo looks at him like he's seeing something in Mark's face that Mark is pretty sure he'd rather wasn't showing.
"I'm glad," he says, and there's an edge to it but he holds fast to Mark's hand Mark looks down at their linked fingers, the outline of their hands water-blurred, and then up at the side of Eduardo's face, the soft line of his rising smile. Good. It's good. They're good.
Eduardo says, "I missed you too," and leans over and down to kiss Mark on the cheek, a quick touch of his mouth to Mark's stubbled skin. Mark leans into it, feels the brush of Eduardo's eyelashes on the line of his cheekbone.
It's been six years since Eduardo signed the deposition settlement, six weeks since Mark found him again and six months since the end of the world, and Eduardo is holding Mark's hand under the Floridian sea.
Over Eduardo's shoulder, sunrise gives way to early morning and Mark thinks, determined: we're going to be fine.
/end/
(OPTIONAL CRACKTASTIC AND RIDICULOUS EPILOGUE)
(BEAUTIFUL ART AND EP by
aqualined)
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2012-09-04 08:55 pm (UTC)so like basically i had this fic open in a tab for the past two weeks, but i kept not reading it because i knew it was going to be sad and i only want happiness and true love and shit for mark and eduardo, but finally i buckled and read this and a;lsdkjf a;sldkfjas; ldkfja; slkjf;asldkjf IT HURTS SO GOOD. i love how they were still them, how their codependency hasn't really dwindled at all, how they still fight over facebook even though it's so far from being something that matters at all anymore. i love the feeling of inevitable sadness and death, and i love that even though the sadness was there, this fic had so much underlying hope. i just-- ugh-- so good.
A+++++++++++
I LOVED IT.