Unravel, Rent, Mark/Roger, PG
Title: Unravel
Fandom: Rent
Pairing: Mark/Roger
Rating: PG
Word Count: 469
Notes: For letter_love. Getting back to the angst a bit.
Mark’s falling apart at the seams, the thread that is Roger slowly unlacing a life that’s taken years to piece together form the scraps he’s found lying around the Village: a place to live, his family-friends, even the students that he tutors occasionally when money is extra tight. And then there’s Roger, the piece of his life to which all others must mesh because if it doesn’t work for Roger, it doesn’t work for him. They are a unit, now, each of them having made enough mistakes on his own only to hear the other say “I told you so” even if the words never pass his lips. Now they’re through with secrets, through with lies, through with moving independently when there are so many fewer bruises and scars when they take each step together.
Roger acts as if it’s all for his sake; after all, no matter how you measure it, his fuck ups have been greater in number and magnitude than any of Mark’s. Roger is the nuclear bomb that falls without warning, and the radioactive dust of his mistakes settles on lives miles away. But Mark has crashed his fair share of times and knows he would not have survived the mushroom cloud that appeared over his existence when he left Brown if he hadn’t had Roger’s friendship, Roger’s home, Roger’s generosity to land on as he waited for the smoke of his father’s anger to clear.
So when he sees the note traced by a finger with chipped black nail polish in the winter grime of the window, he feels the first tug of undoing.
But still, he knows she could be the best thing that ever happened to him, might allow Roger to start rebuilding the life that flew apart in a hundred different directions over the past year. April is gone, Collins is in Boston, the various members of Roger’s band have scattered across the country to continue their path to obscurity in other bars with other bands not enough people have heard of, and Roger’s mother sits at home in New Jersey, still waiting for her only son to call. To Mark, he remains tethered, but that is his last hold on this earth. Until she comes along. And Mark pushes him toward her because he knows that he’ll only be enough for so long. So Mark pushes though he can feel a thread snap free each time Roger smiles for her and not him, each time she is able to get him to do something that Mark’s been begging him to do for months, each time Roger becomes the person he used to be, the person he should be, the person he could never be with Mark-whole and independent and gone-leaving Mark to tend his own tattered edges alone.
Fandom: Rent
Pairing: Mark/Roger
Rating: PG
Word Count: 469
Notes: For letter_love. Getting back to the angst a bit.
Mark’s falling apart at the seams, the thread that is Roger slowly unlacing a life that’s taken years to piece together form the scraps he’s found lying around the Village: a place to live, his family-friends, even the students that he tutors occasionally when money is extra tight. And then there’s Roger, the piece of his life to which all others must mesh because if it doesn’t work for Roger, it doesn’t work for him. They are a unit, now, each of them having made enough mistakes on his own only to hear the other say “I told you so” even if the words never pass his lips. Now they’re through with secrets, through with lies, through with moving independently when there are so many fewer bruises and scars when they take each step together.
Roger acts as if it’s all for his sake; after all, no matter how you measure it, his fuck ups have been greater in number and magnitude than any of Mark’s. Roger is the nuclear bomb that falls without warning, and the radioactive dust of his mistakes settles on lives miles away. But Mark has crashed his fair share of times and knows he would not have survived the mushroom cloud that appeared over his existence when he left Brown if he hadn’t had Roger’s friendship, Roger’s home, Roger’s generosity to land on as he waited for the smoke of his father’s anger to clear.
So when he sees the note traced by a finger with chipped black nail polish in the winter grime of the window, he feels the first tug of undoing.
But still, he knows she could be the best thing that ever happened to him, might allow Roger to start rebuilding the life that flew apart in a hundred different directions over the past year. April is gone, Collins is in Boston, the various members of Roger’s band have scattered across the country to continue their path to obscurity in other bars with other bands not enough people have heard of, and Roger’s mother sits at home in New Jersey, still waiting for her only son to call. To Mark, he remains tethered, but that is his last hold on this earth. Until she comes along. And Mark pushes him toward her because he knows that he’ll only be enough for so long. So Mark pushes though he can feel a thread snap free each time Roger smiles for her and not him, each time she is able to get him to do something that Mark’s been begging him to do for months, each time Roger becomes the person he used to be, the person he should be, the person he could never be with Mark-whole and independent and gone-leaving Mark to tend his own tattered edges alone.