March Madness, Day 8, Rent, Mark/Roger
Fandom: Rent
Pairing: Mark/Roger, but really quite gen
Rating: PG
Word Count: 622
Notes: Gen fluff!
Mark's humming as he rifles through the piles on the desk in the corner. He isn't looking at the papers, and he doesn't throw any way. He just rearranges them, sets one on top of the other, thinks better of it, then switches them back. He'll carefully make sure all the papers are lined up perfectly in new stacks. And then he'll walk around very satisfied with himself for the rest of the afternoon.
This is what Mark calls cleaning.
Roger watches the affair from his perch in the window seat, a smile on his lips, a cup of coffee in his hands, and thinks if he didn't love him so much, he'd probably up and kill him one of these days.
"You do recognize the futility of this exercise," Roger says after watching Mark move the same sheet of hideously green paper for the fourth time.
The humming stops, and Mark slowly turns around, his eyes on the paper as if he's reading it. "What?"
"I've been watching you do this for almost forty-five minutes. And as entertaining as it is for me, I'm really wondering why you bother."
Mark frowns as if he's going to come up with a really great logical excuse, then stops and shrugs with a crooked grin. "What else is there to do?"
"Have you tried actually throwing some of that shit away?"
Mark shrugs again. "Most of it isn't mine. Some of it's Maureen's, some of it's Collins's...."
It's been almost three full years since someone else lived with them. Still the loft echoes with memories and displays scars from previous inhabitants. Maureen broke the buzzer the night she ditched Mark at a bar and returned at four only to find she had forgotten her key. Mark had decided not to let her back up, and he and Roger spent the next two hours drinking and listening to her cuss them out through the intercom. Benny had plastered the posters from Roger's gigs all over the walls, absolutely thrilled that he knew someone who was practically famous. The torn curtains that separated the bedrooms from the main living area came from Collins, who took them from his aunt's house who in turn had taken them from the house she used to clean once she decided she was through cleaning other people's houses for good. The couch Roger and Mark rescued from the curb one Monday morning and carried back the twelve blocks to the loft and up the four flights of stairs before discovering it was missing two legs. They'd laughed until tears streamed down their faces until Collins came home, found them, and was miraculously able to fix it by sawing the other legs off. Roger said he would’ve thought of that eventually. Mark said Roger wouldn’t even have known where to find a saw. There’s the hole Roger punched in the wall about ten minutes before he finally agreed to go to rehab.
Then there were the piles that Mark so lovingly rearranges: papers Collins wrote in grad school, old letters received or never sent, bills most certainly unpaid, Benny’s sketches from back when he used to draw, more of Mark’s old scripts that somehow he can’t bring himself to burn, Maureen’s old headshots, April’s poetry.
The clutter is as necessary as the walls or the roof over their head, leaky though it may be. He may give Mark a hard time, but he knows neither of them could ever throw a single scrap away.
Roger shakes his head and goes back to his coffee. Mark resumes his humming. The “cleaning” continues; the memories remain. The wordless tune fills a loft that will never be empty not matter how many friends move on.
Pairing: Mark/Roger, but really quite gen
Rating: PG
Word Count: 622
Notes: Gen fluff!
Mark's humming as he rifles through the piles on the desk in the corner. He isn't looking at the papers, and he doesn't throw any way. He just rearranges them, sets one on top of the other, thinks better of it, then switches them back. He'll carefully make sure all the papers are lined up perfectly in new stacks. And then he'll walk around very satisfied with himself for the rest of the afternoon.
This is what Mark calls cleaning.
Roger watches the affair from his perch in the window seat, a smile on his lips, a cup of coffee in his hands, and thinks if he didn't love him so much, he'd probably up and kill him one of these days.
"You do recognize the futility of this exercise," Roger says after watching Mark move the same sheet of hideously green paper for the fourth time.
The humming stops, and Mark slowly turns around, his eyes on the paper as if he's reading it. "What?"
"I've been watching you do this for almost forty-five minutes. And as entertaining as it is for me, I'm really wondering why you bother."
Mark frowns as if he's going to come up with a really great logical excuse, then stops and shrugs with a crooked grin. "What else is there to do?"
"Have you tried actually throwing some of that shit away?"
Mark shrugs again. "Most of it isn't mine. Some of it's Maureen's, some of it's Collins's...."
It's been almost three full years since someone else lived with them. Still the loft echoes with memories and displays scars from previous inhabitants. Maureen broke the buzzer the night she ditched Mark at a bar and returned at four only to find she had forgotten her key. Mark had decided not to let her back up, and he and Roger spent the next two hours drinking and listening to her cuss them out through the intercom. Benny had plastered the posters from Roger's gigs all over the walls, absolutely thrilled that he knew someone who was practically famous. The torn curtains that separated the bedrooms from the main living area came from Collins, who took them from his aunt's house who in turn had taken them from the house she used to clean once she decided she was through cleaning other people's houses for good. The couch Roger and Mark rescued from the curb one Monday morning and carried back the twelve blocks to the loft and up the four flights of stairs before discovering it was missing two legs. They'd laughed until tears streamed down their faces until Collins came home, found them, and was miraculously able to fix it by sawing the other legs off. Roger said he would’ve thought of that eventually. Mark said Roger wouldn’t even have known where to find a saw. There’s the hole Roger punched in the wall about ten minutes before he finally agreed to go to rehab.
Then there were the piles that Mark so lovingly rearranges: papers Collins wrote in grad school, old letters received or never sent, bills most certainly unpaid, Benny’s sketches from back when he used to draw, more of Mark’s old scripts that somehow he can’t bring himself to burn, Maureen’s old headshots, April’s poetry.
The clutter is as necessary as the walls or the roof over their head, leaky though it may be. He may give Mark a hard time, but he knows neither of them could ever throw a single scrap away.
Roger shakes his head and goes back to his coffee. Mark resumes his humming. The “cleaning” continues; the memories remain. The wordless tune fills a loft that will never be empty not matter how many friends move on.