FIC: infinity to one (we're gonna last a lifetime)
title: infinity to one (we're gonna last a lifetime)
pairing: mark/eduardo, chris/dustin
rating: pg-13
disclaimer: this is fiction. always & only for love.
summary: (817): i think i’m just going to up-end a bottle of wine and look through pictures of what my life used to be. (2,450 words)
author's note: this is part the first of what will eventually a collection of 10-12 texts from last night ficlets, spanning harvard era through post-depositions. because i got inspired last night, wrote these two in a couple of hours, and started/plotted ~10 more. they technically work as stand-alone one-shots, so i'm going to post them as i write them. the first is chris/dustin-centric, the second is mark/eduardo.
*
(727): Don’t remember much from last night, but I recall slipping you the tongue. For that I apologize.
“I’m leaving,” Mark announces, stalking into the common room and addressing Chris, who’s sitting on the couch turning the pages of his American lit textbook with one hand and periodically fending off Dustin with the other.
Chris glances up, blinking in confusion when he registers that Mark’s got his laptop bag tucked under one arm. “Where are you going?”
“Eduardo’s, I--”
“Mark,” Dustin interrupts, a definite slur in his voice, waving the game controller clumsily. “Make Chris be fun.”
Mark glares at him. “Why are you drunk at midnight on a Tuesday?”
“Why are you going to Eduardo’s at midnight on a Tuesday?” Chris counters, because Dustin is in no way capable of defending himself right now. (Not that Dustin’s life choices are ever particularly defensible, but still.)
“Because I have work to do, and presumably no one is drunk and yelling at Mario Kart in Eduardo’s room,” Mark snaps, ignoring Dustin’s wounded look.
“Fine, okay.” Chris raises his hands in a gesture of surrender. “I just thought he had a Phoenix thing tonight, that’s all.”
“He does, but he said I could use his room to work if I wanted.” Mark shrugs, and Chris has to bite his tongue because it doesn’t take a genius to read between the lines there; a reasonably intelligent third-grader could probably put two and two together with the way Eduardo looks at Mark-but Mark, for all that he has his finger pressed right to the pulse of sociality as a concept, is actually pretty horrible with the particulars of interaction. He either hasn’t figured it out (unlikely), or he’s figured it out and has no idea how to handle it (probably), and is therefore choosing to ignore the whole thing (typical).
“What the hell is up with those two?” Dustin echoes Chris’s thoughts, flopping over on the couch once Mark is gone.
“Nothing,” Chris says, a little too quickly, because thinking about Mark and Eduardo makes him feel weirdly protective of both of them. “They’re just-- I don’t know, it’s a thing.”
“Articulate, Christopher.” Dustin grins mischievously at him.
“Look who’s talking.” Chris glowers at Dustin over the top of his book. “By the way, why are you drunk on a Tuesday night?”
“My early lecture got cancelled.” Dustin stretches out and turns on his side, pressing a couple of buttons to start a new game. “Also, we had beer. I like beer. Play with me, Chris.”
Chris rolls his eyes and turns page-- although, truth be told, he lost interest a while ago. “Has anyone ever told you that the more you drink, the more you start to resemble an overgrown Golden Retriever?”
He’s expecting mock offense, or possibly actual offense, but Dustin just looks thoughtful. Or rather, as thoughtful as Dustin can get after--Chris pauses to count the empty bottles--a six-pack of beer, anyway. “Didn’t you have one of those when you were a kid?”
“Until I was eight, yeah.” Chris frowns, mentally parsing two years’ worth of conversations for any mention of Murphy, but he can’t recall ever discussing childhood pets with Dustin. “How the hell did you know that?”
(Because, really, even if they had talked about it, Dustin has the worst memory of anyone Chris has ever met. He has trouble remembering to go to class, turn in assignments, and he has occasionally been known to leave the suite without pants. Chris tried to impose a post-it note reminder system for a while, but it never really took-- mostly because Dustin somehow manages to get straight A’s every semester without ever appearing to do any actual work. I remember important things, Dustin told him once, grinning beatifically, and Chris just shook his head, smiling back in spite of himself.)
Dustin looks guilty. “Uh, I saw a picture.”
“Where did you-- wait, were you on my computer?” Chris has kept a folder of family pictures on his hard drive since boarding school, and Dustin’s rueful expression is all the confirmation he needs. “Why would you hack into my stuff?”
“I don’t think it even counts as hacking when your password is harvard,” Dustin grumbles, although he does, at least, have the grace to look embarrassed. “You should be more careful.”
“That is so not the point and you know it.” Honestly, Chris isn’t all that pissed; he knows better than to keep anything with much potential for humiliation on his laptop, given that he lives with Mark and Dustin. He's actually more curious than anything. “What were you looking for?”
“Porn,” Dustin says promptly, and Chris figured he’d get a straight answer, because Dustin is a terrible liar when he’s sober and knows better than to try when he’s not. “Don’t worry, though, I didn’t find any.”
Chris groans. “I feel like I should ask why, but I’m pretty sure I don’t want to know, so just don’t do it again, okay?”
“Okay,” Dustin agrees amicably, and flings his arms around Chris’s neck, clumsily falling halfway into Chris’s lap in the process. “I’m sorry.”
“It’s fine.” Chris attempts to disentangle himself, but Dustin is hanging on to his neck and is, like, nuzzling him. “Dustin? What are you doing?”
“You smell good and you’re my favorite person,” Dustin mumbles against his chest, and Chris bites back a smile.
“Yeah, okay. I think you’re done for the night,” he suggests, and starts to get up, which is when Dustin grabs a fistful of Chris’s t-shirt, pulls him down and kisses him full on the mouth.
With tongue.
The really baffling part, though, is that Chris --Chris, who believes firmly in thinking things through and not being impulsive and who recognizes very well that actions have consequences-- doesn’t freeze. He doesn’t think about it. He doesn’t even hesitate.
He just kisses back.
Before he can form a coherent thought it’s already over, and Dustin is blinking sleepily up at him, smiling. “Make sure I remember that in the morning, okay?”
“Yeah.” Chris shakes his head, trying to wrap his brain around what the hell just happened. “Okay.”
“Make sure,” Dustin insists, crawling out of Chris’s lap and curling up at the opposite end of the couch. “I’m gonna sleep out here.”
“Your bed is fifteen feet away.”
“Fifteen feet too far,” Dustin murmurs around a yawn, squeezing his eyes shut. “’Night, Christopher.”
He’s passed out five minutes later. Chris tosses a blanket over Dustin and then goes to bed himself, except that he doesn’t sleep much. He spends most of the night staring at the ceiling, replaying the evening in his head and unsuccessfully trying to get beyond what the fuck?
In the morning, Dustin is still on the couch, nursing a bottle of Tylenol and a serious hangover. He greets Chris with a bleary-eyed grin. “Hey. Sorry about last night.”
“Why are you apologizing?” Chris asks carefully, because he’s been up most of the night thinking it over and if Dustin doesn’t remember, then--
“Are you telling me I drank a six-pack in an hour and didn’t do anything to embarrass myself?” Dustin raises an eyebrow. “I don’t know if that means I’m getting more or less awesome.”
“Well, you drove Mark out of the suite for the night.” Chris keeps his tone even. “But I’m pretty sure I should be thanking you for that, if anything.”
“Right.” Dustin snorts, then immediately winces. “My head is killing me, I’m gonna go to bed. Wake me up for my afternoon class?”
“Sure,” Chris agrees, and Dustin gives him a thumbs-up, stands up and starts to drag himself toward their bedroom.
Chris is just about to firmly shut down the vague disappointment inexplicably clouding his relief, when Dustin pauses in the doorway. “Chris?” he says, without turning around, and Chris’s stomach flips over.
“Yeah?”
“I feel like I’m supposed to remember something.” Dustin glances over his shoulder and meets Chris’s eyes, his expression full of puzzlement. “Did I-”
“Hey,” Chris interrupts, and he makes his smile as convincing as he can, bright and warm. “You remember the important things, right?”
Dustin frowns for another second or two, but then his expression lightens, and he shrugs and smiles back. “Yeah. I guess so.”
He goes into the bedroom and closes the door softly behind him. There are a few scuffling sounds, and then silence.
Chris stands there for a long time, watching the door, telling himself he isn’t waiting for anything.
*
(843): I think you would be disgusted with me if you knew how many times I had imaginary sex with you today.
Eduardo is drunk enough that the quarter-mile walk from Mount Auburn Street back to Kirkland takes ten minutes instead of the usual five.
He spends the extra time trying to patch together an algorithm to define the likelihood that Mark will be waiting in Eduardo’s room when he gets there-- well, okay, maybe not waiting, but present, which is good enough. Eduardo has learned to appreciate Mark’s physical presence in the way most people appreciate attentiveness, because getting Mark’s genuine, undivided attention isn’t a realistic goal unless your speech consists of imperative statements and your inner workings are comprised of 0s and 1s.
Eduardo considers all the relevant constraints: average waking hours Mark has spent working on a given day since their conversation on Caribbean Night (18.5, give or take); likelihood that Chris is doing anything that might cause Mark to leave the suite (consistently low-- there’s the odd hookup, but probably not on a Thursday); likelihood that Dustin is doing anything that might cause Mark to leave the suite (comparatively high, though not a given); urgency of Mark’s desire to launch the site as soon as possible (increasing exponentially by the day); and Mark’s relative willingness to spend time with Eduardo (all signs suggest this is increasing incrementally, albeit with the occasional backward leap).
In the end, though, there are too many unknowns and potentially mitigating factors to make any kind of reliable prediction. Until Eduardo opens that door, Mark is as likely to be there as he is to be holed up in his room at Kirkland. He could theoretically be said to be both. Schrödinger’s Zuckerberg, Eduardo thinks-- and yeah, he definitely could have done without that last drink or three.
There’s light coming from under his door and Eduardo is nothing if not conscientious about turning out the lights when he leaves, but he keeps holding his breath anyway until he turns the key in the lock, pushes the door open and sees Mark sitting at his desk, typing furiously.
“Thank you, Schrödinger,” Eduardo says happily.
“What?” Mark glances up and stares at him, uncomprehending, visibly annoyed at being interrupted.
“Nothing," Eduardo assures him, having approximately zero interest in explaining that particular train of thought.
“Okay.” Mark returns his attention to the laptop screen, and Eduardo kicks off his shoes, pulls off his jacket and flops face-down on the bed. He should change before he falls asleep, probably, but that would entail both rifling through his dresser and a trip down the hall to the bathroom, and neither of those sounds particularly appealing.
Instead, he studies Mark’s back, mapping the way his shoulders tense (when he’s grappling with a new problem or a complicated line of logic) and relax (when, inevitably, he figures it out). Eduardo spends a lot of time watching Mark-- which also has to do with inevitability, at least in part, since whenever they’re together Mark’s single-minded focus is almost invariably, as previously stated, elsewhere.
There’s more to it, of course, but it’s an emotional tangle Eduardo hasn’t begun to sort through, and he isn’t sure he wants to try-- isn’t sure he would know how to begin, in point of fact. Sometimes he wants to hit Mark for no discernible reason, which is weird and frightening; much of the time he wants to kiss him, which is almost as bad; other times he wants both in equal measure, which is visceral and unnerving and by far the worst.
He tends to focus on the kissing (and, okay, in his head it might go further than kissing) because it’s the easiest.
“I’ll be out of here in a minute,” Mark says, his eyes still fixed on the screen.
“You don’t have to leave.” Eduardo yawns, considers trying to work his way under the covers, decides it’s too much effort. “I’m just gonna pass out.”
Mark makes a noise that sounds like an acknowledgment.
“The number of times I have pictured you naked today is easily in the triple digits,” Eduardo adds, into the pillow. The words are too muffled to be discernible, and Mark isn’t paying attention (Mark is never paying attention), but it’s a relief to say it out loud anyway.
Mark stops typing, and there’s a heart-stopping few seconds of silence in which Eduardo thinks Mark might have actually heard what he said, but then the soft tapping of keys resumes. He turns onto his back and squeezes his eyes shut, the world already beginning to black out around the edges.
“Don’t fall asleep like that.” Mark’s voice sounds far away, so Eduardo is probably a minute or two from passing out. “If you throw up you’ll choke to death on your own vomit.”
Eduardo obediently rolls to his side and beams sleepily at Mark’s back-- because, okay, maybe he spends a little too much time scrounging Mark’s words and actions for signs of affect, but he’s pretty sure what he just heard was concern.
(Crudely expressed, maybe, but concern nonetheless.)
“You don’t want me to die,” he mumbles contentedly, curling up and closing his eyes, sleep eagerly creeping in on his consciousness.
Another pause; another silence. Eduardo cracks an eye open and is vaguely surprised to see that Mark has turned in his chair and is staring down at him, his expression completely incomprehensible to Eduardo’s sleep-fogged, vodka-clouded brain.
“Why would you--” Mark begins, his tone sharp, but then he stops abruptly, shakes his head and turns back around. Eduardo closes his eyes again, too tired to muster even the slightest curiosity about the end of that sentence.
The steady tap of the keyboard has nearly lulled him to sleep when it stops again, and Eduardo is beginning to let dreaming pull him under-- but the break in sound is enough to catch the last conscious fragment of his attention. There’s Mark’s voice again, soft but intense, and the words catch in Eduardo’s ear just as he drifts off.
“Wardo. Of course I don’t.”
When Eduardo wakes up the next morning --afternoon, really, it’s past one-- he notices exactly two things. The first is the unrelenting pounding behind his eyes, the familiar sign of a rapidly-worsening hangover.
The second is that someone has shoved a pillow behind him in a clumsy effort to stop him from rolling on his back, and Mark’s hoodie is tucked around his shoulders.
*