fic: a thousand years of kept promises (mark/eduardo, prompt 92)
Title: a thousand years of kept promises
Recipient: hapakitsune
Prompt Number: #92
Pairing: Mark/Eduardo
Rating: PG
Word Count: 2,400
Disclaimer: This fanwork is based on fictional representations of the characters in The Social Network; I make no claims of ownership of the characters or concepts.
Summary: "Together they had overcome the daily incomprehension, the instantaneous hatred, the reciprocal nastiness, and fabulous flashes of glory in the conjugal conspiracy. It was time when they both loved each other best, without hurry or excess, when both were most conscious of and grateful for their incredible victories over adversity. Life would still present them with other moral trials, of course, but that no longer mattered: they were on the other shore." -Love in the Time of Cholera. (Vignettes from after a happy ending.)
Notes: Thank you for the beautiful prompt, HK -- I really hope you like this piece! Much love to the wonderful mods for putting up with me and to M for the extremely patient and helpful beta work.
a thousand years of kept promises
This is the simple truth: they have been in love now for almost as many years as they were old when they met. They are nearing forty, and the wounds that felt once like they could never heal, healed. The things they agonized over are ancient artifacts now, not even buried just beneath the surface, not even rushing in all newly painful when they let their guard down, and the things that seemed like they would never be anything less than the most important things in the world are distant memories.
They fell apart and back together again, and they covered their history in bedsheets and locked it away, trudged around it in the dark when they were feeling uncertain, the dust of it collecting on the soles of their shoes, and after a long time there was no more dust to trudge through.
They have not abandoned who they were at the beginning, and in the years after. All they have now is perspective, and each other, and that is one more thing than they had twenty years ago. The betrayals and the grudges and the misunderstandings have been left behind; the foolishness and the mistakes they learned from, good and bad, are in the past. This love is what they did not forget, despite their best and farthest-flung efforts.
So this is what they’ve learned. Love is more lasting than anger or regret, and gravity is stronger in the end than anything two people can do to drive themselves apart, and you learn as you grow older what to leave behind and what to carry with you.
[ten years]
California suits them best in early springtime, when the air is flush and wet and things are only going to get warmer, stuttering forward hopefully. Their house has gained a quiet sense of permanence, a worn-edged lived-in creakiness that swells comfortably with the seasons and fits them like a second skin. Mark thinks of Palo Alto as their center of gravity, mostly. He tries not to marvel at it too much, and these days he hardly ever thinks to. Some miracles are better left uncontemplated.
They sleep in on Saturdays, and then Mark gets up and makes pancakes. Improbably, he has learned to like to cook. There are a few staples he’s got down to a science, and he reads recipes when he has time, looking for new things, going through phases. Eduardo buys him cookbooks and hides notes tucked in between the pages. Some are about the food; some aren’t. Use the good olive oil for this one. Or just, I love you. -E. I love you comes easily these days, with a certain clarity just in the fact that there isn’t anything particularly special about it. It’s a truth, and not an inconsequential one, a subconscious reminder of the long time they spent fighting it -- but it begs no anxiety, feels natural, expected even. Equally improbably, Mark has learned to like that too.
[one year]
Eduardo is gone without ceremony after the depositions, and it feels like he takes everything with him, even though it’s just a speeding ticket, like Marylin said, but Mark isn’t thinking about the money. He’s thinking about the things they hadn’t had in a long time anyway -- the sound of Eduardo anything but exhausted, the gentle pressure of his hand at the small of Mark’s back, fighting, making up, letting themselves actually feel excited about all this for a handful of brief moments scattered across that first year like road salt through an inch of sleet and ice.
Eduardo takes the day it all exploded and the few years after, this long death rattle. He takes Palo Alto in the summer and Harvard in the spring, takes the three-hour time difference, takes his suits and ties hanging off his hollow frame, takes the way he’s always looked at Mark, helpless and split raw and more than Mark had ever thought anyone could feel for him.
He takes the first time Mark kissed him, in Kirkland, hardly realizing he was doing it, on the night of the first snow of his sophomore year. He takes the shivering fumbles in the worn-brick alley behind AEPi, hands scrabbling at North Face zippers, laughing, shushing each other. He takes the times Mark didn’t say everything he should have said, on his back in bed the close dry dark of Eduardo’s dorm room, tangled up, trembling and sweat-slicked and overwhelmed by the feel of each other and Eduardo so terribly earnest and Mark always unable to form the words. He takes the gutting hindsight that he was only ever trying to get Mark to understand how much he loved him, and he leaves Mark in California with a gaping hole in his heart, a deep, aching denial and a surreal detachment from himself, like he’s been knocked ineluctably off the rails of his own life.
Eduardo’s been gone for a year almost to the day when Mark thinks of him, as he often does with a fleeting pang and a twinge in his jaw, and then just like that he’s slammed with the realization that this is really, laughably, horrifyingly trying to be the end of the story. Eduardo leaves. Mark moves on with his life. They never see each other again. They hate each other, forever.
Mark never hated anyone. And he knows Eduardo doesn’t hate him, even if he wants to, not that Mark blames him for trying.
The number is easy to find. He picks up the phone and bites a welt into the inside of his cheek to try to tamp down the shaking in his hands as he dials, and Eduardo answers and it’s the middle of the night in Singapore and the worlds come tumbling out of Mark like they’ve been waiting to forever now: “Wardo, will you come back?”
Silence, the hissing of the connection. He imagines he can feel Eduardo’s breathing in the room with him.
“I need -- I need you -- I need us to try,” Mark says haltingly, improvising, “again, to try again.”
Another long pause. “Mark...” Eduardo’s voice is sleepy, guarded, hardly a note less defeated than the last time Mark heard it.
“This can’t be it, Wardo,” and his voice actually cracks and this is killing him suddenly, having Eduardo this close, and he feels more like himself than he has in a year or more and it hurts and it’s such a good thing. “It can’t be. I -- I just want to see you. Okay? That’s all. I’m sorry.”
He hadn’t meant to say the last two words. Eduardo lets his breath out in a low whoosh of static.
“Okay,” he says, voice quivering, “okay, God. Okay.”
“Okay.”
“Just -- come?”
Mark laughs and he’s surprised to hear a little actual humor in it. “I -- yeah.”
Eduardo laughs too, a little choked noise that gets right into Mark like a clenched fist. “Okay,” he says, and it sounds like a kept promise.
[five years]
They lie half-awake in the middle of the night, touching unconsciously, little points of sureness beneath the sheets. Mark turns inward, nose brushing against Eduardo’s nose, tracing the pillow creases on his skin with a fingertip - across the swell of his cheekbone, the strange solidity of the hinge of his jaw and the rise of his neck like they’re holding him together, all those dips and lines and hollows, so familiar as to be an inevitability.
Mark closes his eyes and whispers, “Thank you,” and it’s for coming back, for being here, for forgiveness and for understanding reasons why. He says it all the time in moments like this, a necessary tribute, stripped in the warm dark of pretensions and of the need to have always moved on. He knows he spent a long time earning this, that he’s been forgiven, that in the end this is the only thing either of them ever really wanted. It does not mean he ought to forget. He catches himself every now and then, strung tight like piano wire, tangled up into old nerves and the feelings that used to be constant when this was normal, when Eduardo was still gone and Mark was adrift. It’s in the past now, but it’s managed to stay a fixture in some small way, easily accessible at random times like the cold sea through thin ice.
Eduardo stirs from sleep when Mark’s whisper cuts through the darkness, curls closer to him and presses an imprecise kiss to his cheek. “Shh,” he says, and Mark knows that if Eduardo knows they’re going to be okay then surely they will be, and it’s been a long time now that the two of them have been pieced back together, a longer time than it even took them to break apart in the first place.
“We’re going to be fine,” Mark murmurs, more to hear the words out loud than anything. He never used to be the type to need reminding of obvious truths, but he’s come to understand as he’s grown older that self-assured and willfully ignorant are two different things.
Eduardo squints at him. “We are fine, Mark,” he says, touching him absently on the shoulder beneath the sheets. He flattens his palm against Mark’s chest, then fists his fingers loosely in the fabric of his T-shirt like a sleepy child. “Are you okay?”
“Yeah,” Mark says softly, dismissively. “I know.” He does know. He feels a sudden rush of gratitude for this person, who would go through everything they went through and come back in the end to still be with him, who would still say that they’re fine and would care so much and would want to give Mark his forgiveness, who would feel like Mark deserved that, who would understand that there would be years and years to come to terms with what happened and that those weren’t years they ought to waste not having each other.
“I love you,” Mark whispers, always a little jumpy, a little awkward, smiling against Eduardo’s cheek in the dark.
“I love you too,” Eduardo murmurs. He tucks himself more snugly into the frame of Mark’s body, bracketed easily by the parentheticals of his limbs and the curve of his torso. “Go back to sleep.”
“Okay.” Mark threads his fingers into Eduardo’s hair at the nape of his neck and closes his eyes. He likes to fall asleep listening to the rhythms of their breathing chasing one another in the silence. It is one of his many favorite parts of this.
[fifteen years]
It’s been a rainy season in Palo Alto the day Eduardo takes Mark’s hand across the breakfast table and slips the ring onto his finger. The light is thin and green-grey through the windows, September, the mornings just starting to grow dimmer and a chill nudging into the air. There’s coffee brewing in the kitchen and they’re eating toast and sharing a San Francisco Chronicle, and when you’ve been together like they have for this long, any day is a fine one to get engaged.
Eduardo says, tentatively, “Mark,” and Mark looks up from his paper and puts down the crust of his toast, and Eduardo takes his hand and says, “Hey.”
Mark looks down at their hands clasped on the table, cocking an eyebrow. “...Hey,” he says when Eduardo doesn’t elaborate, looking back up expectantly.
Eduardo swallows and squeezes his hand and says, “Will you marry me?”
The corner of Mark’s mouth ticks up. His fingers flutter slightly against Eduardo’s.
“You’re not even going to kneel?” he asks.
“I wasn’t sure if I should,” Eduardo says, and he breaks into a smile. Mark’s heart is beating crazily up into his throat for no good reason at all. They’ve lived together in this house forever already, and -- of course, of course, why not? “I don’t want to make--”
“I will,” Mark cuts in briskly. “Of course I will, Wardo, it’s not like we’re not-yes.” His smile breaks lopsided across his face for a moment, an uncontrolled reflex. “I will.” He squeezes Eduardo’s hand, shaking his head, happily incredulous. “I will.” He can’t seem to stop saying it.
“Why are you shaking your head?”
“Because -- I just think you’re ridiculous.” Mark purses his lips, tries to get his smile under control. “It would be my privilege, Eduardo,” he says magnanimously, lifting Eduardo’s hand and kissing him on the knuckles.
“Okay,” Eduardo says, voice brimming over with laughter. He’s practically glowing. “Okay. I got these.” He pulls two ring boxes out of his pocket and opens one. There’s a simple silver band inside.
Mark eyes it dubiously. “What do you do?” Eduardo laughs.
“Here,” he says, and he slides the ring onto Mark’s right hand.
Mark stares at it for a moment before looking up at Eduardo with a wobbly smile splitting his face. He takes the other ring out of its box, catches Eduardo’s wrist and slips the ring onto his finger carefully, worried somehow that he might do it wrong.
He can tell when Eduardo looks up into his face that it’s all rushing in on him then, all their years together, and he tries not to get carried away as he looks down at the new gleams of silver on their fingers curled together. But it’s hard not to feel a little misty -- and that’s alright. “Wardo,” he murmurs. Eduardo’s face is almost hard to look at, but Mark wouldn’t look away for anything in the world. He thinks the most amazing thing of all is that Eduardo can still look at him like that after all these years, how things haven’t gone stale, they’ve just grown comfortable, broken-in, reliable.
He leans across the table and kisses Eduardo softly, just for a moment, on the corner of his mouth, and when he pulls back he lets his field of vision narrow down just to Eduardo’s face, trying to fold the moment into himself.
“You’re happy, right?” Mark asks, brushing his thumb over Eduardo’s temple.
“Yeah,” Eduardo says. His voice is a little rough around the edges, his eyes shining. He’s still holding Mark’s hand.
“Good,” Mark says, and he kisses him again, and Eduardo puts his elbow in the toast and neither of them really mind.
Recipient: hapakitsune
Prompt Number: #92
Pairing: Mark/Eduardo
Rating: PG
Word Count: 2,400
Disclaimer: This fanwork is based on fictional representations of the characters in The Social Network; I make no claims of ownership of the characters or concepts.
Summary: "Together they had overcome the daily incomprehension, the instantaneous hatred, the reciprocal nastiness, and fabulous flashes of glory in the conjugal conspiracy. It was time when they both loved each other best, without hurry or excess, when both were most conscious of and grateful for their incredible victories over adversity. Life would still present them with other moral trials, of course, but that no longer mattered: they were on the other shore." -Love in the Time of Cholera. (Vignettes from after a happy ending.)
Notes: Thank you for the beautiful prompt, HK -- I really hope you like this piece! Much love to the wonderful mods for putting up with me and to M for the extremely patient and helpful beta work.
a thousand years of kept promises
This is the simple truth: they have been in love now for almost as many years as they were old when they met. They are nearing forty, and the wounds that felt once like they could never heal, healed. The things they agonized over are ancient artifacts now, not even buried just beneath the surface, not even rushing in all newly painful when they let their guard down, and the things that seemed like they would never be anything less than the most important things in the world are distant memories.
They fell apart and back together again, and they covered their history in bedsheets and locked it away, trudged around it in the dark when they were feeling uncertain, the dust of it collecting on the soles of their shoes, and after a long time there was no more dust to trudge through.
They have not abandoned who they were at the beginning, and in the years after. All they have now is perspective, and each other, and that is one more thing than they had twenty years ago. The betrayals and the grudges and the misunderstandings have been left behind; the foolishness and the mistakes they learned from, good and bad, are in the past. This love is what they did not forget, despite their best and farthest-flung efforts.
So this is what they’ve learned. Love is more lasting than anger or regret, and gravity is stronger in the end than anything two people can do to drive themselves apart, and you learn as you grow older what to leave behind and what to carry with you.
[ten years]
California suits them best in early springtime, when the air is flush and wet and things are only going to get warmer, stuttering forward hopefully. Their house has gained a quiet sense of permanence, a worn-edged lived-in creakiness that swells comfortably with the seasons and fits them like a second skin. Mark thinks of Palo Alto as their center of gravity, mostly. He tries not to marvel at it too much, and these days he hardly ever thinks to. Some miracles are better left uncontemplated.
They sleep in on Saturdays, and then Mark gets up and makes pancakes. Improbably, he has learned to like to cook. There are a few staples he’s got down to a science, and he reads recipes when he has time, looking for new things, going through phases. Eduardo buys him cookbooks and hides notes tucked in between the pages. Some are about the food; some aren’t. Use the good olive oil for this one. Or just, I love you. -E. I love you comes easily these days, with a certain clarity just in the fact that there isn’t anything particularly special about it. It’s a truth, and not an inconsequential one, a subconscious reminder of the long time they spent fighting it -- but it begs no anxiety, feels natural, expected even. Equally improbably, Mark has learned to like that too.
[one year]
Eduardo is gone without ceremony after the depositions, and it feels like he takes everything with him, even though it’s just a speeding ticket, like Marylin said, but Mark isn’t thinking about the money. He’s thinking about the things they hadn’t had in a long time anyway -- the sound of Eduardo anything but exhausted, the gentle pressure of his hand at the small of Mark’s back, fighting, making up, letting themselves actually feel excited about all this for a handful of brief moments scattered across that first year like road salt through an inch of sleet and ice.
Eduardo takes the day it all exploded and the few years after, this long death rattle. He takes Palo Alto in the summer and Harvard in the spring, takes the three-hour time difference, takes his suits and ties hanging off his hollow frame, takes the way he’s always looked at Mark, helpless and split raw and more than Mark had ever thought anyone could feel for him.
He takes the first time Mark kissed him, in Kirkland, hardly realizing he was doing it, on the night of the first snow of his sophomore year. He takes the shivering fumbles in the worn-brick alley behind AEPi, hands scrabbling at North Face zippers, laughing, shushing each other. He takes the times Mark didn’t say everything he should have said, on his back in bed the close dry dark of Eduardo’s dorm room, tangled up, trembling and sweat-slicked and overwhelmed by the feel of each other and Eduardo so terribly earnest and Mark always unable to form the words. He takes the gutting hindsight that he was only ever trying to get Mark to understand how much he loved him, and he leaves Mark in California with a gaping hole in his heart, a deep, aching denial and a surreal detachment from himself, like he’s been knocked ineluctably off the rails of his own life.
Eduardo’s been gone for a year almost to the day when Mark thinks of him, as he often does with a fleeting pang and a twinge in his jaw, and then just like that he’s slammed with the realization that this is really, laughably, horrifyingly trying to be the end of the story. Eduardo leaves. Mark moves on with his life. They never see each other again. They hate each other, forever.
Mark never hated anyone. And he knows Eduardo doesn’t hate him, even if he wants to, not that Mark blames him for trying.
The number is easy to find. He picks up the phone and bites a welt into the inside of his cheek to try to tamp down the shaking in his hands as he dials, and Eduardo answers and it’s the middle of the night in Singapore and the worlds come tumbling out of Mark like they’ve been waiting to forever now: “Wardo, will you come back?”
Silence, the hissing of the connection. He imagines he can feel Eduardo’s breathing in the room with him.
“I need -- I need you -- I need us to try,” Mark says haltingly, improvising, “again, to try again.”
Another long pause. “Mark...” Eduardo’s voice is sleepy, guarded, hardly a note less defeated than the last time Mark heard it.
“This can’t be it, Wardo,” and his voice actually cracks and this is killing him suddenly, having Eduardo this close, and he feels more like himself than he has in a year or more and it hurts and it’s such a good thing. “It can’t be. I -- I just want to see you. Okay? That’s all. I’m sorry.”
He hadn’t meant to say the last two words. Eduardo lets his breath out in a low whoosh of static.
“Okay,” he says, voice quivering, “okay, God. Okay.”
“Okay.”
“Just -- come?”
Mark laughs and he’s surprised to hear a little actual humor in it. “I -- yeah.”
Eduardo laughs too, a little choked noise that gets right into Mark like a clenched fist. “Okay,” he says, and it sounds like a kept promise.
[five years]
They lie half-awake in the middle of the night, touching unconsciously, little points of sureness beneath the sheets. Mark turns inward, nose brushing against Eduardo’s nose, tracing the pillow creases on his skin with a fingertip - across the swell of his cheekbone, the strange solidity of the hinge of his jaw and the rise of his neck like they’re holding him together, all those dips and lines and hollows, so familiar as to be an inevitability.
Mark closes his eyes and whispers, “Thank you,” and it’s for coming back, for being here, for forgiveness and for understanding reasons why. He says it all the time in moments like this, a necessary tribute, stripped in the warm dark of pretensions and of the need to have always moved on. He knows he spent a long time earning this, that he’s been forgiven, that in the end this is the only thing either of them ever really wanted. It does not mean he ought to forget. He catches himself every now and then, strung tight like piano wire, tangled up into old nerves and the feelings that used to be constant when this was normal, when Eduardo was still gone and Mark was adrift. It’s in the past now, but it’s managed to stay a fixture in some small way, easily accessible at random times like the cold sea through thin ice.
Eduardo stirs from sleep when Mark’s whisper cuts through the darkness, curls closer to him and presses an imprecise kiss to his cheek. “Shh,” he says, and Mark knows that if Eduardo knows they’re going to be okay then surely they will be, and it’s been a long time now that the two of them have been pieced back together, a longer time than it even took them to break apart in the first place.
“We’re going to be fine,” Mark murmurs, more to hear the words out loud than anything. He never used to be the type to need reminding of obvious truths, but he’s come to understand as he’s grown older that self-assured and willfully ignorant are two different things.
Eduardo squints at him. “We are fine, Mark,” he says, touching him absently on the shoulder beneath the sheets. He flattens his palm against Mark’s chest, then fists his fingers loosely in the fabric of his T-shirt like a sleepy child. “Are you okay?”
“Yeah,” Mark says softly, dismissively. “I know.” He does know. He feels a sudden rush of gratitude for this person, who would go through everything they went through and come back in the end to still be with him, who would still say that they’re fine and would care so much and would want to give Mark his forgiveness, who would feel like Mark deserved that, who would understand that there would be years and years to come to terms with what happened and that those weren’t years they ought to waste not having each other.
“I love you,” Mark whispers, always a little jumpy, a little awkward, smiling against Eduardo’s cheek in the dark.
“I love you too,” Eduardo murmurs. He tucks himself more snugly into the frame of Mark’s body, bracketed easily by the parentheticals of his limbs and the curve of his torso. “Go back to sleep.”
“Okay.” Mark threads his fingers into Eduardo’s hair at the nape of his neck and closes his eyes. He likes to fall asleep listening to the rhythms of their breathing chasing one another in the silence. It is one of his many favorite parts of this.
[fifteen years]
It’s been a rainy season in Palo Alto the day Eduardo takes Mark’s hand across the breakfast table and slips the ring onto his finger. The light is thin and green-grey through the windows, September, the mornings just starting to grow dimmer and a chill nudging into the air. There’s coffee brewing in the kitchen and they’re eating toast and sharing a San Francisco Chronicle, and when you’ve been together like they have for this long, any day is a fine one to get engaged.
Eduardo says, tentatively, “Mark,” and Mark looks up from his paper and puts down the crust of his toast, and Eduardo takes his hand and says, “Hey.”
Mark looks down at their hands clasped on the table, cocking an eyebrow. “...Hey,” he says when Eduardo doesn’t elaborate, looking back up expectantly.
Eduardo swallows and squeezes his hand and says, “Will you marry me?”
The corner of Mark’s mouth ticks up. His fingers flutter slightly against Eduardo’s.
“You’re not even going to kneel?” he asks.
“I wasn’t sure if I should,” Eduardo says, and he breaks into a smile. Mark’s heart is beating crazily up into his throat for no good reason at all. They’ve lived together in this house forever already, and -- of course, of course, why not? “I don’t want to make--”
“I will,” Mark cuts in briskly. “Of course I will, Wardo, it’s not like we’re not-yes.” His smile breaks lopsided across his face for a moment, an uncontrolled reflex. “I will.” He squeezes Eduardo’s hand, shaking his head, happily incredulous. “I will.” He can’t seem to stop saying it.
“Why are you shaking your head?”
“Because -- I just think you’re ridiculous.” Mark purses his lips, tries to get his smile under control. “It would be my privilege, Eduardo,” he says magnanimously, lifting Eduardo’s hand and kissing him on the knuckles.
“Okay,” Eduardo says, voice brimming over with laughter. He’s practically glowing. “Okay. I got these.” He pulls two ring boxes out of his pocket and opens one. There’s a simple silver band inside.
Mark eyes it dubiously. “What do you do?” Eduardo laughs.
“Here,” he says, and he slides the ring onto Mark’s right hand.
Mark stares at it for a moment before looking up at Eduardo with a wobbly smile splitting his face. He takes the other ring out of its box, catches Eduardo’s wrist and slips the ring onto his finger carefully, worried somehow that he might do it wrong.
He can tell when Eduardo looks up into his face that it’s all rushing in on him then, all their years together, and he tries not to get carried away as he looks down at the new gleams of silver on their fingers curled together. But it’s hard not to feel a little misty -- and that’s alright. “Wardo,” he murmurs. Eduardo’s face is almost hard to look at, but Mark wouldn’t look away for anything in the world. He thinks the most amazing thing of all is that Eduardo can still look at him like that after all these years, how things haven’t gone stale, they’ve just grown comfortable, broken-in, reliable.
He leans across the table and kisses Eduardo softly, just for a moment, on the corner of his mouth, and when he pulls back he lets his field of vision narrow down just to Eduardo’s face, trying to fold the moment into himself.
“You’re happy, right?” Mark asks, brushing his thumb over Eduardo’s temple.
“Yeah,” Eduardo says. His voice is a little rough around the edges, his eyes shining. He’s still holding Mark’s hand.
“Good,” Mark says, and he kisses him again, and Eduardo puts his elbow in the toast and neither of them really mind.