fic: or somewhere in between (Mark/Eduardo, Prompt 60) Part 1 of 2

[oflights]

Title: or somewhere in between
Recipient: serenatechair
Prompt Number: 60
Characters/Pairings: Mark/Eduardo, Chris/Dustin
Rating/Warnings: Hard R; warnings for heavy angst, depression, drug and alcohol abuse, infidelity, and (for all intents and purposes) suicide and major character death.
Word Count: 20,731 words
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: For Eduardo, Mark's death is only the beginning.
Notes: Thanks to H, C, and S for talking this out with me forever and summary help, and to B for the quick beta! Please heed the warnings, but don't let them scare you away, either; there's a happy ending.



swan dive down eleven stories high
hold your breath until you see the light
you can sink to the bottom of the sea
just don’t go without me.

- The Civil Wars

There are things that Eduardo will remember that he will not understand.

He will remember how itchy and stiff his starchy sheets feel against his bare skin, that morning when he wakes up. He will remember thinking that he’ll have to remind the woman who cleans his San Francisco apartment once a month to stop over-starching the sheets; though he is rarely there, he still appreciates soft linens, and he thinks he always will.

He will remember lying in bed, feeling appreciative that he had gotten a good nine hours of sleep the night before, the first solid amount of sleep he had had in days.

(He will regret those nine hours of sleep as soon as he checks his phone, and as soon as he turns on his TV for the weather report. He will regret checking his phone, and regret turning on the TV.)

Eduardo will remember getting up, shrugging on his bathrobe and shivering in the morning air. He will remember thinking about the chill, and will feel a twinge of hurt, a small burst of anger and despair, to think of the Bay water, as he remembers the chill. He will remember using the bathroom, washing his hands with vanilla-scented liquid soap, and splashing cool water in his face. He will remember shivering again.

He will not, does not, understand why he remembers those things. He doesn’t quite remember the important things from that day; the news stories are white noise, static from very far away or very long ago, barely reaching his ears through a haze of shock. He doesn’t remember how he had felt when reading his text messages, or listening to his voicemails, except for one voicemail that he has listened to hundreds, thousands of times since. Sometimes, he forgets that it was a Thursday, that he missed all his meetings, that an associate called him to yell at him because she had been too busy to pay attention to the news.

Eduardo does not know why his mind dwells on these details of before. He doesn’t know why he can still smell the vanilla soap, still feel the catch of the sheets on his hip where his shirt had ridden up in those nine solid hours of sleep. He remembers the feel of the phone in his hand, the first voicemail he’d listened to because of the earliest missed call, the puzzlement he’d felt when he’d seen the name Mark.

He will remember, will always remember, the contents of the voicemail: the breath, choked and high and wet, and close, too close, the sound of a foghorn. Then a click, an electronic female voice giving him options to delete or save or replay the message. Message saved.

He doesn’t know if he had seen the news first, or heard the rest of the voicemails first. He doesn’t remember. He doesn’t know how he had really found out officially, doesn’t know when he first started to really understand what had happened, what Mark had done. Sometimes, he still doesn’t think he understands, doesn’t think he ever really will.

There are lots of things he doesn’t know or understand about that day, things he will not know until later. He will know later that Mark’s voicemail to him was not the only message sent out that night, that he was not the only one too asleep to listen, to stop him. He will find out that there had been a text message, read and misunderstood by a wasted, half-asleep Sean Parker. He will find out that Sean received this text message at 2:32 am that same morning, rolled over in bed, and fell asleep for exactly 34 minutes. Then he woke up, read the text message again, and finally understood it.

Eduardo learns later that Sean had jumped out of bed and ran barefoot to his car, leaving two blonde co-eds behind in his bed. He learns that Sean was pulled over for speeding and running multiple red lights, and that he blames these cops for not getting there in time, even though there are time-stamped pictures that prove he could never have been there on time, even if he had understood the text right away.

Eduardo wonders about all these things: the text, the voicemail, the man across the Bay taking pictures of the foggy bridge in the middle of the night. He wonders about the foghorn, the timing, the red lights Sean ran, the cops he pleaded with. He wonders a lot about what Sean found when he finally made it to the bridge, and what it must have looked like that late at night. Eduardo has driven over the Golden Gate Bridge many, many times, at night, during the day, very early in the morning and just as the sun starts setting.

He wonders about that night, and that morning, and he can’t always remember things that should be important; was it a Thursday morning or a Friday morning? Was it a very cold night? Was the moon in waxing gibbous or waning crescent; what was the water like?

Was the water cold when Mark hit?

(testing the water temp under the golden gate; sorry, sean.)

There is a website dedicated to Mark Zuckerberg sightings. Sometimes, when Eduardo is feeling particularly masochistic, he drags it from his bookmarks. He had thought about burying it deep in his bookmarks, because Chris would probably worry if he knew Eduardo looked at it semi-regularly, but these days, he can’t really be bothered.

His grief is such that it’s terribly self-absorbed. He knows this, and sometimes feels guilty about it, mostly in relation to Chris and Dustin, and Mark’s family. In relation to Facebook, too, its blue topbar turned black, weeks turning into months of mourning. And sometimes even Sean, who is not really Sean anymore, or maybe just Sean times ten: buried under drugs and women and anger and paranoia.

So Eduardo knows that he is not the only one affected by Mark’s death. He knows that he is not the only one who feels it so acutely, whose life it shadows constantly, lurking in the corners of his mind and waiting for him to grow idle and happy again before striking once more.

He knows that. He just can’t find it in him to care.

He goes on the Mark Zuckerberg sightings website, clicks around, and does not worry about worrying Chris.

He usually starts crying after a while, which he had initially been surprised about. He had not cried at Mark’s bodiless funeral, standing stoically with Chris and Dustin. Chris had been the one to really lose it at the funeral, having kept his cool through flying in from New York, calmly and seamlessly inserting himself back into the Facebook media fray, comforting a completely devastated Dustin, and even looking after Sean, before realizing he was beyond help. The funeral, though, was Chris’ breaking point, and though Eduardo and Dustin had never really been the strong ones, they were the ones to hold him up.

“Sorry,” Chris had said, sniffling, and Dustin rolled his eyes and hit him lightly, while Eduardo cracked an uncomfortable, awkward smile and said, “Idiot.”

But Eduardo hadn’t cried through all the times he was probably supposed to cry. He’d been okay, not numb but okay, through the first few weeks, making sure that Chris and Dustin would be all right before heading back to Singapore after the funeral. He worked, slept, ate, answered the how are you doing? questions with a small shrug and a crooked smile and many, honest I’m okays.

Then the weirdest things started setting him off. He’d be driving over the Anderson Bridge and suddenly need to pull over, unable to breathe or see through stinging tears. He couldn’t hear the sound of a foghorn without losing it, couldn’t listen to the electronic female voice in his voicemail system.

Now, he cries a lot, which would be embarrassing if he could really care about it. He has stopped identifying triggers because he doesn’t think there even needs to be any. He’ll think about Facebook, think about the dilution, think about Mark’s stupid flip flops in the snow, and lose it. He freaked everybody in his office out a lot by crying over the coffee bar, and some well-meaning colleagues suggested he take some personal time to himself.

“I’m okay,” Eduardo insisted, but no one believed him anymore.

So he took some personal time and, tapping into that inner masochist once again, flew to San Francisco. He works out of his previously rarely-used apartment here now, crying sporadically over Red Bull commercials and switching from vanilla-scented liquid soap to pomegranate-scented. He never watches the news. He fires his housekeeper and does his laundry for himself, cleans his apartment meticulously every Thursday, and he actually is okay, he thinks, even with the crying.

Eduardo thinks that the crying is just a part of this sneaky grief that had crept up on him and keeps planning these quiet, overwhelming attacks. It’s weird grief, because it’s hard to say that he misses Mark. He has missed Mark for years, missed seeing him every day and sharing a life with him, and he had been able to deal with that. It is much harder to deal with this, but he does it, because the only other options are Sean’s options, which he can’t see himself falling into.

He does not miss Mark, not really. He is just sad. There is no other way he can describe it to his mother, who calls him every other night.

“I’m okay, Mamãe,” Eduardo says, and then he tells her about all the work he had accomplished that day. He tells that her he had scrubbed his bathroom floor and went to the hardware store to buy some calk for under the sink, though he hasn’t used it yet. He tells her that he bought himself two silk ties at the mall, one blue and one brown. He had yogurt and berries for breakfast, guiltily worked through lunch, and delicious curry and rice for dinner. All of this is true; he never lies to his mother, not really.

But it feels disingenuous not to mention that he had sat down at his desk, too, and put his head in his hands, and cried for exactly 12 minutes, not loud or messy, but quiet and deep. He doesn’t know how to say that to her, and so he says, “I’m sad a lot, too, though.”

“I know, darling,” his mother sighs, and Eduardo wonders how. He wonders how he can do all these things, live this life as close to normal as possible, and still have this sadness that blankets everything, no matter how innocuous, whether it has no connection to Mark or every connection. That’s what he’s started to realize, actually-since Mark jumped, everything feels connected to him. It’s starting to piss Eduardo off.

The website pisses Eduardo off too, of course, as much as it makes him cry. It’s full of out-of-focus Instagram shots of curly-haired men in malls, restaurants, movie theaters, and restrooms. All of them could be Mark, because there was no body pulled from the Bay, just Mark’s car pulled over at the side of bridge. And the photos, of course, taken by cityscape photographer Amir Alphonse, long shots of Mark’s blurred form falling. And so none of them could be Mark, because there is no way anyone can deny that he hit the water. Experts on the news say that it’s likely that his neck snapped, if not most of his bones. If he died from the fall, he wouldn’t have had to drown. If he breathed in the water, filled his lungs and closed his eyes and let himself sink, it would have taken longer. This is what the experts say.

During this particular crying jag, Eduardo opens up the picture files, the photos that put Amir Alphonse’s name up there with Mr. Zapruder. Eduardo has looked at these photos many, many times. He has listened to the experts. If the fall didn’t kill him, and the water didn’t drown him, the cold killed Mark. The cold pulled him into a slow, frigid death, the worst death, freezing with broken ribs and broken arms and legs too chilled to kick, a neck that failed to snap and afford him mercy.

The experts cannot tell Eduardo if Mark knew the water would be that cold, and neither can Alphonse’s photos. But the experts and the photos tell him that this website is stupid, and sad, and useless.

Eduardo submits a photo, a blurred, curly-haired man, shadowed and falling. Sighted, Eduardo captions it, Golden Gate Bridge/San Francisco Bay. 01/13/15, 2:36 am. This is the last true sighting, the only photo that should be on here. Eduardo clicks send with a satisfied, wretched sniffle.

Eduardo is not the only one still hovering around San Francisco, despite the fact that his Singapore office had asked him back. Chris is still here, and Eduardo discovers one night that he’s staying in Mark’s house with Dustin.

“I like Palo Alto,” is what Chris tells him when Eduardo frowns a bit about this, not tolerant of Chris’ worry for him, but unable to keep from worrying back sometimes. “I asked Randi if it was okay, and she said she has much bigger things to worry about than what to do with Mark’s house, so she didn’t really care.”

“Right, of course,” Eduardo says, as diplomatic as ever when thinking about or talking about Randi Zuckerberg, the new CEO of Facebook.

Everything went to Mark’s family; all of his liquidated assets, the entirety of his considerable net worth, had gone to his sisters and his parents. The world had held its breath over Mark’s cursed control of Facebook (because Facebook is, of course, why everyone thinks he jumped), then let the breath out slowly as it became clear that Randi had inherited all of his voting power, to the disgruntlement of the board.

That poor girl, people said, as if Randi was not a wildly successful and capable grown woman. Channeling her brother, Randi had promptly told them all to go fuck themselves in the classiest way possible-by kicking ass at Facebook.

Eduardo doesn’t know if Facebook is why Mark jumped. He knows that there were rumors, whispers of a takeover, whispers that promptly turned to clapped-shut mouths in the face of Randi’s fierce, steadfast control and no-nonsense attitude. He doesn’t know if that would have happened if Mark had not planned for it. If Mark’s suicide had been a spontaneous decision, as Eduardo knows from a very nice woman named Marilyn Delpy that it probably wasn’t, Mark’s Facebook ownership would have fallen to the next majority shareholders.

Eduardo does know that he would not have let Facebook go, if part of it had fallen to him (which is would have). He also knows that Dustin wouldn’t have, either. He has his suspicions about Sean, and very little understanding of Peter Thiel. But he doesn’t know if he could have been as brilliant and as strong as Randi. He doesn’t know if any of them could be. He likes to think so. He wants to feel hurt, and surprised, that even after all these years, even after basically forgiving each other in a way that only time could force, Mark still couldn’t trust him with Facebook. It should feel like a slap in the face. But mostly, it just seems to make a sad sort of sense.

“He just didn’t want to weigh us down with it,” Dustin tells him. Dustin, who is a CEO in his right, who is not bitter, and is lounging back on Mark’s beat-up old sofa, drinking a beer. “There was probably an apology clause or something for Randi.”

“Nah,” Chris says. He is also on the sofa, work spread out in front of him on the coffee table, his bare feet tucked under him. He is very close to Dustin; this will start to make more sense to Eduardo the more time he spends with them at Mark’s house. They are both pretty unkempt, which is normal for Dustin and odd for Chris, but Eduardo can’t judge. He started crying in the supermarket the day before because a mother refused to buy her small son Red Vines. “Sean is the only one who got an apology.”

Chris and Dustin both look pointedly away from him, then. Eduardo thinks that they believe that he is the one who Mark owed an apology to the most. He doesn’t tell them that Mark didn’t owe him anything except to just try to be okay. He also doesn’t mention the voicemail. They know of the voicemail’s existence, or at least the call to Eduardo, because Mark’s phone had been left in his car, and it had been in the call log, but they don’t know the contents, have never asked. They don’t know that Mark said nothing, only that Eduardo didn’t answer. They probably think that if Eduardo had answered, Mark wouldn’t have jumped.

Sometimes, Eduardo thinks that, too. But mostly he can’t bear to think it.

Eduardo leans back in his own chair, across from the sofa that seats Dustin and Chris, apart. He is not unkempt; he has his own beer. His eyes are probably red, they always are these days, and itchy. He keeps telling himself to get eye drops, but knows he’ll have to stop crying all the time for them to work.

He is not comfortable in Mark’s house, even though he has been here before, and not just for funeral stuff. Mark threw some parties, and towards the end they were friendly enough that it was okay to invite Eduardo, though they hadn’t talked much beyond politeness. Mark had a lot of friends over all the time, people from Facebook and people he met through charity work. Once, there had been a boyfriend that Eduardo knew worked for a nonprofit that brought technology to developing countries for education, or something like that. Eduardo didn’t like him.

There are pictures, though, of the boyfriend, and of the dog that Mark had had with the boyfriend, that moved away with the boyfriend when the relationship ended. Seeing pictures of the dog makes Eduardo really, really sad, and so he tries not to look at them too much. Chris and Dustin don’t know about the crying thing yet.

“How is Sean?” Eduardo asks, taking a large swallow from his beer. Everything is depressing to talk about, even mundane things like going to the dentist or buying different kinds of fabric softener. But Sean Parker’s downward spiral is one thing he can never feel too awful about; the 21-year-old kid that totally called this happening years ago is kind of smug about it.

Chris and Dustin both make an identical face at each other, which will also make more sense soon. When Chris speaks, there is a dry hopelessness to his voice, and it sounds so wrong on Chris. Eduardo’s throat feels tight; his eyes are always itchy. “Sean is fucked, Eduardo,” Chris tells him, and Dustin nods, lowering himself in his seat, downing the rest of his beer. “He’s-man, that text just about killed him. I didn’t think he actually cared about Mark that much. I don’t think he actually cared about Mark that much. He just-he’s nuts about it. He’s angry.”

“He thinks Mark’s still alive,” Dustin says sadly. “He thinks the text was some kind of code, he’s been talking to private investigators and badgering Marilyn-”

“When he’s lucid,” Chris adds, shaking his head. “That’s only about 20% of the time. He was seeing this really nice girl for a bit, Amy-not exclusive, you know, she knows better, but she told me she thinks he’s gonna wind up on the bridge next.”

“Jesus,” Eduardo says. “But-I mean, Marilyn didn’t know-”

“Not really, but, I mean, we all knew, a little bit,” Dustin says, and Eduardo feels the bottom fall out of his stomach, even though this isn’t the first time they’ve had this conversation.

“I didn’t know,” Eduardo tells them both, very firmly. “I mean, who could-”

“We should’ve done something, I mean, we didn’t really know, but we knew a little bit. It just made sense afterwards-”

“No, it didn’t,” Eduardo says. His throat is still tight and he’s getting upset, but it finally feels like a purposeful upset, pointed, towards a target. Mark’s suicide will never make sense to him. It shouldn’t make sense to anybody. Eduardo doesn’t want sense.

“I’m a little drunk, Wardo,” Dustin says morosely, his shoulders slumping. He looks very small. “I don’t really know what I’m saying. I don’t make sense.” He chuckles a little, and Chris looks like he just got punched.

“We should stop talking about this,” Chris says, finally seeming to regain some of his surety, his take charge attitude.

“I didn’t know,” Eduardo repeats, almost mindless, but still firm. “If I had known, it wouldn’t have happened.”

“Eduardo,” Chris says warningly, as Dustin slumps further.

“I know,” Dustin says. “I should’ve done something. You weren’t here. You would’ve known if you were.”

“God, Dustin, can we not?” Chris bursts out, as Eduardo’s stomach twists painfully. “I don’t want to talk about this, okay.”

“But it’s like-” Dustin continues, and he breaks off to give a wounded, apologetic look to Chris. “Why Sean, though?”

Eduardo has not let himself think about that question, mostly because you could also ask why Eduardo? They were both in San Francisco. They were both close. And they were both unavailable.

“I was awake,” Dustin says, and great, there goes the crying. Eduardo puts his hand over his mouth and tries not to flush. “I was up, Leah had a presentation the next day and we were practicing. I would’ve answered. Why Sean?”

“Stop it, Dustin, now,” Chris says, and he sits up, feet pressing into the floor, his spine very straight.

“I just don’t get it,” Dustin finishes a bit lamely, and he bites his lip as Chris stands.

“I’m going to bed,” Chris tells them. Eduardo watches him go with tear-blurred vision, trying to calculate how long this crying jag is going to last. Will he be able to drive home? He’s not sure. The crying thing is never actually fun, but sometimes it’s downright inconvenient.

Dustin and Eduardo sit for a few minutes, and Eduardo sniffles some more and wipes his nose. Dustin says, “Sorry,” and Eduardo doesn’t say anything, because he’s not sure if he’s talking to him.

After a while, Dustin gets up, and he disappears in the direction Chris had gone. It takes a few more nights like this, nights where Eduardo slowly becomes comfortable in the house full of a life Eduardo didn’t know well enough, for him to figure out that they’re going into the same room. And then it’s one more confusing night before he realizes that they are having sex.

“But,” Eduardo says, when Dustin is wearing Chris’ dress shirt over ridiculous boxers with cartoon birds all over them. “What about Leah?”

Dustin says nothing, ducks his head and looks very sad, and Chris says sharply, “Don’t, Eduardo.”

Eduardo has met Leah exactly three times. She is a potter, and teaches classes in Berkeley. Over dinner at the house she and Dustin share, they’d been telling the chicken story for the umpteenth time, and she had frowned, wrinkling her freckled nose and going, “I don’t think that’s very funny, though.”

“Thank you,” Eduardo had said, because he’s never found it funny either, even while he gets why other people do.

“I mean, did you really feed that chicken chicken? How could you do that?”

So yeah, Eduardo isn’t exactly Leah’s biggest fan. And he understands that sex as a way of reaffirming life generally goes along with grief; Eduardo had had sex like, five times with three different people when he got back to Singapore, before all the crying started. The sixth time, he had cried after, which started a sort of celibacy streak he was actually more than okay with.

But this isn’t Dustin; Dustin loves Leah, for all her ridiculous, irrational principles, and strange lack of humor. And it’s not Chris, who probably loves Dustin more than anything, who wouldn’t want this for him.

Eduardo can’t judge. There is a married man he sees sometimes in Singapore; he is young and he has a small child and he likes when Eduardo bites his shoulders, bruises his thighs. Eduardo mostly ignores everything about him except for his body, and his sharp, quick tongue, but still, this proves that he is not a saint. But he worries. He frowns over them, frowns at Chris, who is tired and stopped, still, when he never has been before. And Dustin, who has grown up sad, and maybe this isn’t just Mark, maybe there’s something bigger wrong that Eduardo doesn’t know how to fix, something fundamental in the way they all turned out. He worries.

“Chris is just so-” Dustin tells him later, wearing a bathrobe, ready to join Chris in the bedroom once again. Eduardo has taken to just crashing on this couch, tipping over the photos on Mark’s mantel and end table until he gets too guilty and lifts them up again, cringing. But tonight he doesn’t want to stay here; he doesn’t want to be in a house where Chris and Dustin have to destroy themselves to put each other back together. “He’s depressed, I think, but of course he won’t admit that, and I just don’t want him to-”

“I know, man, you don’t have to tell me,” Eduardo says as reassuringly as possible. He doesn’t need Dustin to justify it; they have known each other too long, done too much to each other, to make excuses. But Dustin just gives him a narrow-eyed look, a pulled face that is eerily reminiscent of his younger, lighter self.

“I know what you’re thinking. I know what goes on in that fluffy moral head of yours.”

“I just want you guys to be happy,” Eduardo insists, and when Dustin laughs, it is nothing like his old laugh. It makes Eduardo’s chest hurt.

“You should go back to New York,” Eduardo tells Chris, catching him smoking on Mark’s back porch. Chris squints at him, flicks the ashes off the end of his cigarette, and then looks out over the expansive stretch of grass that Eduardo once dropped a hot dog into.

“You should go back to Singapore,” Chris says, and Eduardo realizes with an unpleasant jolt that he’s right. He’s being as ridiculous and selfish as Chris and Dustin are; the world doesn’t stop just because Mark Zuckerberg jumps off a bridge. His life hasn’t stopped, not entirely, but it has definitely slowed down. He has never allowed that before, and Mark doesn’t get to do this to him now.

He starts making arrangements the next day, dreading the long and awful flight and setting up work that’ll force him to be in his Singapore office. He makes a lunch date with his friend Cora, a dinner date with a few colleagues, and texts Bertram to see what his schedule is like, wincing as he gets the news that Bertram’s son made his youth swim team. Eduardo makes plans.

And then Chris tells him that police pulled a drunken Sean Parker off the railing of the Golden Gate Bridge, and Eduardo’s plans change.

It’s not that he is vain enough to think that he can actually do anything for Sean. Sean hates him, and the feeling is entirely mutual. Eduardo is fine with that. He’s fine with Sean doing pretty much anything he wants, really; if he wants to destroy his life slowly and efficiently, Eduardo doesn’t think it’s much of a life to destroy.

Something wrong and aching twists in his stomach, though, at the thought of Sean dead. He knows what it is, knows why he feels this way; Mark wouldn’t want this. Mark apologized to Sean. Sean was the only one of them ever meant to have any peace.

Sean doesn’t deserve peace, but if that’s what Mark wanted for him, Eduardo can’t let him throw it away.

He is not Chris or Dustin; he has no one to find comfort in, not any comfort that would really count, not the kind of comfort that would fix this very Mark-centric hole in him. It’s a hole built from history, and his new life is too healthy to deal with it, too far removed.

“I’m going to see what I can do for Sean,” Eduardo announces the night before he was meant to go back to Singapore. Dustin opens his mouth, a pointed, obvious why on his tongue, and Chris claps his hand over Dustin’s mouth.

“Good luck,” he says, very dourly, and Eduardo tries to smirk at him, tries to elicit some of that dry, flat worry that would naturally follow such a comment from Chris. But there is none; Chris knows why he’s doing this, knows it’s probably hopeless, and knows Eduardo’s going to do it anyway. Eduardo misses the days when he would try and talk him out of something stupid. He seems to accept the stupid now as a part of this ridiculous grief blanketing all of them.

I’m losing him, Eduardo realizes with a panicked lurch, and as he looks at Dustin, steady and obedient at Chris’ side, tossing away what’s likely to be a marriage (something he had always wanted, more than any of them: Eduardo wanted Mark and almost only Mark, Chris wanted someone he could take care of, Mark wanted someone who would understand him, and Dustin wanted someone stable, labeled, sure), he suddenly understands that he’s losing both of them.

“You guys should-” Eduardo says, and then he stops, because he has no idea what they should do. He can’t tell them to get over it when he’s not sure he ever will, not completely. He can’t tell them to move on because they are, sort of, just with each other instead of apart. It’s wrong and right at the same time, and they are both going to break their own hearts.

“Yeah,” Chris says, eyes sparkling just a bit, but not enough. Dustin shrugs. And though it pains him, though it feels like he’s watching them from across the Bay, taking pictures of them shadowed, blurred, and falling, he has to shrug, too. He doesn’t know what else to do.

He doesn’t know what to do to help Sean, either. In the beginning, Eduardo doesn’t even know where to find him; the address Dustin had dug up for him had proved to be a stylish but Spartan condo, barely lived-in but well-kept. He had been let in by an older, wispy housekeeper who gravely informed him that Sean had not been home in weeks. She also seemed super stressed about letting him in, which made a lot of sense in conjunction with the nine different locks on Sean’s front door and the nervous glances she kept shooting at what were most likely security cameras. She had no idea where Sean was or when he would be home, and seemed pretty worried about her uber paranoid employer, which Eduardo couldn’t quite commiserate with, really.

Still, he is determined to make at least some kind of attempt at a Sean intervention, even if it winds up failing. He’s only marginally confident in his own abilities to scare the shit out of Sean, and his backup plan is to guilt him straight. Other than that, he’s not sure what else he can try, and knows he has to find Sean first.

He starts by looking for the nearly-infamous Amelia Ritter, famed for having put up with Sean’s shit longer than anybody else (even Mark, now). Chris and Dustin don’t keep in touch with her that much, and so Eduardo resorts to sending her a casual Facebook message, asking about Sean’s wellbeing and if either of them are free for lunch at some point.

Predictably enough, there is no answer, so Eduardo switches to his other available channel: Marilyn Delpy. He has a number for her and is invited to stop by her office during her lunch hour. He is led through a sleek, expensive law office and brought into a curtain-walled office that reminds him a bit of Mark’s, where a pretty young woman he knows is Marilyn is sitting at her desk, eating a salad.

“Hi, Eduardo,” she says, standing up and shaking his hand. “Have a seat. Can I get you something to eat?”

“No, thanks,” Eduardo says, dropping into the seat across from her desk. He jumps a little as he feels something wet press into his pant leg, and he looks down to see a dog nosing at Eduardo’s leg, looking up at him with wide, sorrowful eyes. Eduardo reaches out to tentatively pat at his brown mop of fur, and the dog gives a small yip and presses into Eduardo’s touch. Something plaintive and aching clenches in Eduardo, because he recognizes the dog; this is Mark’s dog. “Hi,” Eduardo whispers, past the lump in his throat.

“Oh, this is Charlie,” Marilyn tells him. “Jamie’s working in Rio right now, and normally Mark would dog-sit, but obviously-I mean, Charlie doesn’t like to be left alone, especially lately, so I bring him in with me. He’s a very good dog.”

“Yeah,” Eduardo says, as Charlie sits up on his hind legs and presses his paws up on Eduardo’s knees, sniffing him rapidly and yipping again. He is small, some kind of terrier, Eduardo thinks, with big brown eyes that seem perpetually sad to him, even as his short tail wags excitedly behind him.

“He likes you,” Marilyn says with a smile in her voice, and Eduardo pets him again and concentrates on not crying.

“I need to find Sean,” Eduardo says with some difficulty, clearing his throat and letting Charlie lick his hand. Marilyn takes his statement in stride, nodding thoughtfully and putting down her plastic salad fork.

“Okay. Why?”

It’s a good question, one that he’s not entirely sure he can answer, but he tries, because that’s fair. “I need to-I want to see what I can do to help him.” When Marilyn just blinks at him, not judging but still penetrating, he squirms a bit and reluctantly adds, “For Mark. I have to-he wouldn’t want this.”

Marilyn nods, eyes going softer. “I know he wouldn’t. But are you sure you’re the best person for this? You probably don’t remember, but I did sit in on the-”

“You were there for the depositions,” Eduardo says, realizing it as he says it. She nods, and he feels his heart drop a little. “Okay, so you heard the things I said about Sean, but you also heard-”

“‘I was your only friend,’” Marilyn says quietly, and Eduardo stops, sucks in a breath, feeling like she’d just punched him in the stomach.

They fall quiet, Eduardo struggling again, that automatic tear reflex kicking in once again. He valiantly holds them back, looking down at Charlie, inexplicably wanting to hug him. He imagines Mark curled up on the couch with Charlie (and Jamie a nasty, jealous little voice in his head adds), walking Charlie, hugging him goodbye when Jamie took him away. He hates Jamie for taking anything away from Mark, and he scratches behind Charlie’s ears.

“I wasn’t,” Eduardo whispers. “I know. But now he’s-I need to do this.”

“Okay,” Marilyn says again, voice even. Eduardo doesn’t know what that means, is already planning for defeat, slumping his shoulders and rubbing through Charlie’s fur like it’s a nervous tick. He is surprised when Marilyn adds, “He’s at Stanford General right now, being treated for an overdose. He’ll be held there for another 24 hours, and visiting hours are between 10 and 8pm. Don’t go after 6, because Amy will be there, and she won’t let you in.”
Eduardo jerks his head up, eyes wide. Marilyn is looking at him with Charlie, eyes soft and sad, and she shakes her head at the question all over his face. “He really likes you,” she says, nodding towards the dog. “I really wish things could’ve been different.”

Eduardo closes his eyes, breathing harshly out through his nose. It’s sad to think of Mark and the dog, and the couch, and Jamie, but sadder still to think of Mark and Charlie on the couch, and Eduardo there instead of Jamie. It hurts more than anything, he thinks, to want that, and to know he’ll never have it. He would never have taken the dog away. He would never have left Mark, not after having him again.

He would’ve done better a second time. He knows it.

His eyes are just a little unavoidably wet when he says, “Thank you,” and accepts a hug from Marilyn, resisting the urge to scoop Charlie up in his arms and not let Jamie have him again. Eduardo leaves Marilyn’s office sniffling, arms folded around himself against the early spring chill.

He thinks that maybe, when this is over, he’ll get a dog. He thinks he can do that.

Sean looks alien, completely uncomfortable, in his white hospital gown and slippers, though his reclined stance in his hospital bed looks cool and casual, very him. Eduardo feels a now-familiar combination of pity and loathing and forces them both down, approaching Sean with as much caution and blankness as he can.

Of course, it doesn’t help that Sean explodes out of his hospital bed as soon as he sees Eduardo, grabbing his IV pole and brandishing it like a defensive weapon. Eduardo stays away from him, arms out, already annoyed, and he rolls his eyes.

“What are you doing here, I didn’t do anything, okay, I tried to get to the bridge in time, the cops stopped me and I wasn’t close-”

“Sean, shut up,” Eduardo says, clenching his jaw to think of that night. This does not help endear him to Sean, though, and he backs up with the IV pole still held in front of him.

“I didn’t do anything, and you shouldn’t be here, if Amy was here you’d be-”

“Jesus Christ, I said shut up,” Eduardo snaps, and he is not entirely surprised when Sean’s mouth snaps shut, his shoulders slumping. He is thin, pale, eyes bright not with excitement but a certain madness, even more dangerous than the original madness that had drawn Mark to him all those years ago. Eduardo sighs and makes himself relax, rolling the threat out of his limbs and shaking his head when Sean remains tensed and defensive. “I just want to talk to you, God. Put the pole down, please, and stay calm.”

Once again, Sean fails to surprise him by sneering nastily, setting the pole down with a metallic clatter but keeping away, eyes full of contempt. “Oh, I get it. You’re like Hughes, you need a new pet project to make you forget about Mark and the bridge. You’re sad and you need to look at someone who’s worse off than you.”

Eduardo thinks about this. It’s all true, of course, and something burns unpleasantly in him to think that Sean still reads him so well. But Eduardo can read Sean, too. He knows what he is, knows what this is. Crazy is like performance art to Sean, and now grief gives it a deeper, more sorrowful picture. He doesn’t believe Sean feels like he does, doesn’t think he’s capable of it; now, slipping on this act of nonchalance and disinterest feels good, sort of freeing. He is still sad, and everyone knows it, and he doesn’t have to keep reminding himself of it. It’s kind of nice.

He shrugs. “Yeah, I guess you’re right. Can I have your Jell-O?”

Sean stares at him. “What?”

Eduardo drops into the chair by Sean’s bed, reaching onto his retractable tray and picking up Sean’s unopened Jell-O cup, snagging a plastic-wrapped spoon as well. “Sit down, Sean, and tell me about how crazy you are.”

“I’m not crazy,” Sean tells him, running his fingers through his messy, curly hair. “I’m right. Mark is alive, and I’m going to prove it as soon as they let me out of here.”

He has to ignore the twinge in his gut at the thought of Mark alive, the ridiculous, outlandish hope that has no place in him anymore. Instead, he concentrates on what an asshole Sean looks like, and starts delicately eating his Jell-O. “Uh-huh. Tell me how.”

Sean opens his mouth and doesn’t stop talking for the next three hours. He paces around the room, often gesticulating wildly, barking at the nurses who step in to check on him, accusing them of trying to throw off his concentration. He looks crazy, despite every insistence otherwise, and when Eduardo points this out not gently at all, he sits down on the bed and puts his head in his hands.

“He’s alive,” Sean says. “I know Mark. I know he wouldn’t do this. And if he did do it, he wouldn’t apologize for it.”

Eduardo ignores the logic in that, pushes aside the sense. He nods along like he believes, and Sean scoffs and knows he doesn’t, knows he can’t let himself.

“There are signs, Eduardo,” Sean tells him. “There are signs all over the place. I know where to look. You’re just too-you know. Heartbroken, or whatever.”

He leans in close, his eyes electric, wired like sparking fuses. Eduardo tries not to recoil, to curl his lip. He doesn’t deny the heartbroken thing, because he hasn’t been kidding anyone, can’t kid anyone anymore, just nods slowly, still cool and calm.

“Okay, Sean.”

“I’ll show you,” Sean says, voice hard. “I’ll prove it. I’ll bring Mark back to you.” He lowers his voice, and his eyes shift. “You just have to get me out of here. They think I want to kill myself, but fuck that-I know Mark left me clues on the bridge. I have to find them. Why else would he text me? He knew I was the only one that would believe.”

Maybe it’s the faking, the careful carelessness, putting up a front for the first time in what feels like months, but somehow, Eduardo agrees right away, almost eager. He doesn’t believe, can’t, but Sean’s manic surety is addicting, enveloping, and Eduardo finds himself very nearly swept up in it. Near enough, at least, to start planning to get Sean released early, scoping out what doctors he has to speak to, specialists he can bribe.

“I’ll get him back for you,” Sean tells Eduardo.

Sean is crazy, but Eduardo is a little sick of being sad, sick enough that crazy doesn’t seem so awful.

The thing about Sean is that it’s all pretending with him. Everything is a performance, an act, designed to make you more than you are, or sometimes just different. This appeals to Eduardo, and it helps him withstand the verbal pummeling Amy Ritter gives him when he gets Sean discharged and brings him pants and a shirt that isn’t held together by a string in the back. What Eduardo really is right now is sort of helplessly sad, always, unavoidably, and he just wants to be something else for a little while.

He and Sean go to Sean’s condo after the hospital, because Eduardo insists that he tell his housekeeper that he’s still alive. He watches with a smirk as Sean sort of melts into a hug from her and then glares over his shoulder at him. Eduardo likes Sean’s housekeeper.

Sean calls in a bunch of private investigators, and makes them show Eduardo all of their “proof”: meetings and arrangements Mark had made before the bridge, statistics about Golden Gate suicides and likely causes of death. “People have survived it with minimal damage,” Sean tells him emphatically, scowling when Eduardo just pushes over the numbers of how many people hadn’t survived. “There was no body,” Sean argues, and Eduardo underlines the number of bodies that have been carried away, never fished out or washed up.

He still humors Sean, though, driving him out to the bridge after feeling certain that Sean is just paranoid and not actually suicidal. He stays in the car, trying not to vomit, head bowed against the steering wheel while Sean searches for nonexistent messages or clues that he’s sure Mark left him.

“Do you really think that if he’d gone to all that trouble to fake his own death, he’d want you to be the one to find him?” Eduardo asks, voice carefully even but unable to keep all the disdain out. Sean is dejected in the passenger seat, muttering to himself, but when he speaks his voice is strong and certain again, confident like he almost always is, even when he shouldn’t be.

“He knows I’m the only one who would look.”

Eduardo purses his lips and keeps driving. That makes it sound like he doesn’t care enough to look, but he’s just not delusional enough. There’s a difference.

“He knew how to do this,” Sean tells him later. “I taught him everything-fake social, fake birth certificate, fake passport; he knows where to go and who to avoid if he’d ever have to.”

“People don’t fake their own deaths and assume new identities, Sean,” Eduardo says tiredly. He is always tired now. Sean is completely exhausting, because hate is exhausting. “This isn’t a movie.”

“Mark could,” Sean says. Eduardo is beginning to suspect he’s never actually going to give up; it would be touching if it weren’t so aggravating. “Mark knew how, I made sure of that. And when you have enough money, you can do anything. You have to know that.”

“Okay,” Eduardo says, clipped. “So why? Why would he do that?”

That’s when Sean starts telling stories.

Sean has always been good at telling stories. Eduardo knows this objectively, even if he’s never allowed himself to be taken in by them like Mark has. He has a gift for selling words, spinning tales that could be lies but are good enough to listen to anyway. And Eduardo still doesn’t allow himself to be drawn in completely, because this is Sean, and it could all be 99% bullshit. But these are stories of Mark, stories of someone Eduardo barely knows anymore. It’s riveting.

Sean tells them like he knows this is what Eduardo needs to keep going. He doles out little bits of Mark, his life and the person he was, the person he became for Facebook, and the person Facebook turned him into.

“Every meeting was a fight in the last few weeks,” Sean tells him. “Everyone had always liked Mark, but they were just as fast to turn on him when the press did. I taught him not to trust anyone, and I don’t think he ever really did, not fully. That’s why he saw it coming.”

“Saw what coming?” Eduardo asks, leaning forward, trying not to be eager. Sean smiles grimly at him, employing a dramatic pause.

“The board was going to force him out. Well, they were going to try, and probably succeed, if not do some serious damage anyway.”

Eduardo doesn’t need to know Mark all that well to feel the horror of that possibility, to know how much that would’ve destroyed him. But all the feeling does is make the suicide more plausible. Facebook was Mark’s whole life. Of course the threat of losing it would drive Mark to the bridge.

“That’s not true, though,” Sean says, and he has the gall to look disappointed in Eduardo. “Facebook wasn’t his whole life. It was just a big part. His life was like-there was all his charity stuff, which a lot of people don’t know about because he refused to talk about it a lot, even though he probably should have, it would have helped. And we used to take trips all the time, a bunch of us, down to Tahoe and up the coast, Napa and stuff. He liked wine sometimes, but beer more, and Jamie took him on a few brewery tours. They both liked South America, and Eastern Europe. He wanted to learn to cook. That was his life, asshole. You can’t have a life out of a website.”

Eduardo knows all this. He has seen the pictures, looked through Mark’s Timeline, had been to Mark’s house. He knew about his friends and only feels a little bitter that they always included Sean. But maybe he hadn’t always believed it. These glimpses only seemed odd to him, foreign to what he knows Mark as. He wasn’t with him enough to understand them. He never thought he wanted to; he has his own life, of course, on a different continent, and it’s rich and wonderful and he knows he’ll go back to it very soon. It’s good to go back to. He had imagined that for Mark only distantly, hoped for it for him, but never truly believed in it.

“Tell me,” he says, a little hoarsely. And Sean’s stories continue, long and rambling, full of easy affection and a determination Eduardo doesn’t fully understand. These stories are why Sean is doing this. Eduardo doesn’t know why he’s doing this. He doesn’t have stories like these, only from long ago.

“I taught him everything,” Sean says. “I-I taught him, he knew, he knew about Roy Raymond and he knew it was cold, so he wouldn’t-he knew. I have to find him.” He makes a weird face, and Eduardo thinks this would be a good moment to cry, but instead he just feels empty. Maybe he’s cured. Maybe he’s beyond it. “He wanted to go sky-diving. He wouldn’t do this.”

“Sean.”

“Jamie cheated on him, and Mark bought him a dog,” Sean says, meeting Eduardo’s eyes. “He wouldn’t do this.”

Eduardo goes back to Singapore.

This is not because he has given up on Sean; he had spent a few more days ascertaining that Sean was not suicidal, self-destructive or in any particular danger from anything but his own psychosis. He had even managed to calm the drugs and drinking down by very logically convincing Sean that he’d find Mark with more success sober. No, he has not given up on Sean; he has mostly done what he had set out to do. But that’s not why he goes back, either.

Eduardo goes back to Singapore because a small, desperate part of him is starting to believe Sean. Even in Singapore, back with his friends and his work and his life, there is a tiny part of his ripped-up heart that believes, just a little bit, that Mark may not have actually died.

It’s completely unhealthy, slightly terrifying, and not at all conducive to moving on. So Eduardo settles back into his life comfortably, the crying thing suddenly a thing of the past now that he’s really concentrating on it.

Spending days without crying requires a lot of attention and focus, and it actually really helps to have that to focus on. He concentrates on being okay so much that one day he wakes up and actually starts to feel okay. He can think of Mark and only shake a little bit, can feel the sadness as if from a distance, dull and hazy.

Working is good; his friends are better, happier than everybody in San Francisco, more self-absorbed and therefore not so hyperaware of him and everything he’s feeling. It takes the pressure off, and Eduardo relaxes back into the good company.

“Are you still sad, sweetheart?” his mother asks him over the phone, and Eduardo thinks about it before answering.

“Yes,” Eduardo says hesitantly, but he adds, “But not as much as before. I think I’m really better.”

He thinks he’s always going to be sad. He’s resigned to that, really. The only way to not be sad is to forget, and that’s completely impossible. But he’s always known that there are varying degrees of sadness. Eduardo has experienced the type of sadness where it is impossible to get out of bed. This has been different. He can live with this sadness, he knows. He can survive it.

He still worries about the other survivors-Chris is not back in New York yet, no matter how much Eduardo tries to nudge him away. Eduardo says, “Mark wouldn’t-” and Chris sort of explodes, “God, Eduardo, not everything is about Mark!”

Eduardo is starting to learn that. Sometimes, it’s hard to believe.

It’s easier to believe that Sean Parker would be the one to come and wreck his comfort; really, Eduardo should’ve expected this. He goes into his office one day, finds his assistant looking guilty and harried, saying, “Sorry, he said it was really important and he-I don’t know, I just agreed, he seemed nice but kind of strange, too.”

Eduardo sighs, “Sean,” and wishes he’d just stayed in bed that morning.

Sean has his feet on Eduardo’s desk when he walks in, and he grins at him. It’s a normal Sean grin, smarmy, and it makes Eduardo feel annoyed and dirty. He also feels slightly relieved, and can’t quite explain why, really. “Nice office,” Sean tells him, as Eduardo sighs again and walks around his desk, putting it pointedly between them and sitting down.

“What do you want, Sean?”

“Nothing,” Sean tells him. He looks healthier, like he’d definitely taken Eduardo’s advice, and smug instead of crazed. That worries him. “This is about what you want.”

“And what do I want?” Eduardo asks flatly.

“Proof,” Sean says, and he pulls a file folder from the inside of his leather jacket. Eduardo glares a little at the jacket, hoping he’s sweating in the humidity outside, but obligingly pulls the folder over to him, frowning over it and ignoring the way his stomach jumps. He opens it and squints down at black-and-white pictures of a man he doesn’t recognize; it’s definitely not Mark, too tall and well-built, and Eduardo feels stupid for even hoping for a second.

“What is this?”

“Remember when you told me to get a therapist?” Sean asks, and Eduardo nods, looking at the rest of the contents of the folder. They seem to include therapy bills paid by Mark, to a Dr. Michel Marleau, which makes Eduardo frown a bit. Thinking of it, though, he remembers someone in Mark’s circle having mentioned therapy, and therapy doesn’t always work. He feels a sudden, warped anger for this Marleau, and it must show on his face because Sean chuckles a bit. “Yeah, exactly. I started looking into Mark’s history and-okay, he had a therapist way back when, another one, this really nice lady named Julie. This was right after the lawsuit, I guess. So Mark got along with her and they finished up with each other and he was fine, right, he was fully functional without it. And then about six months before the bridge, he starts seeing this Marleau guy, completely out of the blue, without telling anybody-”

“Mark was always ashamed of needing help,” Eduardo says, and Sean gives him a frustrated huff.

“Okay, see, no, that’s not true. You should really stop making all these definitive statements about the guy you saw maybe three times a year for the last eight years.” When Eduardo blanches and tries to argue (even though Sean is, essentially, right, even if it doesn’t feel that way, especially now), Sean holds his hands up. “No, wait. Hear me out. I get it, okay. I get that not seeing him all the time makes it worse. I understand. But listen to me. Mark told everyone about his therapy last time. He wanted people to know that he was trying, wanted to prove himself. It was just a part of him. So the fact that I only just found out about this Marleau guy was really weird to me.”

Sean pulls out another file, with more pictures of the man that is presumably Marleau, and looks so triumphant that Eduardo nearly shivers. “Marleau was not a therapist, Eduardo.”

Eduardo looks at the file and does not see the words until Sean says them. “He was a diving instructor. Bam. There’s your proof.”

“I don’t-” Eduardo swallows hard, and his hands are starting to shake. This is a familiar, helpless feeling, and he hates it more, knowing that there’s another side to it, and he had seen it, reached it. “I don’t know what you want me to-”

“Marleau is from Montreal,” Sean tells him, almost gently, like he’s aware of the Earth trying to swallow Eduardo whole right now. “I’ve tracked him there; he fucked off out of San Francisco the same day that Mark jumped. And look at this.” Sean pulls out one last picture, and Eduardo has to bite down on a groan when he sees it’s one of Alphonse’s photos, blown up and blurry, with a red circle around a seemingly random spot under the bridge. Eduardo looks away, closing his eyes, and Sean slaps his palm down against the desk, hard. “No, Eduardo, look. You have to look.”

Eduardo looks. He doesn’t see it at first, even with Sean pointing at it, but then he leans in closer and feels his stomach drop.

It’s a white corner poking out from under the shadow of the bridge. It is not far from Mark’s blurry figure as it hits the water.

It could be a boat.

“Jesus Christ,” Eduardo whispers, and the rush of belief that goes through him hurts in its intensity. Hope, bright and ridiculously painful, slashes through him, and he clenches his hands against the desk. He doesn’t want to believe it, he doesn’t want this hope. But it’s there, and he hates Sean for it, hates the hunger he’s called out. “I-I can’t-”

“You can,” Sean says easily, like there’s not even a question. He says the next sentence like that, too. “We have to go to Montreal.”

Yes, that’s indisputably true, even as Eduardo shakes his head, shuts his eyes against tears. The crying thing is supposed to be over; he knows how to deal with the sadness now, knows the varying degrees.

But he doesn’t know how to deal with hope. The sadness never prepared him for this.

continued here.