Fic: M.A.D., Mutually Assured Destruction [The Social Network][3/3]

[antistar_e]

<-- part two

3 | Facebook

In hindsight, it probably would have been easier to find and kill the Winklevoss twins.

Oh, please, Christy manages to convey, using only the power of her eyebrows. Like I was ever going to go quietly.

"She's very articulate for someone who's bound and gagged," Eduardo comments, out of breath and bleeding from the side of his mouth, where Christy clocked him one. There was a reason why she never bothered with a conceal-and-carry, because her heels alone are deadly weapons. Mark wishes he'd known this before.

She's missing the shoes now, tied to a chair by her wrists and ankles, holes torn in the soles of her nylons. She does particularly violent things to them with her eyes.

Trying to regain his composure, Eduardo tugs on the lapels of his suit, straightening out the cuffs. Mark knows the majority of Eduardo's expressions by rote, and there's a kind of deadness to his eyes here that's uncommon: usually by this point in a murder, he radiates the same intense, almost joyous focus that Mark gets during a particularly strong coding session. He turns, brushing his fingertips along Mark's shoulder and slipping back out the door. The accelerant's still in the rental car (and also a broom and dustpan, which Mark brusquely asked to borrow from Sean's girl du jour, who was already so used to him that she didn't even bat an eyelash at the request.)

Without thinking, Mark closes the distance between himself and Christy, kneeling in front of her and pulling her gag down under her chin.

He expects her to start screaming the second she can, even though he knows for a fact that they're on the dead stretch of El Camino and there's nothing but scrub and half-finished construction projects and no one to hear her for at least a mile, and sounds never carry that far in urban California, anyway. But she just goes still all over, fixing her eyes on him and setting her lips together.

They stare at each other for a long beat, swaying minutely like snakes charmed, responding to the smallest twitch of the other.

Finally, Christy speaks, a cutting, calculating undertone to her voice. "I knew it was you. It had to be you. But it wasn't until you so were desperate for him to come out to California that it occurred to me that he might be part of it, too."

Mark tucks his hands inside the pouch of his hoodie. "Nobody ever suspects Wardo, his face does things to people," he allows, and tilts his head, "But you got extremely possessive of him extremely fast. Didn't you know that I was having sex with him, too?"

"Of course I did." There's no vitriol to the comment. She states it like it's the least important part. "I wasn't worried about you. You wouldn't kill him, and he wouldn't kill you, but the quickest way to learn about any other girls was to play the crazy, jealous harpy. That way I would have some guess as to who you might kill next. Have you killed anyone since Alice?" She bites out.

"No," he answers, and sees a number of interesting things flinch over her face: relief, like it might have been her fault if they'd killed someone behind her back, and horror, because maybe some part of her had been holding out on the hope that she was wrong, and they weren't responsible for --

"My Alice?" she goes, and for the first time, her voice shakes.

"We cut her open in her bathtub," Mark informs her conversationally, and there it is: Christy's head rocks back on her neck like he's physically struck her, and Mark watches her avidly, because he's always wondered how a normal person would react to what he and Eduardo do. "Drained her of blood best we could, then dissected her into fifty different pieces and hid her in the crawlspaces in her apartment building. She was unconscious when we killed her," he adds after a beat, like it might be a comfort. "So she didn't feel it."

Her shoulders snap straight at that, quick and vicious.

"You'll never get away with it," she lashes out. "Your actions have consequences, Mark, and you ruined whatever chance you had at success the very first moment you decided your own self-absorption and your own arrogance was more important than somebody's life. The quicker Facebook grows, the more people are going to be interested in you and someone's going to see. You and Eduardo can't have Facebook and murder people as a side hobby, it will never work. It'll be worse than death for you, losing everything. You will. You will lose it all."

"I need Facebook," Mark snaps back. "I will do whatever is necessary to protect it."

Something shifts in her expression, her hatred sharpening as understanding dawns on her. "Oh," she goes, and her mouth quirks up, mocking, the way you do when you see someone trip over themselves. "You think Facebook is going to be what saves him."

"What?" Mark's brows come down. She leans back against her restraints, eyes flashing, and he surges into her space, drawing a hand out of his hoodie to grab her jaw. "Wait, what do you mean by that?"

She opens her mouth, but before she can say anything, they hear footsteps, loud and echoing: Eduardo, returning.

Their gazes snap together, and Mark goes on an exhale, "good-bye, Christy," and pulls his other hand out of his hoodie, slamming the chloroformed rag to her mouth just as she lashes out, head snapping forward like she's going in for a headbutt. They meet in the middle, scuffling, and Mark grabs on, holding her down as she thrashes, screaming in the back of her throat -- the high, instinctive animal noise of someone about to die, fighting for every last breath of life. He presses down so hard with the rag that he can feel her teeth slice through her lip, the rush of blood warm even through the rag and his latex gloves, and Mark squeezes his eyes shut, revulsion churning in his stomach. He runs the simplest parts of code through his head like prayer (body { text align: left; color --), repeating until her struggles slowly trail off, her body twitching spastically underneath him until even that stops.

When he finally opens his eyes again, the first thing he sees is Eduardo, standing a pace away with a gasoline can in one hand and an unreadable expression on his face.

"Hang on," says Mark, his voice flat even to his own ears, and he digs around in his pockets -- car keys, no, house keys, no, spare USB drive, and ah, Dry-Erase marker he'd accidentally stolen from the Wall, there it is.

He pulls the marker out, twisting the cap off and extending a hand. Gingerly, he straightens Christy's jaw, wiping the blood from her mouth and chin. Her pulse beats sluggishly against his fingertips as he tilts her head up so he can draw a giant black X over her lips.

He pulls away, aware of the own trembling in his hands as he caps the marker again. Eduardo steps up to him, touching their shoulders together.

"Did she say something to you?" he asks, finally, and Mark lifts his eyes, flicking over every familiar part of Eduardo's face; his stupid caterpillar eyebrows, the duck of his mouth, the way his eyes follow Mark like they can't help it.

He breathes out, because when it comes to Eduardo, there's not even a choice.

"Nothing important, no," he says, and musters up a smile, nudging at Eduardo's arm with his knuckle. "Hey, didn't you tell me that the very first thing she ever said to you was to ask you to Facebook her?"

Eduardo laughs; the sound of it rushes through Mark faster than blood. "I'm pretty sure she wasn't talking about this facebook," he goes, grinning slim and sly as the thin side of a dime.

Mark lifts a shoulder, "Well, she did ask," and Eduardo laughs again, leaning in to roll his forehead against Mark's. The gasoline can sloshes between them.

3 |

They turn their backs as Christy burns, and don't ask each other why. It's not their prettiest kill.

(The picture Mark winds up keeping for her profile in his facebook isn't of her with the X over her mouth, or even the bits of black ash and large, charred bone that they sweep into the dustpan, but instead, it's the one she keeps on her real Facebook: the four of them all crammed together to fit into the frame, Eduardo with the camera held aloft because he had the longest reach and Alice with her arms wrapped around Mark's neck and Christy caught laughing, uninhibited, nose crinkled up and teeth on display. No matter how Mark tries, he can't shake the image.)

3 |

When Mark wakes up the next morning, in his own bed in his own house, he finds his nose pressed underneath the wing of Eduardo's shoulder, too close to his armpit for comfort. With a groggy noise of protest, he rolls over, forgetting what he's doing as he does it and so winds up spending another minute or more tangled with his sheets on the edge of the mattress, wondering how he got there and tempted to give up and fall back to sleep.

Finally, though, he gets up and goes into the bathroom to piss and brush his teeth.

He passes through the front room, which is void of any of his programmers passed out on themselves or each other. That doesn't necessarily mean they aren't passed out on themselves or each other elsewhere, and if this was a normal morning, Mark would be sending out remorseless text messages summoning them back for the day's assignments. He didn't even check the RSS feed when he came in last night. He hasn't been separated from Facebook this long since the start of summer.

Instead of feeling itchy with inactivity and separation, he mostly just feels too heavy to do anything at all besides stand around in his kitchen, drinking what's left of the orange juice from the carton and thinking about what Christy said.

You think Facebook is going to be what saves him.

She's dead, they killed her, and there's no master of the universe glow surrounding that thought. She's dead, no one will ever find her, and Mark just feels tired.

You will lose it all.

No, I won't, Mark thinks back, vicious, like there's any chance she's going to reply now. He tightens his grip around the carton, and it groans in protest. He will protect Facebook at all costs, because he needs it to succeed. He needs it to be bigger than $300,000 on oil futures. He needs it to be bigger and more beautiful than murder.

You think Facebook is going to be what saves him.

Bare feet scuff the linoleum behind him, and Mark turns around as Eduardo comes into the kitchen. The morning sunlight streaming in through the blinds sends sharp slats of golden light across his chest, his arms, his face, catches on his unattractively sleep-flattened hair. He smiles at the sight of Mark, kneejerk, and it's the smile Mark didn't realize he missed until this very second: it was the "oh, look, aren't we wonderful, Mark, we are, how did that happen," smile.

"Morning," Eduardo goes, the word breaking in the middle around a yawn.

Mark leans his hip against the edge of the kitchen sink. I don't want to kill another person, I'm not going back to that life, he wants to say. But I want that joy I see in your face when you think someone's death is particularly spectacular. I want it for me. What would make me that spectacular to you, Wardo?

Do you ever feel remorse? he wants to ask.

"What gave me away?" is what comes out of his mouth.

"Your sparkling personality," Eduardo answers immediately, stepping over and taking the orange juice from him. "Sorry, no, wait, what gave what away?" he tilts his head back to finish off the cartoon in a couple loud, gulping swallows.

"Back in freshman year. How did you catch me?"

Eduardo's expression clears. "Oh, that," he says, and then shakes the empty carton a little, like, what am I supposed to do with this? Absently, Mark takes it from him and tosses it into the sink basin. Eduardo rolls his eyes.

"Jonathan Reid," he elaborates, and the relevant facebook page leaps instantly to the forefront of Mark's mind. He was the last person Mark killed before getting the scholarship to Harvard. "Eighteen years old, founded strangled to death in the boy's locker room on Halloween. The cops dismissed it as a prank gone wrong, but the interesting thing they mentioned in the paper was the object he'd been garroted with was a softer fabric --" he presses the flat of his hand against Mark's chest, thumb and forefinger lined up against his collarbones. "-- not unlike the drawstrings found in most basketball shorts and hooded sweatshirts."

Jonathan used to date this girl from Mark's mathlete group, and he'd overheard Mark comment to someone, purely hypothetically, that if he got the opportunity, he would sniff a girl's panties just to see what all the fuss was about, because that's what Mark did (investigate for the sake of investigating, he means, not pantysniffing.) It might as well have been a red dawn the next morning, because it was like war trying to go anywhere. Not that Mark had much social status before then, but that pretty much killed it.

Jonathan Reid had to die, simple as that.

"And I thought, well, that's interesting." Eduardo's tilted close enough that Mark can measure the length of his eyelashes, his voice pitched too low to even be heard on the other side of the kitchen. It doesn't matter that no one else is there, because that's just the way of people who keep secrets. Mark does it too. "Now, not to seem like I'm bragging or anything, but I'm somewhat of an expert in strangling --"

"Sure, strangling chickens," Mark interrupts.

"Hush, they were lovely, no matter what the animal cruelty charges said. And yes, I've heard every murder most fowl joke under the sun. Now, it takes confidence to strangle someone with a drawstring. You'd had to have done it before to know it'd work, otherwise you'd probably go with a classic, like piano wire. So I thought to myself, self --" he drops his voice with a flair. "There's someone living in this area who is preying on the weak and the innocent and the --"

"Six-foot-tall basketball scholarship drop-outs?"

"Stop that, I've got a flow going," Eduardo says, trying to be serious, but there's a grin around the corners of his mouth. "But yes. And then it was just a matter of going through every single death in the area --" Mark opens his mouth to add, and NYC, but Eduardo shoots him a look that clearly says, I have murdered people more innocent than you and your bare foot is an inch from mine and I will blame the hour and stomp on your toes if I have to. "-- and determining which of them were yours."

"Sounds time-consuming."

Eduardo laughs, and the hand he has on Mark's chest slides north, cradling the curve of his jaw and tilting it up. "Oh, right, because you've never taken up any of my time before, Mark," he says, and there's something in his voice that doesn't quite meet the jocularity on his face; it rings deeper than that, and Mark responds before he can think about it, planting his hands on Eduardo's spine and pulling him in to kiss him, because that's just what you do when someone's looking at you like that.

I'll save him, Mark thinks to Christy, nonsensical.

Their ankles tangle together as they step into each other, knocking shins against the cabinet doors under the sink, making them rattle. Eduardo's tongue slips along his, a languid hello. The sunlight from the window warms his eyelids, setting everything to a rosy glow.

Another scuffle, the familiar noise of someone's socks catching against the kitchen entryway, where the linoleum is peeling up a little bit.

Mark tenses, but Sean's already speaking, caustic and dry as bone, "I'm glad to see you two fixed things."

Still surgically attached to Mark at the mouth, Eduardo's middle finger expresses his hostility just fine.

"Good morning to you too," Sean answers without missing a beat. More scuffling feet, and the fridge opens with a soft schwk. "And you drank all the orange juice, of course you did. Whose turn is it to pick up groceries?"

Mark has no idea -- it's one of the benefits of having staff. Food, beer, energy drinks, and the occasional jam jar of urine (Dustin's girlfriend Tiff does biomed down at Stanford: nobody really asks questions about the urine, because it seems like one of those things you can live a long, happy life not knowing) appear in the fridge as if by conveyor belt. If someone actually goes out and buys them, well, Mark never notices.

"Never mind," says Sean, realizing this in the same moment. "Hey, so about the --"

"Sean," and Eduardo finally pulls away from Mark's lips, the taste of concentrate and citrus strong at the roof of his mouth. If it wasn't for Eduardo's hands, anchored around his hips, Mark would swear his center of gravity shifts, like the axis of the world had started spinning in another direction entirely and he hadn't even noticed. "I am going to take my CEO and we are going down that hallway --" he points helpfully. "-- and we are going to spend all day in bed. If you need his assistance, you can message him. I'm sure he'll get it, whenever I let him up."

To Mark's surprise, this actually seems to shut Sean up for a second, because he blinks and looks questioningly at Mark, who shrugs back at him, equal parts, I don't even know, and, Sorry, but not really, because hey, man, booty call, you know how it is.

Eduardo tugs him into the hallway, accidentally-on-purpose stumbling into him so that he could lip at the spot under Mark's jaw, where he's ticklish. Sean lets them go with having the last word, which is uncharacteristic of him, though that might because he's expecting Mark to come up with a properly scathing retort on his own. Mark takes great pleasure in messing with everyone's expectations of him -- it never gets old.

"You're not actually going to attempt to keep me in here all day, are you?" he asks as soon as the bedroom door closes behind them, the lock snicking shut.

Eduardo just grins at him, a slim flash of teeth, and steps into him, overlapping Mark's feet with his own cold toes. Mark shifts his weight, stretching up into the contact with all the self-assuredness of someone about to get kissed and tolerantly takes it for granted.

Their noses drag together. "No, seriously, Wardo," he says, tilting away. "I do have work that needs to get done."

Eduardo accepts the diversion, mouthing along the side of his face without intent. "No, you don't," he goes easily.

"No, I really do, and so do you." A well-aimed pinch to the ribs has Eduardo twitching away. "We need to put together a portfolio for you to give to Peter Thiel's people."

"Mark!" Eduardo widens his eyes at him, scandalized, and Mark knows he isn't going to like where this is going. "It's Saturday morning! It's already past sundown on Friday, you're not allowed to work. We're not even supposed to turn the lights on manually until the end of the day."

Mark lifts his eyebrows. "Seriously? You did not just go there."

Eduardo sits down on the edge of Mark's mattress, amidst Mark's untidy half-price IKEA sheets (which are blue, but if they weren't right in front of his face, Mark probably wouldn't be able to tell you that: this isn't really his room so much as the corner of the house he's taken over with personal items, where he sleeps whenever he wants to not be awake.) "What?" he goes, making innocent eyes. "It's the Sabbath, Mark. Keep holy the Sabbath."

"There are so many fallacies with that argument I don't even know where to begin. We've never kept holy the Sabbath before."

"That's because you are horrible at being Jewish."

Mark rolls his eyes so hard it actually hurts. "My family was only Jewish when they wanted something to complain about. I never went to Hebrew school, so I don't know what impractical perimeters there are around what does or does not quantify as 'work' in Orthodox tradition, nor do I care. You're just looking for an excuse to keep me in this room --"

"Oh, thank you," exhales Eduardo, who reaches out and catches his fingers along the meat of Mark's hand, snagging hold and dragging him close. For a moment, his fingertips slide over the ring Mark still wears on his smallest finger; Erica's class ring, the one Eduardo had taken from her corpse when he was done with it and given to Mark the way cats bring home dead mice for approval. He cages him in with his knees. "And here I was, thinking you weren't going to cotton on."

"A day in bed isn't feasible, Wardo," Mark reminds him, matter-of-fact.

Eduardo sighs. "We're supposed to be doing this together, you know," he says, and Mark fumbles mentally, trying to catch up with the train of thought that lead him there. "Mutually assured destruction and all that, remember? I follow you, you follow me, we make art where other people only see death. And I just -- don't leave me behind, okay?"

Mark's fingers curl around his, clutching impulsively.

"We go together, you and I," Eduardo continues, the same simple way people say that water is made of hydrogen and oxygen. "And I -- I want this, okay. Please," he lets out a shuddering breath, and Mark gets how much this is costing him to say, and goes still. "Tomorrow, we'll deal with Peter Thiel and that paperwork. Tomorrow, I'll report my girlfriend missing. But right now? Right now, I just want to remember why I love you."

Mark closes his eyes, as if not having to look will somehow make that easier to deal with, like if his eyes are closed, he can keep everything from flying out of him. "And if Sean or Dustin come and try to drag me off to code? Because you know they will."

A tentative smile shifts at the corner of Eduardo's lips, like it and the rest of his face aren't sure of each other yet. "We'll moan theatrically loud like porn stars and pound on the walls until they go away?" he offers, and Mark throws his head back and laughs, because this is the Eduardo he knows, the one that recognized him for who he was the second he met him because of a hoodie string, the one who tortured chickens then tortured people and now he's here, with Mark, and Mark thinks, briefly, of statistics -- the ratios of genius IQs in China and the odds that out of all the strange, beautiful, fucked-up people Mark had the chance of meeting, he met Eduardo.

Eduardo's got his mouth right along the bottom curve of Mark's ribs, licking and teething without any particular purpose, just like he should be doing it because the skin is there and he can. Mark curls his spine, an arm around Eduardo's shoulders for balance so he can bury his face in the hair by his ear.

They stay like that for a moment, and then Eduardo speaks.

"This is my favorite, you know," he says into the dark, nothing space between their bodies, where it's theirs and nobody else's. Mark can feel his lips moving, feel the breath he takes expand across his back, feel the pulse in his skin like it's his own. "This, right here. This is the best of all things." He lifts his head minutely, so that his forehead rests against Mark's chin. "Do you --"

"It's still just you," Mark cuts in immediately. Eduardo makes a low, questioning noise, and Mark breathes out with only cursory impatience. "Remember, after Alice, you asked me a question. The answer's the same. It's still just you. Objectively, I liked the killing -- it was like making something and knowing it'll be a classic after you're gone, the full culmination of your career. It's intellectually and existentially satisfying, but, Wardo, there's a difference between success and happiness."

He swallows, his tongue feeling sandy and strange, and he squeezes his eyes shut and presses his head against Eduardo's, like the sheer physicality of it will say what he needs it to say. "It's always been you."

It'll be worse than death, losing everything. And you will. You will lose it all.

When Eduardo draws away, slow, Mark's eyes fly to his the second they come into focus, because he can't not. Eduardo's eyes are bigger, rounder than he's ever seen them, like he's trying to look at the whole world at once and can only see Mark, and there aren't words, aren't numbers, isn't any tangible way to describe what this does to him. He looks at Mark the way you do when you've found not one answer, not two answers, but every answer to everything you've ever wondered. He looks like if you asked him, right now, what 2+2 is, he'd give you that shocked, world-scape look and answer, "Mark," without hesitation.

"You," he goes, and Mark's not sure if there's any sound to the way his mouth moves, but there doesn't need to be. "That. You wonderful, genius, articulate bastard."

"Always with the adjectives," Mark comments, smiling despite himself.

Slowly, so monumentally slowly, Eduardo puts his hands on either side of Mark's face and pulls him in, catching him up in the kind of kiss so deep and thorough it's like it would kill them to stop.

You will lose it all.

It's the end of June. They've got red, white, and blue everything painted on store windows, and the news radio runs the standard Fourth of July warnings about fireworks, like every other city around the country, every single year.

It's the end of June. Mark is twenty-one years old, there are thirteen people in his facebook (the private one,) and he has Eduardo Saverin with him in bed.

It's the end of June, and this is the happiest Mark Zuckerberg will ever be.

3 |

Close to the end, on one of the very last days, Georgiana from Legal heaves a sigh and puts down her list of greater Bay Area lawyers, marked with four different colors of highlighter. She puts her fingers to her temple and looks across the table at him. She's older than he is, but most people who work for him are. "Mr. Zuckerberg, this would be so much easier if you just answer one question. Do you feel any remorse?"

Mark flicks a look at her over the top of his tablet PC. It's nine-thirty in the morning and they won't let him get on to more important things until he deals with this. You can't ignore Eduardo and the lawsuit forever, man, Chris shrugged in apology, all but frog-marching him to the conference room.

"No," he answers, monotone, because there are certain things Mark feels remorse about and he doesn't have room in all of that to care about whatever Eduardo's suing him for. Mark loses no sleep over shares. "No. Let Wardo come at us with lawyers if it makes him feel better. We have the money."

"Fine," says Georgiana shortly, her mouth thinning with displeasure, and he wants to laugh at her, because how do people get by with knowing so staggeringly little. He pushed a girl from a tree when he was thirteen and he set a girl on fire so much more recently than that, and she sits there, condescending to him on how ineptly he kicked his best friend out of his company, like she or her opinion are of any import whatsoever.

Mark figures out somewhere along the way that Eduardo's right -- it never goes away and it's not something you can just turn off. Just because Mark is successful now doesn't mean he stops getting fed up with stupid people, doesn't stop him from wanting to jab their eyes out with a fork or casually shove them into oncoming traffic.

He just finally developed what everybody else got early on: the ability to step back from those things and say, that's not right, and then not do them.

Is this what it's like, he wonders, to be a normal human being, all this second-guessing and backtracking? It's amazing anyone gets anything done.

It's been coming for a very long time, the decision that led up to sneaking behind Eduardo's back and betraying him with fine print -- it probably started as early as that time in Kirkland, when Eduardo fidgeted and said, "we haven't killed anyone since Erica" the way other people would say, "Have you fed the cats yet today?" -- and no matter what anyone tries to imply, later, it isn't something Mark took lightly. He puts it off and codes, endlessly codes, just so he wouldn't have to think about it.

He starts asking people for advice in his weakest moments, when he's face-down on his own desk and he can't tell ceiling from floor or tomorrow from yesterday. No one bothers him, not anymore, because he's CEO, bitch.

Eventually, though (and this is the part Mark never wants to admit, not to anyone,) people start answering.

"Well, if you want our help, you're going to have to explain the problem," someone points out to him during one of these moments, quite calmly. "Why are you so adamant about diluting Eduardo out of the company?"

Mark's head jerks up, off of his arms, because he knows that voice. Once, he had taken enormous pleasure in the thought that he would never hear it again.

Sitting at Dustin's darkened computer console, Erica Albright looks at him steadily, waiting for his answer. She's wearing the clothes she wore the last time he saw her; the peacoat and striped tights, her hair braided back along the sides of her head, and the fact she looks corporeal enough to touch isn't the most alarming part.

"Well?" she goes patiently. Her throat moves when she speaks, the sick red slash that cuts her open from one side of her jaw from the other sliding open and shut, like a second, grotesquely grinning mouth.

"Oh, no," Mark tells her, vehement, pushing himself to his feet. He wobbles like he's got sea legs, and he wonders when was the last time he stood up. "I am not doing this. I am going to sleep."

"All right," says Erica equably. "I suppose some of us have got to stay around to make sure you do."

He shuts down his computer and unplugs his headphones, and when he reaches the hallway, he checks, compulsive, but the place where she'd been sitting, clear as day, is empty.

That's how it starts; from the first time Sean brings up the possibility of changing ownership shares all the way up until the very moment Mark sees Eduardo's head bend over the papers in Peter Thiel's office, they're there, mingling under Mark's eyelids, waiting for him to be alone, tired, and worn down before they try talking to him. It's Erica, most of the time, asking him questions or simply sitting beside him while he works, humming songs from Carmen, but Michael the TA is there, too, with his green-shot eyeballs, and Milly Garcia, splashing her legs at the edge of the pool and calling for him to join her, her head twisted on backwards. Alice and Ian and Jonathan and the gymnast. All of them.

One day, he gives in. "All right!" he says, spinning around in his chair. "You want me to talk to you, and I want you to tell me how I make you go away."

Erica answers first. "Okay, then. Is that the attitude you had that made you want to murder people? They wouldn't leave you alone, so you just made them go away?" She looks incredulous for a beat, her mouth twitching downwards as she thinka that through. "Your premise has been flawed from the onset, you know. Killing off everyone that gets in your way doesn't make you invincible."

"Quite the opposite, actually," Alice points out. In Mark's imagination (hallucinations, whatever these are,) she's been sewn back together like a doll, big coarse black stitches running from her painted toes to her mouth. "The more you killed, the more vulnerable you became."

"How so?" Mark frowns.

"Eduardo made you reckless," comes from the oil futures guy. Mark has no idea what he actually looks like, so he's just kind of hovering in the corners of Mark's vision, where all he can see is a silhouette, not unlike the blank profiles that come with newly created Facebook accounts. He's never there when Mark tries to look at him directly. "He made you take chances you'd never have been comfortable with otherwise. You haven't been caught yet, but you will. He makes you stupid."

"No --" Mark starts automatically, but down the hallway, a door opens and Dustin shuffles out, scratching at the back of his neck. Mark's ghosts vanish at once.

A week later, Mark is sitting cross-legged on Sean's bed, laptop open on his calves and power cords tangled around him in the sheets, and he looks up and says, "What if I told you that I murdered, or was collaboratively responsible for the cold-blooded murders of twelve different people, and now I am certifiably crazy enough to have conversations with them when they haunt me?"

At the end of the bed, Sean lolls his head back to look at him. He's on a bad trip; his friends dropped him off without so much as a whoopsie-daisy, and Mark pulled the short straw for babysitting duty.

"Are you sure?" Dustin had said, biting his lip. "I kind of feel like I'm giving Buzz Lightyear to that Sid kid. I don't know what's going to happen."

"Well, if you're volunteering," Mark had tersely replied, and Dustin automatically took a step back. So Mark has spent most of the evening waiting for Sean to come back down to earth, reassuring him that the trees weren't actually going to pick his ribs out, and sure, why not, take everything grey-colored out of your closet and wrap it around your head, Sean, that'll protect you. So he's reasonably certain Sean isn't going to remember this conversation; it doesn't stop his heart from pounding, because the last person Mark ever confessed anything to was Eduardo and it doesn't exactly get easier.

Sean contemplates him, serene. "Do you feel remorse, Tom?" he asks, a little husky. "Are you trying for a little remorse?"

Mark laughs, short and bitter. "Is that what this is? A guilty conscience?"

He doesn't believe it.

And then they kill Christy, unlucky number thirteen. And then Eduardo shakes hands with the lawyers. And then she's on her tiptoes, smelling like smoke and whispering in his ear, "Do you think this will save him?"

Mark and Sean do what they did because you can't trust people like Eduardo. He's too dangerous to keep that close to Facebook's jugular vein. Sean's reasons are probably a lot shallower, but Mark knows what he doesn't: Eduardo has always, always intended to get caught one day, preferably once he'd built up an impressive head count, the kind that would put him in the books for the rest of human history. He's going to let himself be caught at the most strategic moment to kamikaze his family -- he'd always given everything he had, into everything he did, whether it was murder or Mark or Facebook, and if it hurt his family, then he was going to give everything for that, too.

So Mark needs to get his attention, he needs to get it now, and he needs to separate Eduardo from Facebook before people get too interested in him. Facebook is too important to risk, and he really needs Eduardo to see that.

When they first finish drawing up the final draft with their lawyers, Sean must catch something in his face on their way across the garage, because he sidles closer and claps a hand to Mark's shoulder, shaking him a little bit to get his attention.

"Hey, man," he goes, fishing in his pocket with his other hand for his car keys. Somewhere in the labyrinth of cars, the big, black SUV chirps back at them, louder and more echoing that the flip-flapping of Mark's flip flops. "You're doing the right thing. He's just slowing us down, you know that." He gestures grandly with his arms; it's eleven in the morning and he might be drunk already. Mark can never tell. "I'm glad you listened to me. There's nowhere to go but up, little Zuckerberg. It's time to take your life back!"

Mark just snorts, because his life hasn't been his since the day the boy in 417 smiled at him and said, what did you do with the bodies?

"That's what they do, you know," Christy tells him, sitting on his toilet seat with her legs crossed, watching Mark brush his teeth with a smirk. "You never see them coming. They sneak up on you and surprise you with the way they smile or the way they say things or the way they always dress like they want to do something nice for you, and the next thing you know, you're cracked wide open and vulnerable and it's the most awful thing, because they can do anything they like to you. That's what falling in love is like."

Mark bends over the sink and spits, trying to run the script for the Wall from memory, hoping it'll take up enough of his brain that it won't have room for her.

No such luck. "He surprised you," she continues cruelly, "being the first person to ever catch you. Even your own mother doesn't know what you did to that girl in the tree or the boys in your school, but Eduardo did. He just walked into your life one day, walked into your life and your mind and your bed and your heart and never, never has it occurred to you to shake him off. No, you want to keep him, declaw him, because you can't stand to let him go."

"I'm aware of that, thank you!" Mark snaps at her, loudly. "Tell me something I don't know!"

Which is stupid, because she's a figment of his imagination -- they're all figments of his imagination and technically, they don't know anything he doesn't already know. They've got no answers that he hasn't found himself.

"Um," comes from the doorway. "Le spirit d'escalier is French for that feeling you get when you walk away from an argument and dwell on all the scathing things you could have said."

Mark looks up and grimaces. "Thank you, Tiff," he sighs.

Dustin's girlfriend shrugs a shoulder, unperturbed by Mark yelling at nothing in the bathroom. She holds out a jam jar. "Can you do me a favor and pee in this?"

"People underestimate just how perfect you and Dustin are for each other," Mark mutters, and then, "Can you leave me alone so I can pee in your jar?"

"Sure!" she chirps, and shuts the bathroom door.

Mark looks at the jar for a moment, then wrinkles his nose and sets it down on the edge of the sink with a soft clink. Christy's not on the toilet seat anymore, and for one heartbeat, two, he listens to the rest of the house; the volume on the TV spiking with each set of commercials and Sean murmuring on the phone in the next room over (it's his sister, Mark can tell by his tone; he wouldn't be attempting to be quiet if it were anyone else.)

Mark is going to cut Eduardo Saverin out of the company because it's as necessary as creating an alibi before you go in and kill someone. Eduardo believes in getting what he wants, and usually he succeeds, because he works hard, believes hard, and he's got a face that does things to people. This is what made them so amazing in the beginning, because Mark believes all those things too, and they'd been as beautiful as blood, both as killers and as friends.

It's also why it's so goddam horrible now that they want different things.

Eduardo is not the nice one, Eduardo has never been the nice one, and he has this idea that they're going to run a business together, and maybe when someone got in their way, they could put their genius brains together, and Mark would come up with a plan and Eduardo would carry out the hit, and they could have it all.

But it's like the Winklevoss twins and the Harvard Connection: Eduardo has this idea, but Mark's got a better one -- keep your head down and never get caught.

"Yes," he whispers, that day, that day, not so very much later, watching Eduardo seal his fate with a handshake. "Yes, it is awful, needing someone quite this much. Can we save him?"

"Oh, Mark," Christy sighs, and when he looks over his shoulder, she's gone.

3 |

It's only when it's too late, much much too late, that he realizes how Eduardo must have seen it: assuming that diluting him down to .03% meant Mark had chosen Facebook over him. As if suddenly Mark didn't want anything to do with Eduardo at all, just because he didn't want to plan murders with him. Like murder was the only thing they could do together. Eduardo thought Mark had made a choice, the speak now or forever hold your peace kind of choice.

Stupid.

Stupid, stupid, stupid. Eduardo was the only choice to be made.

3 |

There are pieces of laptop still lying on the floor. There's the processor and what's left of the hard drive, and the heat sink, for some reason, is all the way over by Priscilla's desk; he doesn't know if it ricocheted over there when the laptop smashed or if Eduardo or Sean kicked it. It doesn't matter.

His staff give him space, which is part of why he hired them, because his mind is going a mile a minute and it's worse than the mental white-out he gets when he's coding, because it's trying to cover all possible avenues of thought at once: picking apart Eduardo's behavior, his words, the look on his face; Sean's behavior, his words, and that vindictiveness Mark hadn't ever expected to see turned on Eduardo like that; how many hours of work may or may not have been backed up on the Facebook servers before Eduardo smashed his laptop to pieces.

He tries to map out all the possible actions Eduardo can take now.

The Facebook office toasts to one million members, and Mark digs his phone out of his pocket.

Please don't kill Sean, he texts to the first number in his contacts under E.

His phone buzzes with a reply almost immediately, which makes Mark think that Eduardo isn't in his car (smart, as downtown Palo Alto is a tangle of one-way streets and stop signs that's difficult to navigate even when in possession of full faculty) and is, instead, walking it off. He's probably scaring people, because foot traffic in the evenings is usually intense, this close to the Stanford campus.

Sean Parker is nobody and nothing, and someday he'll understand that. Whatever anybody says about text messages not relaying proper tone, Mark reads the cold, calm fury of this loud and clear. It's nothing like Eduardo's usual expressiveness. In fact, he sounds a lot like Mark. I wasn't expecting anything from him, it'd be a waste of my time.

He slams the phone down on his desk so he doesn't have to look at it again, burying his face in his palm and squeezing at his temples.

What's the worst he can do? he asks himself. He closes his eyes and columns of answers appear on the darks of his eyelids.

1. Kill Sean. Yes, fine, okay, that would be problematic, as Sean is usually the first to translate Mark into English for the programmers and is a smoother businessman than Mark will ever be (although between him and Christy, back when she was alive, Mark did get a crash course in political correctness that has come in handy once or twice,) but his usefulness has been minimal since the angel investment, and Mark has already paid him back for that with the pajamas-and-middle-finger stunt. Eduardo has nothing but contempt for Sean, whereas Mark's feelings run more towards disappointment: for someone who could have been the best man he and Eduardo had ever known, Sean can't even manage a drug habit without getting pulled up in front of the cops. Although it rankles to admit, given how he'd defended him after that first introduction, Mark can't respect someone who isn't capable of pulling off a simple crime.

And if Eduardo does turn him into a blood and gore masterpiece and leaves him lying around, well, there are plenty of people with a grudge against Sean that they can deflect police attention to first. What's the point of being rich and having your own PR team if you can't manipulate them to cover up the fact that you and your (probably now former) best friend are mass murderers? (Mark would prefer not to use his PR department in this manner. This is what you'd call the last resort.)

2. Lawyers. Okay. Okay.

Okay, wait.

Mark spins back around in his chair, snatching up his phone.

You're being asinine, he texts out, and maybe it's stupid to antagonize Eduardo when he is this out-of-his-mind furious, but Mark is very good at being Eduardo's last straw. Think it through. You can't go to the lawyers. The whole Facebook thing began with Erica breaking up with me. They're going to want to question her, and then when they realize she's that missing girl, they're going to want to question us. Mutually assured destruction, remember?

It far exceeds the 160 character text limit, but Mark hits send and resolutely doesn't care, because if there is ever a time to text-bomb Eduardo, it's now.

He absently runs his phone along his lower lip, watching a couple of the girl programmers awkwardly try to do a body shot off the kid intern from San Mateo, the one with the whippet-thin body and the same cereal bowl hollow in his sternum that Mark has. Everybody's laughing too hard. The overhead screen says they've now got 1,000,145 users. That's 145 new users in a little over an hour: for a website, it's the textbook definition of success.

His phone buzzes.

! it reads.

Mark immediately thumbs the lock button, staring through the phone as the screen goes blank, mirroring his own expressionless face back at him. Eduardo communicates in emoticons and exclamation points, because he says they help to distinguish tone so that people don't misinterpret him, whereas Mark always thought it just demonstrated a tendency towards spastic mashing of buttons over coherency. A single exclamation point was Eduardo's way of saying, you're right! and he mostly used it when he thought Mark had just asked him something really obvious, like, is she mad at me? or is it Tuesday?

He bares his teeth at nothing, primal fear curling in his stomach.

The difference between Mark and Eduardo is that Eduardo always intended to get caught someday. Mark thought he had months, years with which to persuade Eduardo to postpone it, or not do it at all, years with which to convince Eduardo that he didn't have to set himself on fire to burn his whole family down. Mark had partially assumed that being co-founder of Facebook would give him that status he so desperately craved, something with a lot of shine to take home and pin to the fridge to impress his family, and now, now Mark's realizing that he's probably just triggered exactly what he was hoping to avoid, cutting ownership shares like that.

Eduardo's not going to just kamikaze his family, he's going to kamikaze Facebook. Christy was right, he's going to burn them all to the ground, and he can do it so, so, so easily, just by walking into the Santa Clara County sheriff's office and telling them, I murdered Erica Albright because Mark Zuckerberg asked me to, the night Harvard's network crashed.

He can tell them where to find her body (the burden of proof the Winklevoss twins could never deliver.) He can tell them about Michael Oglegias the TA, Alice Simmons, and Christy Lee. He can change them, from Mark Zuckerberg and Eduardo Saverin, masters and commanders of Facebook, to Mark Zuckerberg and Eduardo Saverin, youngest serial killers in the history of America.

For all his planning, for all his strategies and plots and careful alibis, for all they nodded to each other and said, we're too tied up, if one of us gets caught we both burn, this one thing had never occurred to him: that Eduardo could be the one to bring it all down on them, to give them up.

Vulnerable, breathes a voice in the back of his mind: it could be Christy, could be Alice, could be Erica, or maybe it's all three of them together.

He's on his feet. There's noise in his ears and colors blurring in front of his eyes. None of it means anything.

His phone buzzes again, unprompted.

He looks.

Guns are inelegant, you said, but I think we were just waiting for someone with a mind beautiful enough to blow out, weren't we.

Everything spins. The floor could be ceiling and Mark wouldn't be able to tell, because the roaring is enormous, a fear like he's never known before, and he suddenly, abruptly, for the very first time, realizes exactly how Christy must have felt, right before she died: Mark wants to kick, to punch, to bite, to tear like a primal creature, because this can't be happening.

When he next comes back to himself, it's to Dustin, clapping a hand on his shoulder hard enough to jar him.

"Hey, man!" Dustin goes, off-balance and leaning a bit too close. "You all right?"

"Fine," Mark goes automatically, tilting away from him. Chaos screams in his peripheral.

I'm coming back for everything.

"He's coming back for the most beautiful mind he knows," Mark whispers.

"Dude, what?" Dustin blinks at him, and blinks again in the hazy way of someone who's already seeing double. "You're, like, all grey. You sure you're all right?"

"Go throw up on something, Dustin," Mark snaps, impatient, and it's a true testament to the reliability of Dustin's character that all he does is shrug and back off, like this is actually an reasonable suggestion. Mark buries his fingers in his hair, trying to ignore their trembling. He fans his fingertips out along his skull, pushing in like he wants to feel his own brain underneath.

He wonders what kind of blood splatter it will make.

He wonders how stunning it will look, all that red and black and grey.

3 |

Minding his own business is usually Dustin's main form of transportation, but at the end of the week, he routinely finds himself going through the rookie programmers' lines of code, fixing easy-to-miss errors before Mark has a chance to catch them and chew out whatever fresh-faced graduate is responsible, because then the kid will hide in the copy room for a week and smoke and make everything smell like burnt tobacco, which Dustin hates.

Hey, nobody ever said his intentions were pure.

He's in the middle of rearranging a copy/paste mistake when a shadow falls over him.

He looks up, tugging his noise-reduction headphones down around his neck just as Sean Parker plants his hands on his desk and leans in.

"Is it just me," says Sean. He smells overwhelmingly of Axe, and Dustin doesn't care what the commercials say, it doesn't make him want to tackle Sean off the desk or get into a catfight with the closest person. It mostly just makes him want to move into a less hazardous airspace. "Or have you been to Mark's house recently?"

Dustin fish-eyes him. "I did live with him until Tiff and I found our own place," he reminds him, because if there's one thing Facebook can't revolutionize, it's the goddamn California housing market.

Sean waves this off, like Dustin's impending engagement and successful homeownership isn't even worth a footnote in his thoughts. "I'm talking about how he basically invented his own unhackable security system. I think his home is probably more impenetrable now than Guatanamo Bay."

Now that Sean mentions it, Dustin did notice that Mark's alarm code seemed to be longer than all their social security numbers combined the last time he was over, but he just figured it was Mark's way of showing off. Hey, look, I invented Facebook, but that's old hat, look what else I can do, I can make a highly economic version of Fort Knox with a firmly middle-class home, a paperclip, and some string. It was a Mark thing. It wasn't for Dustin to understand: Dustin is just the defaulted best friend who, they decided back at Harvard, would be the one to clear Mark's Internet browsing history on the occasion of Mark's unexpected death, just as a safety precaution.

And it's not like Sean can go and ask Mark himself, because Mark is pissed as hell at him right now for that stunt with the cocaine and the underage girls. As their boss, Mark's policy is generally, "do whatever," but by that, what he really means is, "don't ever get caught," and the look on his face when he says it is so frightening that in their first couple days, it has the new programmers skittering out of his path like he's a black cat.

Sean nods at him like he said something important. "Exactly." He lowers his voice even further, so that Dustin has to lean in. "Do you think there's more to this lawsuit thing than he's letting on?" Dustin automatically opens his mouth to inform Sean that not everything is a government conspiracy, but Sean keeps on talking, "Because I find the abrupt spike in his security rather alarming."

Dustin's mouth snaps shut again. "You have a point," he agrees slowly. "I don't know what he's so paranoid about, either," and then he grins. "It's like he's expecting Eduardo to come in the middle of the night and slit his throat or something."

Sean darts a glance at him out of the corner of his eye, and they both snort themselves into laughter, and that's it, they can't take it seriously anymore.

It's probably the most absurd mental image to ever cross Dustin's mind. Honestly. Eduardo's one of those people that probably scoops baby spiders out of the bathtub with a Kleenex and releases them outside. The most he will ever do is look sad at shareholder meetings, and maybe they'll lose a few investors because Eduardo's got that kind of face, but -- and Dustin can say this without being mean because he's been Eduardo's friend for years -- he overestimates the number of people that will actually care about him.

Eduardo Saverin is, and has never been, much of a threatening person.

Everybody knows that.

3 | the fac

It's close to the end, one of the very last days, and the dark circles under Mark's eyes won't go away.

-
fin