Fic: M.A.D., Mutually Assured Destruction [The Social Network][2/3]

[antistar_e]

<-- part one

2 | The Facebook

Mark sets his phone to go off early on Monday morning, because he does have to get his problem sets done at some point before his 9am programming lab.

He shuts the alarm off, scrubbing at the crusty bits in the corners of his eyes with his thumbs. The rest of the dorm is quiet; the only sound is the far-off whine of a city bus. Mark rolls off the bed, not having far to go considering dorm beds aren't exactly spacious.

It's only when he spots the two halves of paper sitting on the desk does he realize that he's completely forgotten about the notes. He'd brought them over because he'd known there was more work he could do on figuring out the identity of their secret admirers, and Mark forgot about it. Mark never forgets about things.

How does that even --

He glances over his shoulder, at the bundle on the bed that's half-Eduardo and half-blankets, both considerately curled away from the spot where Mark had been laying. From here, he can make out the oval of Eduardo's face and the pale, sharp jut of his ankle where it's peeking out at the end of the bed. A nervous, skittering feeling goes up and down his spine, spider-like. He wants, for one trip-hammer of his heart, nothing more than to go curl back up into that negative space on the bed and just let it be.

He shakes his head to clear the static, pulling out Eduardo's chair and folding himself down into it, mindlessly hitting the power button on the hard drive column with his big toe.

It churns around in the pit of his stomach, the thought that he might be in more trouble than he realized.

2 |

There's some childish, gleeful part of Mark that practically cartwheels when Cameron Winklevoss keys them into the Phoenix building.

After eleven murders, though, you tend to develop something of a poker face, so Mark just kind of lifts his eyebrows when the door lock buzzes, like this is absolutely meaningless. With a sarcastic flourish, Tyler holds the door open for him. Short enough (he's average height, thank you -- the Winklevosses are just monsters) to duck comfortably under Tyler's arm, Mark wonders if that had been done on purpose, grabbing the door and holding it pointedly until both twins had gone in ahead of him.

And, just like that, it hits him.

It's a jolt, like the unexpected moment you electrocute yourself trying to find a plug adapter in the dark, or the moment you realize you are two moves away from winning the boss battle and there's no way you can lose no matter what you do, and Mark feels his eyes flare wide with astonishment.

They introduce him to Divya Narendra, who's sitting at the bottom of the staircase with his HP balanced on his knees and paperwork distractedly spread in a semi-circle around him. He smiles for Mark like nothing is up, extending his hand in greeting.

Mark eyes it and stays where he is, then lifts his gaze to meet theirs, smiling thinly. "I liked the bit with the notes," he says, watching their expressions blank out simultaneously. "A commendable attempt at originality, for sure. But I can't help but wonder as to what you were hoping to achieve."

Cameron, the taller twin (although this might, in fact, be negligible, as the illusion of height probably has more to do with the way he styles his hair than any actual physical difference between him and his twin,) takes a step towards Mark at that, and Mark shifts backwards automatically, continuing, slap-fast, "Was there a reason you singled out my friend and I in order to accuse us of -- what was it, kidnapping and possibly torturing a girl? Or do you just do that to everyone you have a proposition for?"

He curls his hand around the strap of his backpack and watches curiously as a number of things flicker across their faces, more confident that he's correct with every second that passes, because who would be best at creating a fake Phoenix initiation letter than someone who's already been initiated? Who would have access to a speciality card manufacturer, of all things, than someone with entirely too much money and too many contacts? Who would run a clear-cut, two-man delivery and still, within the body of the notes themselves, use a single pronoun, as if used to referring to themselves as one entity?

Tyler recovers first. "How about," he says mildly, leaning against the banister and folding his arms, nonchalant. "We tell you our idea, and you tell us whether you can assist us or not?"

"What assistance could I possibly be to you, gentleman?" Mark says with only the barest scrim of politeness, half-smiling. "Let me guess. You can't row crew worth shit and you need someone to bust the kneecaps of your competition, so you found the lowliest punk on campus to take the fall for you?"

"Don't be stupid." Tyler again. "We are more than capable of busting kneecaps on our own when the situation demands it," he delivers this so calmly and unconcernedly that all traces of humor evaporates from Mark in a heartbeat.

"You're here," Cameron puts in silkily. "Because FaceMash was a brilliant idea that got lost in execution. We want to hire you to build a website for us."

Mark listens to the three of them describe the concept behind the Harvard Connection -- sex, money, prestige, and the desire to nose in other people's business; they have the basic skeleton needed for success -- and waits until they trail off expectantly, before he tilts his head and asks them, "And if I don't, will I suddenly find myself a person of suspect?"

"Possibly," Cameron says cheerfully. "Your ex-girlfriend's been missing for awhile now, and you don't seem horribly bothered by it."

"I've been told I'm a Stairmaster," Mark replies. "It's very hard to get the expected response out of me no matter the situation."

"Still," Tyler shrugs. "You and Eduardo Saverin have a lot going for you. It'd be a shame if anything happened to that."

Mark looks at them for a long moment, gauging their expressions and running a dozen different possibilities through his head like columns of code.

They are rich, smart, and very clever, but Mark is smarter, cleverer, and twice as manipulative, so he just shrugs and says, "Sure."

"Really?" says Narendra from the stairs, sounding wholly surprised, but then he catches up to himself and gets out of his nest of papers, hopping down the steps to exchange formalities and phone numbers with Mark. He fidgets only slightly under Mark's scrutiny, uncomfortable, but Mark gets the feeling this comes more from the fact that Mark is socially inept, everybody wants his head on a platter right now, and he's staring at him, lizard-like and cold, rather than from any real fear Narendra has that Mark likes to kidnap ex-girlfriends. This is satisfying to know, that the Winklevoss twins' closest general doesn't really believe people like that exist.

He texts Eduardo as he leaves, the cold slamming into his face and racing down the back of his shirt. I met our secret admirers.

!!!!! Eduardo texts back, almost before Mark gets his phone back in his pocket, and so it doesn't come as much of a surprise when he gets back to Kirkland and finds Eduardo sitting on the banister outside Mark's door, messenger bag still slung over his shoulder and nose bright red.

"Do the RAs not even bother to make you sign in at the front desk anymore?" he wonders of no one in particular, pulling his lanyard from around his neck.

He lets them into the dorm -- empty; he checks the couch for Dustin or Chris just in case -- and then Eduardo grabs him by the elbow and goes, "Tell."

Mark does, noting the various interesting things Eduardo's face does. "Blackmail?" he goes, incredulously. "That's not very gentlemanly."

"Of course it is, it's as gentlemanly as you can get as long as you never admit to it," Mark sneers, and waves the lanyard around, dorm key still clutched his fingers. "But! The important thing we learned, Wardo, is that they don't have a leg to stand on. They've got nothing besides the vaguest threat that they can bring the police down on us. It's actually very satisfying to know, because now I'm considerably less worried about it. They fear failure, that's why they'll go to such lengths for the Harvard Connection."

"So why did you agree to build it for them?"

Mark gets to his feet and walks over to his desk. "Because there's something to it. It's not a bad idea, I can work with it."

Eduardo follows, a long-suffering look on his face. "You can't steal their idea and claim it as your own, Mark."

"I'm not stealing anything," Mark returns briskly, settling into his chair and then popping back up again, too frenetic with excitement, resentment, inspiration, and everything in between to sit still long enough to wait for his desktop to boot up. Eduardo, who probably saw that coming, is already by the mini-fridge and passes him a beer from it. "I'm going to make it better. In fact, I don't think they're going to have any room to complain at all, because if they think they can bully and intimidate us, then I'm going to give them exactly what they're asking for."

"What?" Eduardo goes, a little warily.

Mark grins at him, a sly sliver of teeth like the flat side of a dime. "I'm going to give them the facebook."

2 |

December becomes January, and three weeks after the website's launch on Harvard campus, the police come knocking on Mark's door.

To be honest, he's a little disappointed it took Narendra and the Winklevoss twins this long to pick up on The Facebook's existence. He thought their little Phoenix spy network would work faster than that. Or maybe they did, and it was the police that made them twiddle their giant, crew-rowing thumbs and stew in frustration. It's an appealing mental image.

"Ms. Albright has been missing since the 14th of November," interjects one cop, once they have Mark's basic statement. "She disappeared between eleven and eleven-thirty that morning. Have you heard from her since then?"

"No," Mark answers, flat. He pulls the string out from the hood of his sweatshirt, knotting the ends and beginning to weave cat's cradle patterns with it, because it's either that or start clapping. Mark always feel an immense rush of contemptuous pride for law enforcement when they possess exactly the information he wants them to have and nothing more.

"And you were involved with her at the time, correct?" the cop goes shrewdly.

They tell you that you need two people to do cat's cradle effectively, but that's a lie. Mark pinches two lines together with his teeth and ducks his index fingers together. "I answered that question already," he says, a little unintelligible. He wishes he could use his laptop. It would be a more productive use of his time, but he supposes that if you were ever going to show a cursory respect for someone, it would be while they had a police baton in their possession.

"We're sorry, Mark," says the cop, as unapologetically as she can get away with. "In cases like this, we need to be completely thorough, and new information is coming up all the time. We --"

"I understand completely," Mark talks over her. He reclaims his mouth and looks at her through the diamond pattern he made out of his string like it's a window. "I'm your best suspect. Obviously."

Both their heads snap up, so fast it strongly reminds Mark of the way cats look like when someone pops the lid off a can of Friskies.

"What?" goes the cop standing by the door, like he thinks he must have misheard.

"I'm a perfect fit for the profile you're looking for," Mark elaborates, watching them steadily. "A college girl goes missing right after she publicly breaks up with her boyfriend. Said boyfriend is, by all accounts, a volatile asshole and a shady character. Trust me," he goes at the look on their faces. "Nothing you can tell me about myself would surprise me. Add in the testimonies of upstanding people like Narendra and the Winklevoss twins -- am I right? I thought so -- and gosh, wouldn't it be so convenient if I did it after all?"

The cop who's supposed to be writing this down examines him with the squint-eyed look of someone coming to the conclusion that they don't like him very much at all.

Mark gazes back, imperious and undisturbed. "Now, I hate to point out the obvious flaw in this plan, but I'm afraid I can't be that person for you, officers, as I think you'll find I was in a disciplinary meeting the whole day, being punished for an entirely unrelated crime against the female sex." Lifting his eyebrows, he shoots a look at the notepad, pointedly enough that the officer holding it lifts her pen without seeming to realize she's doing it, and says as clearly as possible, "I have not seen, spoken to, or heard from Erica Albright since she called me an asshole and walked out of my life."

They leave shortly thereafter. Mark tries not to let the door hit them on the way out, but it's a close thing.

In a hindbrain action, he texts Eduardo, who shows up half an hour later. He's wearing a full suit with cufflinks and the kind of cologne that men wear in a bid to intimidate each other or subtly suffocate them, and Mark wonders what he has going on later tonight that his father wants him to be at, and if he, Mark, is vindictive enough to come up with some kind of excuse to keep Eduardo here. He probably is.

"Did they come talk to you, too?" he asks, ushering Eduardo inside. On the sofa, Dustin and Chris lift their hands in greeting without looking up from the laptop they're sharing, earbuds dangling between them. They aren't paying them any attention whatsoever, but Mark and Eduardo step closer together anyway, lowering their voices on instinct.

"Yeah," Eduardo returns, near enough that his hair brushes against Mark's forehead, making it itch. "Right before I left. They came knocking about four minutes after you sent that text, but once I told them that you were my best friend, they got this look on their faces like everything made sense. They didn't even really ask me anything about Erica, thanked me for my time, and left."

"It's your face," Mark says, completely serious. "It does things to people."

"Your face," comes back immediately, which doesn't even make sense, but Eduardo continues before Mark can point this out. "So what's the verdict?" he goes, a grin already starting at the corners of his mouth. "Are our operations in trouble? Do people know about the real facebook? Have Cameron, Tyler, and Divya successfully schooled us into submission?"

Mark snorts, sarcastic. "I think on the official record, they're more guilty of slander than we are of kidnapping. Also," he adds as an afterthought. "Those cops might hate my guts."

Eduardo throws his hands up in a somebody please help me gesture. "Mark, whose cup size did you cast aspersions on this time?"

On the sofa, Dustin's head twists around, so quickly it has Mark thinking uncharitable things about Pavlov and his dogs. He narrows his eyes at them. "Sorry, I heard 'cup size.' Who are we talking about?"

"Nobody even remotely in your league," Mark answers, simultaneous with Eduardo's, "Nobody you have a chance with, Dustin."

Dustin claps a hand to his chest, mock-hurt.

2 |

January becomes February, February becomes March, and right on the cusp of spring break, Eduardo starts getting antsy. He only makes cursory attempts at conversing with Mark, Dustin, and the guys they have on site maintenance, and while Eduardo is good at not bothering them while they're working, this is unusual.

"What's up with you?" Mark asks, finally, after the third time he crosses the room to the fridge to fetch a drink, his knuckles aching from long, repetitive typing sprees, and finds Eduardo sitting on the couch, chewing on his thumbnail and not even pretending to be working.

Eduardo looks up, distracted, his eyes cloudy and restless underneath his eyebrows. He glances sideways towards the second set of desktop computers, the servers lined up against the wall; the beds had to be shoved closer together to make room for them. Dustin's wired in, humming to himself. His screen flips over, becoming the white pages and blue headers that never fails to thrill through Mark every time he sees them, somewhere between pride and fear, because they've been in his head since the day he pushed Milly out of that tree and now they're out there for all the world to see, a giant, flashing sign, Look what I did!

He snags a Red Bull from the fridge and joins Eduardo on the couch, knocking him in the arm with the can.

Eduardo takes it from him, popping the tab and taking a long gulp, his throat rolling; Mark watches shamelessly, because it's his to see. Eduardo passes the can back, and says, after a beat, "It's just ... we haven't added anyone to our facebook since Erica."

There's a bad moment where Mark doesn't even know what he's talking about -- a frown starts to crease his face, because Eduardo isn't one of those people who judges their own self-worth on how many friends he has on The Facebook, and then it clicks: he's talking about their facebook, the lowercase one, the one with only eleven people in it (well, three in Eduardo's, although that's three more than most people have.)

He blinks, thrown off. "Huh," he goes, because he hasn't actually felt the urge to kill anyone recently: his website's unexpected exponential growth had done a very good job at driving all thought of it from his mind. "So we haven't."

Eduardo watches him, assessing, as Mark takes a long, thoughtful swallow from the energy drink. Mark's lip twitch up. "Is there anyone in particular you have in mind?" he says dryly.

"To be honest, I figured you would have someone by now. You know, someone that you were just itching to, like, shove from the top of a building or something."

"Sorry to disappoint," Mark mumbles into the rim of his can. "Hello, my name is Mark Zuckerberg and it has been x amount of months since the last time I felt the urge to gruesomely end someone's life."

This startles a laugh out of Eduardo, who then proceeds to golf clap magnanimously for him. Mark bows his head politely. On the other side of the room, Dustin yells, "Stupid text box, stay where I put you!" and slams his hands down on the keyboard, smashing it down like it's in any way helpful. He might as well be on Mars for all he's noticing their existence.

Eduardo seems to realize this, too, because he twists around on the couch to face Mark squarely. "Have you thought about Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss? No, wait," he says at the expression Mark gives him. "Think about what we could do to them, Mark. They're high-profile, they're training for the Olympics, and even better, they're a two-for-one deal. We can overpower them if we try, I know we can --"

He trails off, because Mark is shaking his head, emphatic. "I want them alive," he says. "Them and Divya Narendra. They thought they could cow us with blackmail, so the ideal revenge to enact on them is to succeed. I want them to live to see us be more successful than they'll ever be."

His volume climbs without his noticing it. Eduardo starts biting his fingernails again, his brow furrowed in thought. "All right," he goes equably. "I like the sound of that. So who then?"

"I don't know," Mark goes, sarcastic. "Shall we just pick someone on the way to class tomorrow?"

Eduardo rolls his eyes, tolerant and refusing to rise to the bait. "Mark," he says patiently. "That's what we have The Facebook for. All the information we could want about somebody, laid out for anyone to see. It'll be like window shopping for victims."

"I don't think stalking is an acceptable use of our admin privileges," Mark feels compelled to point out. "Although we have been getting complaints recently about our privacy settings."

"You said it, not me."

Mark studies his profile, the irritated red of his pores from where he shaved in a hurry this morning and the fading posy-mark on his jaw from Mark's teeth, and wonders when Eduardo's profile became more familiar to him than anyone else's.

"After the Bill Gates conference," he decides.

Eduardo blinks, looking at him quizzically.

"After the Bill Gates conference," he says, smiling through another swallow of Red Bull. "We'll pick someone then."

2 |

"Mark!"

There's a moment after Mark hears his name called out across the bar where he's absolutely certain it's not meant for him, before he remembers that, wait, he's supposed to be a big name now, and turns.

On the other side of the room, a man lifts his arm, flagging him down. He's familiar in a vague, maybe they share a class kind of way, and Mark's about to just wave back and keep going, when he gets a good look at the other people at the table, and everything snaps into place.

"Mark?" goes Eduardo, questioningly, but Mark pushes himself away from the bathroom door and weaves in between the tables.

"Oh, good, we were wondering if we had the right name," says the guy who'd called for him; Jorge, he's a broad-eyed black man a year older than Mark, and he and Erica took Music Theory together just so they could have each other's shoulders to cry on around finals time (of course, Erica never made it to finals.) They were best friends. And across from him, two women from her robotics club, her roommate who had also been her understudy for Carmen, and her roommate's boyfriend. These are all the people who knew Erica the best. "We said to ourselves, hey, isn't that Erica's boyfriend --"

"Ex-boyfriend," Mark corrects immediately.

Jorge shrugs, good-natured. "Yeah, well."

"They're still looking for her," pipes up Erica's roommate (Selena? Serena? Serenity? It's something that always makes Mark think of Sailor Moon.) She wraps her hands around her drink. "Or, well, they promise they are, but it's almost been six months, and ... well." She shakes herself. "We were worried something had happened to you too, since we haven't heard from you in awhile."

"Until we heard that the cops were sniffing around your door," fills in Jorge. "They think you did it, man?"

"They asked me some questions," Mark says, neutral.

Jorge snorts, "I bet they did. My grandmother works in the Harvard presidents' office and she told me about how butthurt those big, beef-armed twins got over the Harvard Connection thing, and that is low, so very low, if they're tattling on you because of that."

"He's right," chimes in Selerenity's boyfriend. "They're just trying to slam you. Nobody really thinks you did it. You loved her," and he can't help but grin, because he'd been there when Mark had tried that somewhat disastrous romantic gesture outside Erica's midterm last year.

Jorge grins sideways, too. "Yeah. You're an angry drunk blogger, not the Craigslist killer."

"Right," says Mark. And, "I should probably --" he gestures over his shoulder, shrugging.

"Yeah, no, man, we just wanted to connect and say what's up. It was good seeing you again."

Mark stares at them for another beat, and a cold, racing kind of rage snakes its way from deep in his stomach, making the corners of his vision white out. He thinks, three months ago, you wouldn't even have talked to me. You would have easily believed that I'd kidnapped Erica and chained her in my basement and fed her cockroaches or something insanely idiotic like that. You would have avoided my eyes and muttered about FaceMash and how it made perfect sense.

He spins on his heel, leaving Erica's friends behind.

He wants nothing more in this single moment than to just annihilate everyone, because how do people like this exist? How are people so stupid and judgmental and how do they survive? It doesn't matter that Erica's friends will probably defend him if the cops ask them questions, because Mark cannot respect willful stupidity, no matter the form.

He reaches Eduardo, who'd been lingering awkwardly somewhere between the bar and the bathroom like he isn't sure what he should be doing. He takes one look at Mark's face and puts a hand on his shoulder, fingers sliding up to curl in the fabric of his hoodie. For everything Mark's feeling, there's an answer in Eduardo's eyes.

"Alice?" he says simply.

Mark nods, decisive. "Alice."

Eduardo tilts his head, beaming. His cheeks are flushed a rosy color, blotchy and warm-looking: sex always does linger longer on his features than most people's. "Excellent," he murmurs. "You know, I've never asked, but why haven't we ever just gotten ourselves a revolver?"

Mark snorts, "Go right ahead. Shoot someone with any kind of gun and you might as well hand over your social security number at the same time. Guns are too easily traced, and besides, where's the challenge in shooting someone?"

This is what most people see when they look at Mark and Eduardo. They see people like them, ordinary-looking college boys, and they make impressions based on face-value: they see bored, taciturn, socially-inept Mark and they see wide-eyed, considerate, well-dressed Eduardo, and it's so very easy (lazy) to come to the conclusion that Mark is an asshole and Eduardo is the nice one.

This is the most laughable thing Mark has ever heard.

"You have a point. I just want to see her face when she dies," Eduardo says, almost to himself. In the half-light, his face looks pale, sickly, pulled into a skull's mocking grin.

Eduardo's never been the nice one.

2 |

"Okay, if guns are out, then how do you feel about chainsaws?" Eduardo goes, musingly, a keen, thoughtful look all over his face.

Mark looks up. "Messy," he replies, flat, and narrows his eyes. "Why?"

Eduardo casts his sight around, scanning the ceiling and the corners of the room. "You know what I love about old buildings?" he says, like it's somehow an answer. Mark doesn't bother with a reply this time, because Eduardo's being rhetorical and he'll get to his point eventually. They've got Alice in the bathtub, draining slowly, so it's not like he can just get up and leave, regardless. There are only so many pints of blood in Alice's body. "Especially here in Boston? They have all sorts of hidden nooks and crannies -- aha!" He grabs the back of an office chair and drags it across the carpet, gingerly placing a foot on it and pushing himself up.

Mark watches, rather dispassionately, as the chair tries to spin underneath him and he wobbles, ungainly and coltish on his long legs before catching his balance again. There's a panel in the wall above Alice's bookshelf that looks like maybe it once held an air conditioner, and in the past century has been shoddily built over. It slides away easily when Eduardo pushes at it, and Eduardo beams over his shoulder.

Mark sees what he's getting at and sits up straight. "You want to chop her up and hide her in the walls?"

"Think about it. Nobody will be able to find her --"

"-- not even when she begins to smell --"

"-- because everything smells horrible in this part of Boston and they'll try to sell it off as part of the apartment's charm!" Eduardo finishes excitedly. Mark never gets used to the sight of him like this, so in his element and looking so ridiculous, wearing latex gloves and a hairnet at the same time. No matter what the spy movies have you think, murder isn't really a glamorous thing and Mark has gone undetected so far because he makes sure to leave nothing behind, hair and fingerprints being the easiest things to trace back to somebody. Eduardo waves a hand at him, misinterpreting his silence. "She'll stop smelling eventually."

"Hmm," Mark goes discouragingly. "If it's absolutely necessary that we dismember her, do we have to stick her in the wallspace? That seems unsanitary."

"But very poetically elegant, don't you think?" Eduardo is fond of describing murder the way someone else might critique art. "If we hide all the pieces really well, some part of her will literally always be here."

"It's still risky." Mark's early murders were never very complicated in procedure. He mostly pushed people off of, out of, and into the way of things, because those were the easiest to claim as accidents (except for the gymnast, because nobody would believe she'd just trip and fall into something, so he slit her wrists, somewhat inexpertly. Nobody bothered to look very closely, because she was prone to unnecessary histrionics and the officials assumed suicide was something she just did to piss off her parents. People's sloppiness never fails to astound him.)

Eduardo pouts. Mark didn't realize there was a facial expression for "I really wanted to chop her up and hide her in the walls," but there you go.

"We'll have to be careful," he says finally, and Eduardo's eyes widen fractionally in surprise. "Saws are noisy, and leave indicative marks on whatever surface we'll use. But it's feasible."

Eduardo fist-pumps in joy. "I thought I saw a stereo in her bedroom," he says, and disappears into the hallway, voice carrying over his shoulder. "We can turn on ABBA or something and play it really loud to cover up the noise."

"We are not sawing apart a corpse to ABBA," Mark returns, aghast at the idea. "Where are you planning on getting a chainsaw, anyway?"

"Oh, I wasn't, I was just saying that for effect. But Alice has a bone saw, which will work for our purposes just fine."

"What is she doing with a bone saw?"

"You really weren't paying attention to a word she said in the bar, were you." It's not actually a question, so Mark doesn't deign it with a reply. "Should have figured. She works at that storage unit near the community center in Charlestown, remember? So she picks up all kind of weird knick-knacks from people's abandoned storage units. She's got a whole surgeon's kit -- it sounded amazing."

"It'll be quieter," Mark agrees, and wonders if they can get away with keeping a surgeon's kit in a dorm room at Harvard, because that sounds useful.

He gets up, slipping after Eduardo into the hallway. He passes the door to Alice's bedroom, where Eduardo is scanning CD titles, and goes into the bathroom.

Alice is spread out in the tub, wrists tied together with the string from Mark's hoodie (which is always stronger than people give it credit for, but then again, so are most people when they're in death throes and Mark has lost more than one drawstring to the cause, but they're softer and chafe less than rope or zipties,) and looped around the soap dish. One foot dangles out the side of the tub; her toenails are painted a shade south of midnight, a tiny moon on her big toe and miniscule white dots of stars on the littler ones.

He sits down on the toilet seat lid, reaching over out of habit to check her pulse. She's dead, of course; they cut the brachial arteries in her upper arms and she bled out in minutes. It streaks down the sides of the tubs, pooling around her body and sliding in rivulets towards the drain, still darkly red and fresh. They'll scrub out the tub with bleach before they leave.

He stays like that a moment, and then slides down to his knees on the bathmat. A lock of Alice's black hair is caught in her mouth, frazzled, and he frees it, pushing it back behind her ear.

She has very large teeth, Alice does. It made her smile seem cartoonish, animated and exaggerated; it took up her entire face whenever she turned it on people. It reached her eyes, and she'd leaned against Mark's arm in the bar and turned that genuine, so-big smile on him while he stumbled over his own words and rambled about the relative room for servers in the Kirkland dorms or something, he doesn't remember. Later, in the bathroom up against the stall partition, she'd gone down on him with that mouth, but that seems almost secondary to the way she'd smiled with it.

It's a little strange, Mark realizes, to be here looking at the dead body of someone who might have actually liked him, if only a little. She certainly never did anything to hurt him. It's a first for him.

He swallows against the thing caught in his throat, but before he can think on it anymore, a hand descends on top of his; the one bracing his weight against the tub. Eduardo's fingers curl around the breadth of his hand, gloved fingertips pressing into his palm, and Mark only catches a glimpse of Eduardo's expression before he bends at the waist and kisses Mark's mouth.

He pulls Mark to his feet, their arms banding easily around each other so that they can kiss again, licking at each other's tongues, the smell of blood slick in the backs of their throats and Alice's corpse their silent witness.

"Come on," Eduardo murmurs when he pulls away, the bridge of his nose touching Mark's. "She's got AC/DC."

"No Iron Maiden?" Mark retorts, sardonic and low in the close quarters.

"Don't even. Blasphemer."

Hours later, when all evidence of their presence has been erased and Alice's body has vanished, never to be seen again, Mark and Eduardo ride their high all the way back to Cambridge, unable to talk on the bus but catching each other's eye and laughing helplessly, too golden and full of success to care about how they must look.

Mark forgets, sometimes, just how much this feeling cures all ills.

They don't discuss it, but Mark doesn't take the turn to go back to Kirkland from their bus stop. Instead, he follows Eduardo to his dorm, like this is all par for the course, and the whole way, he carefully ignores the little smile that curls at the corner of Eduardo's mouth. He isn't even surprised when he gets handsy, fingers catching on Mark's hip before curling themselves around his own, and on the narrow staircase, he leans in, mouthing at the back of Mark's neck. There's a girl passing in the other direction, a basket full of laundry in her arms, and she gives them a knowing smile; their entwined fingers and the look that must be on Eduardo's face, half-hidden as it is by Mark's mess of hair.

Mark slants his eyes at her, haughty, because whatever conclusions she just jumped to, she has no right to them. They're none of her business.

Eduardo's on him the second he gets the door kicked closed behind him, hands skating up underneath Mark's hoodie to find the warm flesh of his stomach, snaking around to grip him close, getting at his mouth in the dark of his abandoned room with more enthusiasm than aim. Mark pushes back into it just as fast, thinks, shirtlifter and Eduardo and margin: 0px 0; and it's fine, because he knows exactly what all that means. It's thrilling up and down inside of him, warm in his spine and dizzy in between his temples, the sensation of Eduardo pressed flushed against him.

"Is this what turns you on?" Eduardo asks, so close to him it sounds like his voice is everywhere at once. They're shedding clothes, awkwardly banging together in close quarters and still a little inexpert; toeing out of shoes and socks, pulling Mark's sweatshirt up over his head, elbows tangling and mouths catching each other in passing.

"Hmmm?" Mark goes in the back of his throat, when it finally registers that Eduardo had said something.

"This," Eduardo tries to articulate. "Is this why you do it? Do you get off on it?"

Mark connects the dots. "The correlation between the fact that we just killed a girl and my present enthusiasm?" He hears the thunk of Eduardo's bare heel against the edge of the suitcase underneath his bed and pushes, hard, following him down onto the mattress. "No," he says, getting Eduardo's skin underneath his hands again, like it's insanity not to. "No, killing is an existential high, not a sexual one."

"So..." Fingers in his hair, nails scratching along his scalp.

"It's you," Mark goes distractedly. "I get off on you," and he bends his neck to tongue at the hollow of Eduardo's throat.

He sees the flutter of movement, Eduardo's eyes squeezing shut like this is something he simply cannot handle, and stretches his neck to kiss him, kiss him until their mouths are slick with each other, taste the same.

Mark kisses him again for good measure, closing his eyes and wondering, wondering, wondering, somewhere deep underneath the kamikaze bright light of Wardo, of Alice Simmons View Profile, of Facebook all tucked inside his chest: does it get better than this?

2 |

And then they meet Sean Parker.

Technically, Christy does all the go-between and introduces them, because she's Eduardo's girlfriend now (he'd actually asked Mark if he minded, and Mark had blinked at him the way you would someone who picked their nose on the bus and then tried to show you; two consistent sources of sex are better than one, right?) and the kind of social network she possesses inside her phone more or less makes The Facebook look like as insignificant and localized as Tom's Gully Summer Fishing Club.

The thing is, eventually, the Very Smart start to attract the other Very Smart, and it makes for a lot of Very Smart people getting in each other's way. Christy is Very Smart, and worse, she's sharp, suspicious, clever, and she doesn't miss a thing. The way she watches Mark has him thinking this might be the Winklevoss scenario all over again, only Christy circumvents the creepy blackmail notes. It unnerves him, in the rare moments he's actually thinking about it, around all the time he spends making sure The Facebook doesn't crash (and oh, how the Harvard networking people must be laughing at that. It's different when somebody's trying to crash your network, isn't it, Mark Zuckerberg?)

"Your relationship is a farce," he informs Eduardo at one point.

"Thank you for your input," Eduardo replies, his tone suggesting the complete opposite. And then, "I thought you said you were okay with it."

"Don't be obtuse. If this had anything to do with jealousy, what makes you think I would be subtle about it. It's just facts. You like her because she's Alice's best friend; she talks about Alice a lot, she asks about Alice a lot. It strokes your ego, having the person that knew Alice best that close to you and still completely unaware. Meanwhile, she dates you because she believes in the promise that you'll be famous someday, or at the very least successful, and she wants her name on that so she can cash in on it someday. Also, she's suspicious that I had something to do with Alice's disappearance, and dates you to keep tabs on me. She's too smart for you, otherwise."

"You're doing a fantastic job at not sounding jealous there, Mark," Eduardo says, something in his tone that Mark can't place.

Mark rolls his eyes, even though Eduardo can't see it, and spins around in his chair. "This is why nobody should ever have sex," he informs Dustin, who comes through the door that very second, plastic bag from the Campus Convenience Store dangling from his fingers and backpack over his shoulder. "It automatically makes any attempt you make at speaking the truth dismissible as 'jealousy'."

Dustin blinks, and offers him a thumbs-up with his free hand. "Whatever you say, brother."

Chris follows him in, carrying the important parts of the food pyramid: breakfast burritos and Red Bull.

Mark makes a move to get up, because he can practically see his name written on those things from here, but Eduardo grabs him by the wrists, pinioning them to the arms of his chair and trying to straddle his thighs in the same movement. It doesn't really work; Mark's chair isn't built to withstand that and Eduardo has coltishly long legs besides, so they probably look really silly, but Mark has a lapful of Eduardo and it's hardwired into him by this point to not do anything that would make Eduardo get off of his lap.

Eduardo leans in close, saying soft and slow and in a voice meant for him alone, "I'm dating Christy because I like her. I don't need another reason."

Mark lifts his chin. "And me?" he goes, maintaining eye contact.

Eduardo tilts forward and kisses him soundly, the kind that makes his head rock back on his neck from the force of it. Eduardo's hand catches at the side of his face, holding him still and kissing him again, like it's an answer.

Dustin nudges into their peripheral, going, "hey, hey, heeeeyy," continually and annoyingly, and doesn't stop until they break apart.

"What, Dustin?"

He grins at them. "Hey, so, as the only straight person in this room, does that mean I'm excused from coding today because I have an incurable heterosexual disease?"

Everybody replies at once.

"No," deadpans Mark, same time Eduardo says, "you are so curable," same time Chris goes from the other side of the room, "wow, Dustin, way to insensitively group everybody under one heading. I'm pretty sure Eduardo's an equal opportunist and Mark's just really intimidated by women."

Eduardo throws his head back, barking laughter in that infectious way that has Chris and Dustin grinning back at him, kneejerk, and Mark says, sarcastic, "Thank you, Chris."

And this is what The Facebook was, in the very beginning: four boys in a dorm room. It was fine.

But Sean?

Sean changes everything.

He is competent, he is intelligent, he is perceptive, and he's the same brand of Ivy League genius that Mark, Eduardo, Christy, Chris, and Dustin are (well, when sober,) with the added ambition of someone who's been kicked out and still has a lot to prove. He's what you would get if you took Mark's innovative vision and shameless disregard for social convention and combined it with Eduardo's knack for understanding people, and this is what makes him the most dangerous person Mark has ever met.

"I don't get it," goes Eduardo blankly, in the cab on the ride back home. "What do you two see in him? He's basically a used car salesman, only for, like, cyberspace. He's a used cyberspace salesman, and you'll all buying into it." He gestures, emphatic. "There are literal dollar signs in your eyes right now, I can see them."

"You are making no sense," Mark informs him with the self-assuredness of the very drunk, and then leans around him to talk to Christy, who understands how momentous this is. Eduardo leans back in his seat with an impatient huff and lets his girlfriend and his best friend talk over his head, a thundercloud heavy on his brows.

There's something about Sean that makes Mark feel like he's three steps away from stepping on a rattlesnake. There's a thrill in it, a little wonder and awe.

Sean sees the potential in The Facebook, like he really believes that there's more to it than just Mark giving the middle finger to the Winklevosses for their note stunt, and that kind of faith is going to be a problem. Between Christy's suspicious streak and Sean's clear-eyed scrutiny, Mark and Eduardo will have to be twice as careful, so that nobody realizes there's a difference between The Facebook and their facebook.

The thing is. It's worth the risk.

"It's a future, Wardo," Mark says to Eduardo insistently.

Eduardo beckons with one hand, impatient. Mark's supposed to be carrying a box of thumbtacks for him while Eduardo puts up Young Financiers Association flyers up around campus, but apparently he's not that successful at it. There's too much standing involved, Mark thinks.

He obediently steps closer so Eduardo can snag a couple tacks, pinning a flyer to the billboard with his forearm. Maybe it's not for the Young Financiers Association; Eduardo's the president of a lot of things. It's a very, very impressive repertoire for a sophomore, or so Mark's been told.

"I mean," he continues. "Just forget the marlin metaphor for a moment. Between me and you, The Facebook wasn't ever supposed to be anything big, right, just a side-hobby of a company --"

"A way to thumb our noses at Divya, Cameron, and Tyler for scaring us with their I Know What You Did Last Summer scheme," Eduardo supplies, ever-helpful.

"We weren't scared," Mark says immediately. "But yes. And now we've got something that might pay us back for that a million times over. It could be a future, Wardo, something that can cushion us for the rest of our lives. We won't have to spend several years and ridiculous sums of money on business school, won't have to compete for cutthroat positions with repugnant employers just to be able to have a job someday where we can make our own rules. We're already there. I think we should go to California."

Eduardo heaves a sigh. "Do whatever you want to, Mark," he says tiredly, aimed mostly at the billboard. "You usually do anyway."

Mark doesn't know what to do with that, so he stays quiet and offers him another thumbtack.

April becomes May, and Mark takes Dustin and Chris and pulls up stakes, striking out west.

2 |

Eduardo keeps in contact, of course. He texts and e-mails and calls, even. Mark watches his cell phone buzz its way across his desk, coming to a halt against his beer bottle and rattling hollowly, only dimly audible over the racket coming from the other room.

Dustin eyes him strangely from the next workstation over, and leans over when the screen switches over to "missed call." He flips it into his hand and texts out, "sorry, man, he's wired in," showing it to Mark for approval before sending it.

But all the updates from New York are about things that Mark doesn't want to hear: it's all progress going in the wrong direction, and so he sends back monosyllabic replies, ignoring text after voicemail after e-mail, and once, at midnight (3am New York time, his brain supplies for him automatically,) a message that simply says, there was a girl today. she had yellow eyes, Mark, like green and golden all mixed up and I wondered how gorgeous they would be if we strangled her. but I didn't, because I wanted you there to see it and you weren't. Mark deletes it immediately, panic thudding at the back of his head, and can do nothing but hope that whenever Eduardo wakes up, he does the same.

How do you tell someone they're completely in the wrong about advertising when that someone doesn't have any moral qualms about strangling a girl just to see her pretty eyes bulge? That's something he wants to say face-to-face, so he can gauge Eduardo's expressions and change conversational tracts accordingly, so he puts it off and puts it off, until until until until --

Until suddenly there's no until left, and Eduardo's voice is tight, coiled, nothing like his usual self, saying, "you're going to have to hang on for a second, Mark, my girlfriend set fire to my apartment."

Mark turns around, rubbing his free hand along his arm, trying to generate some warmth. California is nothing like Boston when Boston is stuck in a winter rut, but in the Bay Area, it easily drops into the 50s after sundown, and Mark didn't think to grab a sweatshirt before coming outside to make this call: his anger had kept him warm enough, then.

Sean meets his eyes through the sliding glass door, cocks his head questioningly.

Mark lifts his shoulders, a default response.

He's your friend, Sean had said earlier, reassuringly calm in the face of Eduardo bankrupting them out of the blue. And I get that he was your friend before he was your CFO. Whatever decision you make, man, I'll support it, but you know what I think.

He'd said it like there was any kind of decision to be made at all, besides making Eduardo see, making Eduardo understand, making Eduardo come out here, and he knows he can do it because Eduardo loves him. Of course he does. Objectively, bottom line, Mark knows for a cold fact that Eduardo's neglected, stunted little heart doesn't have room for anyone else.

"Answer me this," Eduardo's voice is suddenly right back in his ear, speaking with the confidence of someone who pushed a $20,000 button and got exactly the response he was looking for. "What about facebook?"

"That's exactly --" Mark starts, as trip-hammer reactive as a heartbeat, but Eduardo cuts over him.

"No, not Facebook the company, but our facebook. Yours and mine. If I give up everything I have worked for here and moved out to Silicon Valley for you, would we be like we were?"

Mark casts a dark, desperate look out across the pool, picking at the dead skin on his lip to buy himself some time. Eduardo waits, as patient as he's ever been, and Mark hears him clunking through his bathroom; the sound of running water hitting something hollow, like a trash pail.

"It's too difficult," he says at last, absolutely toneless. "Back east, it's simple and straight-forward, and societal quiescence makes it easy to pick people off, one at a time. But Palo Alto ... it's not a one street-light town by any stretch of the imagination, I don't think there are any of those in California, but it's different. Too many alert, arguably intelligent people with an eye for detail and trigger-fast with their camera phones. It'd be much harder to accomplish -- not impossible, never impossible, I can craft us any kind of alibi, even here -- but I can't run the risk, Wardo. I can't get caught. Ever. Facebook needs me to survive."

Eduardo exhales. "You can't just answer a question, can you."

"Okay," Mark parries readily. "The answer is no. No, we can't be like we were, because Facebook is more important right now than whatever urge we have to kill people!"

"You wouldn't have Facebook at all without those urges!" Eduardo spits back, a furious, animalistic noise that Mark has never heard from him. "Don't you remember? You only have Facebook because of your twisted little method of keeping score. Facebook isn't some revolutionary student network, it's your goddamn scrapbook, the one you can't help but show off because that's all that matters to you, isn't it, showing off."

He tries to interrupt, but Eduardo bowls right over him, "Don't you get it, no matter how many circles you try to run with angel investments and sponsorship deals, we're never going to be the businessmen you envision us being because we're too screwed in the head. And that's not something you can just turn off."

Mark rocks on the spot, stammers for a moment, and then gets his voice back. "You can't assume. You can't, Wardo, you can't tell me that you want both and expect me to make it happen. It's a Dust Bowl kind of existence --"

"Do not turn my life into a Grapes of Wrath analogy, Mark," Eduardo hisses angrily. "If you'd ever bothered to finish reading it, you'd know that it ends very badly for the people who moved out to California."

He doesn't know what to say to that, so the silence stretches, uncomfortable and cold. They breathe at each other, little harsh sounds, like they've run to get to this point, like they've taken blows that winded them.

On the other end of the line, Eduardo snorts, derisive, hopeless, and Mark knows he's about to hang up; hang up and not pick up when Mark redials.

Precipice, Mark thinks, and then thinks of the zipline between the chimney and the pool, the recklessness that'd surged everywhere inside of him when Eduardo wrote an algorithm on glass, the way he'd pressed into Eduardo and murmured, mutually assured destruction, like a promise. He closes his eyes and leaps.

"Bring Christy with you," he blurts out. "You're right, it's not something we can turn off, and -- She likes fire, right? We can show her what real arson is, and we'll see. We'll see where things go." A pause. "Together," he adds, because that part of it might be important.

In a secret between himself and his own dignity, he might do some silently begging, because if Eduardo is here, he can make him see. They're so close to getting everything, and if it costs one more person their life, Mark can add that to his cosmic debt, because after this, everything changes.

Eduardo breathes in, sharp, and Mark can see it without needing to see it, the way he'll close his eyes and sway, pulled under like a drowning man at the thought that he could have it all: a beautiful murder and the success of his company and Mark.

"Yeah," he exhales, and Mark curls his hand against his own forehead, resisting the urge to gulp down air, like they've both been underwater. "Yeah, we'll be there."

part three -->