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i.
Special Agent Chris Hughes adjusts his tie in the mirror and watches his husband eye him with interest.
“Don’t start that when I have to go in,” Chris says, shaking his head and hiding a smile.
“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” Dustin says innocently, sidling up to him and linking his arms around Chris’s front. His mouth brushes warm down the back of Chris’s neck as he murmurs, “Absolutely no idea.”
Chris curls his fingers around Dustin’s wrist, and has almost resigned himself to being a little later than he wanted when his phone starts buzzing loudly and jolts him.
“Mmmm, you should probably get that, Special Agent Hughes,” Dustin says, and draws back, laughter in his voice.
Chris sighs, and reaches for his phone.
Thirty seconds later, he bites out, “Oh, fuck,” and watches Dustin’s head whip around in response.
“Zuckerberg’s escaped.”
- *
“Here you go,” Chris hears from behind him as a file lands on his desk with a loud slapping noise. He sits up straight in his usual reaction to hearing his boss’s voice—Erica Albright is an exceptionally fair taskmaster, but notoriously steely when crossed.
They get along great.
“My newest pet project?” he asks, already flipping open the file. “Two of them,” Chris mutters to himself, running a finger down the page. “Oh, good, a hacker and a thief.”
“No one’s caught them on camera yet,” Erica says. “They like to hit museums—from what’s in there, it looks like that’s the thief’s preference and the hacker’s his support. Take care of it, would you?”
“Yes boss,” Chris says, snapping the file shut and tucking it under his mousepad. He grins at her for a moment and says slyly, “So—what’s their nickname?”
“I’m sure I have no idea what you’re talking about,” Erica says flatly, but she looks amused.
“I can’t keep calling them ‘hacker’ and ‘thief’ forever,” Chris says, and will deny that it sounds anything like wheedling.
Erica sighs, rolling her eyes a little. “Not far off actually.”
Before she turns on her heel, she grins a little and says: “Da Vinci Coder.”
*
“They’ve got a new guy after us,” Mark says, eyes still trained on his laptop screen.
“Oh?” Eduardo asks interestedly. From the slightly strained tone of his voice and the repetitive puffing exhales of his breath, he’s doing something to exercise his thoroughly ridiculous flexibility. Mark refuses to look over there, because if he turns around to see Eduardo with his legs thrown over his head or something, he will be forced to do something drastic like tie him down in that exact position and have his way with him, and then neither of them will get any work done.
“FBI Agent Christopher Hughes,” Mark says, as Hughes’s entire life history spills across his screen. “Oh look, that was him in Washington, and it looks like he came damn close in California too. Huh.”
“What?” Eduardo asks, and his voice is suddenly a lot closer as he perches on the arm of Mark’s chair. There’s a faint gleam of sweat on his throat, and a pant in his voice, and Mark rests a hand on Eduardo’s leg, lean but corded with muscle.
“Nothing. This one might have a brain,” Mark says, and watches Eduardo grin a little wickedly.
“Good thing we like that.”
*
He’s in a warehouse. Chris has a hand on his gun for form’s sake, but he already knows he doesn’t need it. Mark Zuckerberg and Eduardo Saverin have never had anything to do with weapons of any kind, and now that it’s just Mark Zuckerberg, Chris doesn’t expect it to be any different. The man with his forehead leaning against a window, staring out at nothing, isn’t a man looking to take out an FBI agent. He’s a man who escaped prison to find his partner and never came close.
His posture is stiff, guarded, but Chris knows defeat when he sees it. “Mark,” he says, because he can’t call him Zuckerberg when he looks like that. “Mark, you were almost done.”
Chris watched Mark and Eduardo get taken away that day he arrested them both, watched them say goodbye to each wordlessly, a brave smile on Eduardo’s face and a quick brush of Mark’s fingers that said more than a thousand words would from anyone else; Eduardo’s been out for almost a year now, and Mark had scant months to go before he’d see him again. He wouldn’t screw that up unless it was important.
Mark finally turns around, and his face is a hard mask, except for his too-bleak eyes. “I came to find him,” he says. “He was here. He said goodbye.”
Chris tips his head to the side in mute inquiry, and Mark motions over his shoulder. Chris catches a glimpse of numbers scribbled on the window behind Mark, before Mark covers them up again with a careful hand.
“It’s our algorithm,” Mark says quietly, fingers gliding on the window like he’s tracing something—or someone—else entirely.
- *
“They are not romantic, Dustin,” Chris says, rolling his eyes so hard he thinks he might have sprained something.
“They’re a little romantic,” Dustin says, shrugging. His slightly wicked grin means that he’s probably mostly doing this to wind Chris up, but Dustin also likes books about star-crossed lovers and thieves with hearts of gold (even though Chris tells him that a heart of gold really does not make their actions any less illegal), so there’s likely also a part of him that means what he’s saying.
“They’re criminals,” Chris says helplessly.
“Yeah, but think about it! They do all their jobs together, and Eduardo likes paintings so—”
“Don’t call him Eduardo, you don’t know him and he’s a thief,” Chris tries to interrupt, in vain. He seriously needs to stop bringing his work home.
“—Mark gets him into any museum he wants, and you said they spent a year in France together, and plus, they look like they’re in love,” Dustin finishes quietly, looking at the one picture Chris has in his file, the one picture he’s finally managed to find of these brilliant, maddening criminals.
It’s an unbalanced shot, and they’re half-turned away from the camera, but Chris can see that they’re turned right toward each other.
“I think he looks like a robot, actually,” Chris snaps, jabbing a finger at Zuckerberg’s face, and then rubs his eyes in wordless frustration. This case must really be getting to him if he’s started snapping at Dustin.
“You’ve got no romance in your soul, Christopher,” Dustin says reproachfully, but his hands are cool and tender when they press against Chris’s throbbing temples.
Chris turns his head to the side a little, brushes a kiss against the inside of Dustin’s wrist. “I haven’t taken you to France, true, but I don’t think I’m too bad,” he says quietly, smiling a little.
Dustin’s whole face goes soft, his sweet wide mouth turning up at the corners as he steps into Chris’s arms. “I don’t need France,” he murmurs into Chris’s ear. “Nothing but you.”
*
“Where to next?” Mark says, a hand trailing down the smooth curve of Eduardo’s naked back, watching him arch into it in the mirror in front of their bed. Eduardo is golden and lithe and wicked, and Mark has no problems with his ego, but some days he’s not exactly sure what keeps Eduardo in his bed, his arms, his life; what puts that look in Eduardo’s eyes when he watches Mark, soft and vulnerable when everyone knows that vulnerability only screws you over in the end when you’re in this business.
Eduardo rolls over and traps Mark’s hand underneath him, smiles up at him like he’s a piece of art that Eduardo wants to steal and keep forever—except Mark is already stolen, already caught.
“I don’t care,” Eduardo says. “I’m with you.”
- *
Their first job together goes—well, much better than either of them had expected.
“Their security system is new,” Eduardo says, a slightly worried crinkle between his eyebrows. “I can get the safe, but I don’t know about the cameras.”
“Don’t worry about that,” Mark says, wiggling his fingers and smirking. He draws a line down the blueprints with his forefinger and says a little distractedly, “We’re going to need to get it from up top, and it looks like space is pretty tight up there. That’s going to require some flexibility.”
There’s a rustling noise from behind him, and when Mark looks back, he sees Eduardo hanging from the ceiling bar by his legs, before he twists his body up and back in a way that makes it look like he’s completely missing all of his bones.
“Don’t worry about that,” Eduardo says, and winks.
After they’re done, Eduardo says, “…Well, that went well.” He sounds a little surprised, and Mark doesn’t blame him. That was one of the smoothest jobs Mark has worked in a long time.
Mark eyes him sidelong; Mark works alone, has built himself on the conviction that he needs no one else, but there’s something about Eduardo—his quiet competence, the awe with which he watches Mark work, the wicked humor behind his sweet-faced exterior, the way he seems to read Mark’s mind at times—that makes Mark say casually, “One job could be a fluke.”
Eduardo grins, bright and pleased. “We’d better do another one, then,” he says. “Just to be sure.”
*
“You think he left on his own?” Dustin asks quietly, stirring pasta around on his plate at dinner that night.
Chris thinks about it for a minute, but he shakes his head because he already knows the answer. If he’s wrong about this, he’s no judge of character at all.
“No,” he says slowly. “I don’t think there’s anything in the world that would make Eduardo Saverin leave Mark of his own free will.”
*
“You’re working on a case right now that has your team at an impasse,” Mark says immediately, when Chris visits him in prison the next day.
Chris stops in his tracks, considers for a moment, before deciding that confirming Mark’s statement won’t do any harm. “Yeah,” he says. “So?”
Mark leans forward. The orange washes out his already pale skin, and his head of curls is a mess; but there’s something so assured about Mark Zuckerberg that not even prison can take that from him. It’s as if he’s so convinced that he is the most brilliant person you will ever meet, he manages to convince everyone around him as well.
“Special Agent Hughes,” he says quietly, formally, and something like warning bells begins ringing distantly at the back of Chris’s head.
“I have a proposition for you.”
ii.
Mark doesn’t mind being fettered.
He’s never been one for travel, for capricious flights that take him wherever he pleases; no, that’s Eduardo, who is sly and bright and happy because he runs from his pain, who runs from the memory of his family, who runs from the things he can’t change. Eduardo runs with no destination in mind but away, and Mark will always go with him.
So Mark doesn’t mind the tracker around his ankle, or the radius they’ve boxed him in, or that his movements are accountable to Chris and his team, or that he isn’t allowed his own computer at home because they don’t trust him with it. He’s good enough to work around that. He’ll get by.
What he minds is that no one is looking for Eduardo.
“That’s not true, Mark,” Chris tells him. “We’ve put the word out, and—”
“If you wanted him found, you’d let me look,” Mark says coldly. “Let me take those fucking restrictions off my office computer and I’ll—”
“You know I can’t do that,” Chris says, though his eyes are sympathetic. He puts a hand on Mark’s shoulder, and it’s only because he’s always refused to bullshit Mark that Mark doesn’t shake it off. “I’ll be looking,” he says intently. “Okay? I give you my word.”
Mark nods tightly, at last. He doesn’t trust easily with most things; with Eduardo, he trusts no one.
But something eases slightly in his chest, all the same.
- *
The first time Chris meets Eduardo Saverin, he’s fleeing across a rooftop. The rooftop of the building directly across from the one Chris is in, to be exact.
“Don’t try this at home!” Saverin calls with his hands cupped around his mouth. He’s a smudge of black fading into the dark night, too far away to see his face, but Chris would bet anything that he’s grinning like the adrenaline-addicted maniac his exploits prove he is. “You’d probably break your neck, and we kind of like you!”
And with that and a wave, he disappears over the edge of the building. Chris is already barking orders into his handset, but he knows it’s no use—they won’t find any sign of him or Zuckerberg.
“Oh, they like me,” Chris mutters to himself, tearing off his vest. “I’m so glad I have the approval of a pair of criminals.”
There’s the sting of being caught one step behind, but tearing through Chris’s body is also the spark of the chase, an intoxication in his blood. He hasn’t felt this alive in a while. A pair of criminals they may be, but they’re damn smart, and Chris is—at heart—perpetually unable to resist a challenge.
They got ahead this time; that’s all right.
His time is coming.
*
“Come on, come on, come on,” Eduardo hisses as he slams into the room, already scrabbling at his clothing like he’ll rupture something if he isn’t out of it right now.
“Stop moving,” Mark says coolly, distantly, and watches Eduardo freeze in place. He tracks the slow bob of Eduardo’s throat as he swallows hard, hands flat on his own stomach. Mark carefully unzips Eduardo from his black suit, kneels and draws it down his legs, lays a hand on his side and feels the tremoring of his body, the fire in his blood he can’t contain.
“Don’t want to damage this,” Mark says casually, folding it up neatly and setting it on a chair. “We’ll need it again.” His movements are slow and unhurried; out of the corner of his eye, he can see Eduardo standing stock-still, except for the quick rise-fall of his chest as he breathes fast and the glide of his tongue over his lower lip. Mark knows how Eduardo gets after a job; he needs someone to look after him, hold him down. Someone to burn with him and make sure he comes out unscathed.
“Okay,” Mark says quietly. “Come here.”
Like a shot released, Eduardo does.
It’s a little like throwing oneself into a hurricane, only Mark will give as good as he gets.
“I need,” Eduardo gasps when Mark shoves him onto the bed, “I need—”
“I know,” Mark says, because he does; strips out of his clothes, pushes Eduardo’s wrists down into the bed and says, “I’ve got you,” watches Eduardo push up with his whole body and fall back against the bed when he realizes he’s going nowhere, panting and bright-eyed with adrenaline and lust.
He chants Mark’s name while Mark gives it to him with deep, vicious thrusts that drive gasps from Eduardo’s throat; he’s got his legs drawn up, a full-body curve that Mark is deeply possessive over, proprietary. Ever bend and dip and golden twist of Eduardo’s body belongs to Mark; his heart goes without saying.
It’s only fair, when Mark is so acutely aware of being less than a whole person without Eduardo there. He’d managed fine before Eduardo. With Eduardo—fine is surpassed tenfold.
It never takes long on nights like these; not for Eduardo—who is still shaking with exhilaration and keening every time Mark surges forward—and not for Mark—who plans these jobs to the nth degree and then waits by his laptop, feeds Eduardo information and watches with his pulse pounding in his ears as Eduardo does what he says. It’s exquisitely intimate in a way so few understand.
“We should probably refrain from taunting the FBI agent who’s determined to see us in prison,” Mark says afterward, murmuring the words into Eduardo’s—for once less-than-perfect—hair.
“You think so?” Eduardo asks. Mark can feel the smile he’s hiding against Mark’s chest.
“It would be smart,” Mark says matter-of-factly, but he already knows Eduardo’s answer. Smart would be retiring with what they already have and putting their talents to use in the legal sector. Smart would be doing jobs in other countries, where there isn’t a sharp, resolute agent who’s after them like it’s personal to him. Smart would have been never going into this business in the first place; settling for the mediocre lives they’d been born into, for joining the masses of uninspired sheep who never manage to raise themselves up into being extraordinary.
They’d take extraordinary over smart any day.
“Yes, but this is so much more fun,” Eduardo says drowsily, coming down hard from the rush of a steal; he’s addicted to this world and its perfection as much as Mark is, can’t live without the flood of heady satisfaction that comes from stealing something out from under someone’s nose—he’s Mark’s other half.
If they’d settled for less, they never would have found each other, and that possibility is unacceptable.
*
“I hear Princess Saverin’s in trouble and you flew the coop,” is the first thing Sean Parker says to Mark since he last saw him five years ago.
For a minute, Mark seriously considers shutting the door in his face—Eduardo’s name is a raw wound inside his chest, tender to the touch—before reconsidering. Sean isn’t malicious, just kind of a tactless dickhead (and coming from Mark, that’s saying something). Mark’s also known him way too long to be free of him, and Sean’s always had his back.
“I’m glad you’re volunteering to help,” Mark says calmly, and holds the door wide open in a wordless directive.
Sean flicks his sunglasses up and smirks, before sidling into Mark’s room and collapsing on his couch.
Later, when they’re both more than a little drunk and Mark has told Sean everything he knows and possibly fallen into a brooding state while staring out the window, Sean stretches a leg out and kicks Mark’s ankle, says, “I am going to help, you know.” He’s mumbling it a little, which stems from either the copious amount of alcohol he’s consumed, or slight embarrassment. Sean Parker is one of the few people Mark knows who gets embarrassed when he’s being sincere. “I like pissing him off because it’s hilarious, but it’s not like I want anything bad to happen to him,” he continues. “Besides, dude, you’re so much less grumpy when he’s sucking your cock on a regular basis. I really don’t want to go back to those years when he wasn’t around.”
Mark snorts. Sincerity mitigated by vulgarity. That’s Sean all right.
But Mark might have more assistance in this than he realized. It’s a comforting thought. “Thanks,” he says quietly, still staring out the window, and wonders if Eduardo can see the same sunset wherever he is.
- *
“I am not working with him,” Eduardo says flatly, arms folded across his chest.
Sean leans back in his chair and smirks up at Eduardo. “I don’t know why you don’t like me, Saverin. Could it be the long and varied history Mark and I had before you came along?”
Mark glares at Sean exasperatedly, who just keeps staring at Eduardo. The only sign he’s noticed Mark’s irritation is his deepening smirk. No one smirks quite like Sean.
It’s not even like he’s actually interested in Mark, he just can’t resist winding Eduardo up. If anything, Mark might have to worry about Sean being after Eduardo, with how closely this resembles pigtail-pulling.
But no—Sean’s sole objective in life is to be an agent of chaos, that’s all.
Starting with pissing off Mark’s boyfriend, whose lips are starting to go white with how firmly he’s pressing them together, apparently.
“Mark, can I have a word,” Eduardo says tightly, and leaves before Mark can answer him. Mark follows him into the other room with the distinct feeling that he is currently the most mature person in their general vicinity, which is a somewhat frightening possibility. No one’s ever held Mark up as a standard of behavior before, and he doesn’t think they’re about to start anytime soon.
They haven’t gone ten steps into the room before Eduardo’s whirling around and kissing the life out of Mark, teeth scraping roughly over Mark’s lower lip, hands fisted in his shirt. It’s not the best kiss they’ve ever managed, but Mark will chalk that up to sheer frustration, if Eduardo’s white-knuckled hands are any indication.
“Feeling any better?” Mark asks dryly when they pull apart, smirking. There’s a slight sting in his lip from Eduardo’s enthusiastic teeth. Mark runs his tongue over it to feel it flare up again, to watch the dark bloom of Eduardo’s pupils.
For a moment, Eduardo is still visibly caught up in his frustration, before his face crumples a little shame-facedly, and he drops his head onto Mark’s shoulder.
“Yeah, actually,” he says kind of sheepishly, the sound vaguely muffled. The fit of his hands on Mark’s hips is deeply possessive.
“Neanderthal,” Mark says blandly. “However do you live with yourself.” Just in case Eduardo’s overdeveloped guilt-complex gets tricked into thinking Mark’s actually serious for a moment, he fits his hand over the back of Eduardo’s neck briefly, and trusts Eduardo to recall how Mark had set his teeth there the night before, an open-mouthed bite of possession that had Eduardo shaking and begging and falling apart in his hands.
Neither of them are exactly one for sharing.
Eduardo shivers a little, and finally pulls back. When he sees that Mark is still smirking at him, Eduardo covers his face. “Do I really have to be nice to him?” he says in a tone that is very nearly approaching a whine. Mark swallows a smile. Nice seems so effortless for Eduardo—whether it’s strangers he passes on the street, or random old ladies he holds the door for, or cashiers at the grocery store, he always has a smile and an interested ear ready. So for him to lose that composure and that pleasantness around Sean, it means that Sean’s really getting to him.
He’s so fucking jealous over Mark that it’s practically steaming off his skin, and it hits the deepest, most primal part of Mark like a fist.
“Nice isn’t really required,” Mark says dryly, pulling Eduardo’s hands away from his face. “Civility would be good, though, if only for the duration of this job.”
Eduardo looks at Mark’s face and sighs. “No,” he says, “I will be nice, even if I have to fake it desperately. He’s your friend.”
“Yeah,” Mark agrees. “He’s my friend. And you’re mine.”
Eduardo closes his eyes, at that. He looks like he’s sinking into those words with no intention to ever come out again.
“Okay,” he says at last, voice gone soft and a little breathless. “Let’s go back. I’ll be good now.”
“I can’t tell you how glad that makes me,” Mark says wryly, “because I guarantee you he won’t be.”
True to his words, Sean looks like he’s barely holding back laughter when they go back, on the verge of one of the many inappropriate remarks he has at his disposal.
“Okay, let’s be professional about this,” Eduardo says cheerfully before he can do so, like he’d never stormed out of the room not ten minutes ago. “I want to get this done as quickly as possible, I’ve got a date with Mark’s cock.”
Sean is too practiced to choke at that, but he does laugh out loud—a real laugh, one that not many people see. Eduardo looks a little smug, and Mark—well, Mark’s just had the rough equivalent of a mating dance performed over him. He’d have to be dead to not be a little satisfied with himself.
They go back to work, and Eduardo and Sean end up getting along a little better after that.
“A little” being the operative phrase there, of course.
*
“If I ever meet whoever got Zuckerberg started in crime, I’m going to—” Chris trails off, waving his hand around ineffectually in a way that means do something drastic, too tired to finish his sentence out loud.
“Pat them on the head?” Dustin suggests. “Fan them? Slap them backhanded? You might want to work on your clarity of gesture, Christopher.”
Chris glares at him a little balefully. “You’re not exactly being supportive, you know,” he says, rubbing his face with one hand.
“You want supportive, darling husband of mine?” Dustin asks, grinning a little and forcibly closing the file in Chris’s other hand. “Leave the terrible twosome alone for a bit and come to bed. They can have you during the day, but you’re mine right now.”
Chris should argue, probably; should go back to work like the dedicated and model FBI agent that he is.
His head is swimming with how tired he is, and Dustin is smiling at him sweet and slyly tempting, hair glinting redder in the fading half-light from the window.
“Yes sir,” Chris says, watches Dustin’s eyes go promisingly dark, and follows his husband to bed.
- *
“Come on, kid,” Sean Parker says, car salesman grin that manages to be charming even when its manipulation is so blatant. He eyes Mark up and down—Mark in his button-down shirt and tie, that tie that feels more like a noose day by day; Mark who is working an IT job and hates the banality of it, who turns to online pursuits of questionable legality because they give him the thrill he so desperately craves; Mark, who wants a purpose like oxygen for his lungs, but doesn’t know what that purpose is—and he says, “You’re meant for more than this.”
Mark listens, and that is the beginning.
*
“There’s something weird in his financials,” Amy says, leaning over Mark’s shoulder as his fingers fly. “You want to take a look at—”
“Done,” Mark says complacently, and leans back in his chair. Numbers roll across his screen, and Amy’s eyes narrow as she reads quickly.
Finally, she leans away and claps a hand on Mark’s shoulder. “Marilyn wanted a puppy, but I came down on Chris’s side,” she says with a grin. “A pet felon’s much cooler.”
“Thank you,” Mark says, dry as dust. Being allowed legal access into the FBI’s database doesn’t carry quite the same thrill as hacking it, but Mark does like showing off.
Amy smiles at him again, and runs off to tell Chris about their breakthrough. Chris nods at Mark with approval over her shoulder, and rolls his eyes when Mark just slouches a little lower in his seat.
They’re actually—well. He and Chris are actually kind of friends now, which is more than a little strange. Mark doesn’t make friends easily, definitely doesn’t keep them for long if he ever manages to get them in the first place.
So it surprised Mark more than anyone else when he started getting comfortable around Chris. Chris, who looks like a choirboy, for god’s sake.
A choirboy with a crisp sense of humor and a steely authoritative streak, to be exact.
Mark has a feeling that Chris is used to being underestimated by most, and just as used to proving them wrong. He’d do it with a smile on his face and stone in his eyes. Mark gets that—how many people have looked at Mark and categorized him as a nerd, dismissed him outright, and paid for that in the end?
Chris is a bit of a walking contradiction, and Mark likes mysteries. A sharp FBI agent with a face like a fifteen-year-old’s, who handles his gun smoothly and confidently and never hesitates to get his hands dirty, and dresses like he actually cares about the cut of his suit, which is baffling to Mark.
(If Mark had had his way, he’d have spent all of his time in sweatpants and a t-shirt and flip-flops, but Eduardo had different ideas. It’s thanks to Eduardo that Mark knows the look of someone in love with his clothes, actually.)
“Nice work,” Chris says to him one time, adjusting his tie as he’s speaking. “See if you can get through those other four files, okay?”
“Sure thing, Prada,” Mark mutters distractedly under his breath, eyes trained on the computer screen.
Chris stops in his tracks. He covers his face with one hand. “You are never meeting Dustin,” he says firmly. “The two of you—christ, it doesn’t bear thinking about.”
Mark smirks.
*
A week later, Chris takes Mark home for dinner.
“Dustin won’t shut up about it,” he grumbles as Mark slouches in the passenger seat.
“So you’re a little bit whipped, aren’t you,” Mark says with amusement.
Chris scowls and darts a look at him sideways. Mark can practically see the words forming on his tongue: you’re one to talk. Chris has too much control and too much tact to let them slip, though.
Mark looks out the window. “I suppose there are some benefits,” he says quietly, still smiling a little, and the tension in the air breaks as he sees Chris shake his head out of the corner of his eye.
Mark’s seen pictures of Chris’s husband when he was checking up on Chris’s life history, but this is the first time he’s seen him in person. Dustin is vivacious, quick to laugh, and very, very smart. Mark is not fooled by his constant, seemingly meaningless chatter. He’s got eyes that notice everything.
“Oh, excellent,” Dustin says when Chris and Mark walk inside, “now I get a firsthand account of all those files he’s been bringing home for years.”
“Oh, fuck,” Chris mutters and disappears upstairs in something very like a hasty retreat. “DO NOT MAKE MY HUSBAND AN ACCESSORY,” comes floating down the stairs as a hurried afterthought.
Dustin winks at Mark, mouth quivering in amusement. Mark eyes him, considering.
They’re probably going to get along.
Throughout dinner, Mark fulfills Dustin’s love of all things theft—which is somewhat inexplicable considering who he married—by preceding almost every sentence with “we allegedly—” and watching Chris cover his face resignedly.
“Don’t mind him, he insists on being the voice of reason,” Dustin says cheerfully, and pours out coffee for all of them.
“I’m pretty sure someone in this room needs to be,” Chris says, crossing his arms in front of his chest. His mouth quivers in amusement, though; it’s a tell, one that speaks to how comfortable he is here, in his home, with his husband. Usually, Mark entertains idle thoughts of taking Chris along to a poker game and watching him clean up.
“Yes sir, Special Agent Hughes,” Dustin says in a tone laced with innuendo.
“Should I excuse myself?” Mark says blandly, and Chris rolls his eyes so hard Mark wonders if he’s going to strain something. Dustin ducks his head, grinning.
Over-the-top flirting aside, though, later Mark catches Chris straightening Dustin’s collar and running a thumb over the back of Dustin’s neck, an easy gesture that speaks of familiarity. They don’t realize Mark is watching. Dustin’s squinting absently at a paper in his hand, and Chris sighs and digs around in one of the kitchen drawers for a minute, before he comes up with a pair of reading glasses that he subsequently drops on top of Dustin’s head.
“You’re supposed to keep those with you,” he reminds Dustin with a put-upon look, but Mark watches him watch Dustin avidly as he pushes a pair of black frames up his nose.
Dustin eyes Chris over the top of his glasses and smirks a little, like he knows exactly what his husband is thinking. He probably does, too, if Chris’s slight flush is any evidence.
They’re so damn married. Mark looks away, tightens his fingers around the handle of his coffee mug, one by one.
- *
“Do you ever think about it?” Eduardo asks, twining his fingers around Mark’s and drawing their joined hands up to bite lightly at Mark’s knuckles. He’s got his head on Mark’s leg, stretched out on the couch, while Mark balances his laptop on his other leg.
“Think about what?” Mark murmurs distractedly, tapping his keyboard with his free hand. His work might go faster if he had two hands to work with, but he’s got no intention of pulling away. They’re in no hurry.
In response to his question, Eduardo makes a circle of his thumb and forefinger and slides it down Mark’s ring finger, uncharacteristically hesitant.
Mark stills.
“We couldn’t use our real names,” Eduardo says, “and I know we wouldn’t be able to wear them all the time. But I—”
I want it, his eyes say, hungry and pleading, like he’s ever needed to plead, like Mark could ever deny him anything.
Does he think about it, Eduardo wants to know. Does he think about putting a ring on Eduardo’s finger so that no one else will ever touch him again. Does he think about saying the words that mean mine, only mine, forever mine. Does he think about it?
Mark has backup plan after backup plan for everything he does, isn’t content unless he’s figured out every way to handle a job, every way to recover from a misstep, every way to be in control. Mark always knows what to do.
With Eduardo, Mark is flying totally blind. Eduardo is it. There is no backup plan.
Mark takes a breath and says, “I’ve thought about it.”
“And?” Eduardo asks, but his eyes are already lighting up like a captured sunrise, because somehow Mark—inscrutable, monotone Mark—is as transparent as window-glass when it comes to Eduardo.
“And I think you’d better ask me for real someday,” Mark says, running a thumb over Eduardo’s mouth, tapping a kiss with his fingertips. “Put some effort into it, Saverin.”
Eduardo laughs, a clear sound that thrums more with delight than amusement, and curls into Mark like he’s come home.
“Okay,” he says, words muffled against Mark’s stomach, voice warm and content, and it’s achingly sweet like he’s pressed his fingers into Mark’s heart. “Someday it is.”
“Take your time,” Mark says, breath catching in his throat. “Neither of us is going anywhere.”
*
Mark sees Eduardo three days later.
It’s a split-second sighting, but that’s enough; Mark runs, feet pounding, searching every unfamiliar face and swallowing against his dying hope, and then he hears the payphone.
His fingers so tight around the phone that his knuckles creak in protest, Mark’s voice is like a whip when he says, “Wardo, where are you.”
“Mark,” and the sound of his voice threatens to send Mark to his knees, but he grits his teeth, slams a hand against the phone booth, listens as Eduardo continues, “Mark, god, I can’t tell you, but I—I’m fine, okay?”
Fine is a relative concept. When Eduardo’s sick and trying to hide it, fine means I’m not dying, stop staring at me like that; when he wakes up with nightmares that send him flying out of bed, wild-eyed and trembling, fine means I’m a mess, a fucked-up kid inside at the moment, but I’ll be okay in the morning.
Right now, fine means nothing more than I’m alive, I’m unbroken, and I don’t want to scare you, and Mark knows exactly what options are left unspoken at the edges of that statement.
“Tell me,” Mark says quietly, because there is a purpose to this conversation and the sooner he finds out what it is, the sooner he can ruin everyone who stands in between him and Eduardo.
“They said they’re looking for something,” Eduardo says quietly. “Something we took.”
“Well, that narrows it down,” Mark snaps—not at Eduardo, but at his own ineffectual fear, at the fact that he can’t do anything.
Eduardo makes a noise that is almost a laugh. If Mark were there, it would be a laugh. Eduardo always laughs easier, smiles more, goes softer when Mark is around.
“They’re after Facebook, Mark,” Eduardo says slowly, and Mark just nods, because some part of him was expecting that.
“Okay,” he says, and Facebook is the product of his greatest heist, it’s theirs, the convergence of their two brilliant minds, the mark they made that proved their worth.
He’d give it up to get Eduardo. He’d give up everything.
“Okay,” he says again, and Eduardo swallows, says, “Mark, be careful.” It means don’t do anything stupid, and I can take care of myself, and please just walk away, and I love you, I love you, you idiot.
Mark loves him too, the terrifying, overwhelming kind of feeling that Mark had never thought himself capable of before Eduardo, which is why he has absolutely no intention of listening to him at all.
- *
“It’s called Facebook,” Mark says, years in the past, the both of them young and fresh and convinced of their own immortality. Eduardo is bright-eyed with interest, chin hooked over Mark’s shoulder as he reads.
“Modern art,” he murmurs in Mark’s ear. “That’s different for us.”
“Yeah,” Mark agrees, “but it’ll be worth it.”
“Collection of photographs…” Eduardo reads aloud, “creator is son of billionaire…died at age twenty, two weeks after completion…huh. Father sold it immediately afterward, and now it’s up under maximum security—oh, this is good.”
“Yeah,” Mark says, leaning back into Eduardo. “Three people have tried for it already.”
“We can do better,” Eduardo says, and it’s faith in Mark, perhaps, or faith in himself; or maybe, at this point, the two are one and the same.
“Sean says it’s on everyone’s list,” Mark says. “You know how criminals love a good story.” Everyone’s going to want this, and no one will ever think Mark and Eduardo capable of it.
“They all think we’re just kids,” Eduardo says quietly, and they are, objectively, but what the fuck does that even mean: there’s a fire in Eduardo’s eyes that matches the one setting Mark alight, a drive to be better, the best, and they’re kids but they’re as far from green as possible, and this will be their signature, emblazoned across the shady, hidden corners of the world that underestimates them.
“So let’s prove them wrong,” Mark says, cool and certain and hungry for a challenge, and this is the curtain drawing up to bare the next act, the thread of fate plucked and humming and waiting to make its mark, the shadow of the future creeping unseen; only neither of them knows any of this, because Eduardo’s mouth is open and yielding against Mark’s own, because they are young and invincible, because they are in love and this is not yet the moment when everything goes to hell.
*
“Mark,” Chris says one day, and Mark’s head snaps up instantly at his tone. “Mark, you need to see this.”
“We flagged it on our database,” Mark hears distantly, along with other explanations, but he’s not listening properly. All he can see is the picture in front of him: Eduardo, who looks tired and a little bruised under the eyes; Eduardo, who badgers Mark into eating when he’s working, but never sleeps enough for Mark’s liking; Eduardo, who doesn’t have Mark there to help him sleep.
There’s a hand on Eduardo’s shoulder, and a piece of the back of someone else’s head on the other side of the picture; Mark’s chest seizes in recognition, and he thinks oh.
“Do you know who they are, Mark?” Chris asks, voice a little gentle like Mark’s a spooked animal, but also a little careful. Mark wonders for a moment what his face looks like, if it’s anything as cold as he’s gone inside.
“Yes,” he hears himself say as if from a distance, and his voice curls as clear and precise as a frozen tundra, and he is aware that behind him, Chris is wincing in response. “Yes,” Mark says again, fingers running over the hidden fear in Eduardo’s eyes. “I do.”
iii.
“You know Mark’s not going to give anything up for me, right?” Eduardo says, lounging in his seat as best as he can with his hands tied behind the chair. “He likes me well enough, but he’s not sentimental.”
Dear god, it’s the biggest lie he’s ever told in his life—and he’ll never forgive himself if he doesn’t sell it. Mark’s reputation is working in his favor; there are enough people willing to swear to Mark’s cold eyes and emotionless nature that it would seem ludicrous to expect vast depths of emotion from him.
Eduardo is one of a bare handful of people who know exactly the kind of fury that lies beneath Mark’s cool composure, a fury that is all the more dangerous for its control. Eduardo’s felt the emotion in Mark, buried deep and breathed to life when he’s with Eduardo; the light in his eyes when he cups Eduardo’s face has never left Eduardo cold.
Eduardo knows with earth-shattering conviction that if anything were to happen to him, Mark would tear apart anyone and everyone responsible for it. He’d ruin them or die trying, and Eduardo wants him away from this.
(It’s nothing less than Eduardo would do, nothing different. They’re about as dangerously codependent as two people come, and Eduardo has no room to talk, but it doesn’t matter—he wants Mark as safe as he can be, all the same.)
“We work better together than we do alone,” Eduardo says, shrugging a little, viciously walling off the tremor threatening his voice, “but I’ve got no value as a bargaining chip. You’ve got a better chance just going after Facebook yourself.”
Cameron coughs a little into his fist, a deliberate affectation if Eduardo’s ever seen one, and a chill starts to run down Eduardo’s spine.
Tyler smiles, slow, cold and vicious.
That is when they tell him that Mark has broken out of prison.
- *
Chris isn’t languishing for excitement in his life, or anything. For one thing, his team is plenty exciting enough—sly, sarcastic Amy, who pats Chris on the shoulder and says, “I’ll take care of the legwork, boss,” before flying down the street after a fleeing criminal who’s stupid enough to think he can outrun her; and Marilyn, with her sweet face that allows all kinds of idiots to underestimate her, up until the moment she puts them on the ground and cuffs them without ever breaking a sweat.
So Zuckerberg and Saverin are off the streets. That’s good news—it leaves Chris more time to work on other cases, more time to come home to his husband. More time to remind himself that he is an FBI agent, on the side of the law, and it is, most likely, unseemly to show so much animal satisfaction at the thrill of the chase. He is supposed to put criminals away. He isn’t supposed to dream of the looks on their faces when he proves they aren’t half as smart as they think they are.
They haven’t run out of criminals to go after, that’s for sure, but with each one, Chris is increasingly conscious of a lingering feeling that approaches—disappointment. There’s no challenge in them. It’s the egotist in Chris, probably, but he doesn’t feel like he’s done a thing properly unless he had to really work at it first, prove himself worthy.
“What do you think they’ll do when their time’s up?” Amy asks him one day, wild and relentless Amy who reminds Chris of himself, and probably understands best the slight, gray tinge of boredom he feels when he sees the new cases they get. She doesn’t say who, but she doesn’t need to.
“I don’t know,” Chris says, shrugging, because Chris might be the one who caught them, but that doesn’t mean he’s anywhere close to fully understanding them. “Maybe they’re done. Maybe they’ll settle down. Maybe they’ll run away to France again.”
“And if they just start up again?” Amy asks, eyebrows lifted, sounding like she already knows the answer, watching the energetic tapping of his fingers as he contemplates the question he’s already wondered about a hundred times before. “The theft, the running, the taunts, all of it.”
And Chris looks up, meets Amy’s understanding eyes and grins a little, says, “Then I’ll just have to put them away one more time, won’t I.”
- *
The way they look at each other when Chris finally catches them—wordless but necessary, like they’re saying I’ll wait and take care of yourself and I love you all at once, like they’re stealing and binding all the split-second instances of each other so they can hoard it when they have nothing else, and Chris—Chris is implacable but sympathetic, because this is the one thing he understands about them: not the draw of crime, nor the greed for things not his, but the connection that springs up between two people, unexpected and staggering, so that nothing else will ever matter.
If it were a choice between Saverin and his life of crime, Chris would stake almost everything on the certainty that Zuckerberg would choose the former, and the reverse would be true as well.
Chris is not one to gloat, so he doesn’t, but this chase is over and Chris has come out in front, and he breathes and believes in the law that these two have broken willfully, so there is no hesitance in his hands when he snaps the handcuffs around Zuckerberg’s wrists.
But the two of them are in the kind of love that he recognizes innately, so he is careful when he loads Zuckerberg into the car, and pretends not to notice when Saverin taps his fingers against the window glass: a silent, solemn goodbye.
*
Eduardo has waited for Mark to put his hands on him and say Okay, you can—, and came apart at the permission; he has waited for Mark’s voice in his ear, backing him up, the one person he trusts implicitly; once, he spent a heartsick, gray three months waiting for Mark in Canada, because the two of them together were conspicuous, and that was the time they couldn’t afford to be careless.
So this is not unfamiliar, waiting for Mark to be at his side, but this time he hates it all the way up to his teeth. They aren’t meant to be apart.
“Your hair looks ridiculous,” Mark says, fingers tapping against the glass separating them, a smile tugging at his lips.
“Sweet-talker,” Eduardo murmurs. He puts his hand up against Mark’s, a shallow tease for what he really wants: the feel of Mark’s skin on his own, no glass to come in the way.
“Keep your head down until I’m out,” Mark says quietly, and Eduardo can hear the promise that follows: and then we’ll leave, fly, disappear and do whatever the hell we want—together.
“I’ll be waiting,” Eduardo says in response, throat tight and aching.
“Soon,” Mark says, fingers on glass again, tapping twice, and Eduardo did it first, but from either of them it means I love you.
*
Mark counts every remaining week by the light in Eduardo’s eyes when he visits, stays quiet the rest of the time, wonders if the first thing he’ll do when he gets out is find a room for the two of them and make Eduardo scream until his skin feels like his own again, or maybe they’ll just get out, the two of them, as fast and as far as they can go; and Eduardo comes every week, constant like the chime of a clock, an unspoken reminder of what Mark has waiting for him, the deceptively doe-eyed, shamelessly wicked beacon of hope that keeps Mark human—until the week when he doesn’t, and sends Mark’s world toppling to the ground.
*
Eduardo is their bargaining chip, their leverage, the knife at Mark’s back, but in the end they only need him alive. That leaves a lot of leeway.
At one point in his life, Eduardo was polite more often than not, kept his thoughts to himself. He’s smart enough to recognize idiocy when he sees it, but he used to swallow his words, smile like he’d never met someone so interesting before, when all he wanted to do was laugh in their faces. It’s difficult to overcome years of conditioning.
If Eduardo has softened Mark’s edges over time, taught him when to back down and when to hold his tongue, Mark has done the reverse for Eduardo: like the two of them are tipping scales, lending each other the weight of their temperaments until they find their balance.
“So, which one of you is the criminal mastermind?” Eduardo asks with interest, eyes darting between Tyler and Cameron. “I’m having a little trouble figuring out who’s Brawn and who’s Brain when you’re both in such stunningly good shape.”
Tyler is the volatile one, Eduardo knows: as Eduardo keeps his mouth running, Tyler’s response is nothing less than predictable.
Tyler cracks him across the face, back-handed, white starburst of pain at the corner of his mouth. Eduardo touches his tongue carefully to his lip, tastes blood.
After that, Eduardo never stops talking.
- *
It’s been three months and four days since Eduardo last saw Mark, and he could probably count the hours too, has been carrying the tally in his bones.
It’s been three months and four days, and then Eduardo gets a message that says, I’m coming to you.
“It was only supposed to be a few weeks,” Mark says when he shows up, stumbling over the sentence because Eduardo has latched the door shut and shoved Mark against it and keeps kissing him between words, trying to gain back three months of touch in the space of a few minutes. Mark kisses him just as hard, one hand clutching the back of Eduardo’s neck. When Eduardo pulls back, he can see that Mark’s eyes are shadowed with the purple kiss of sleepless nights, he’s pale from too much hiding, wrists thin, because when Eduardo’s not there he’s content to subsist on whatever’s at hand and nothing more.
“I—the job went easily,” Mark continues, visibly tired, pressed so close to Eduardo it’s like he wants to fuse them together. “But it fucked over the Winklevosses, they wanted it too, and their partner, Divya—he got shot in the middle of it all. I had to stay away. They’re out for blood, and they’re never going to get yours. Not while I’m around.”
“Not yours either,” Eduardo says, dark and hungry and certain, and he nips sharply at Mark’s lower lip until there’s a copper tang on his tongue, and Mark groans into his mouth like he’s coming alive after months of coma. Eduardo licks the taste of blood from his mouth and says, “That’s for me.”
Psychologists would have a field day with them. Eduardo thinks about it, sometimes: if they ever got caught, how would they be remembered? Would it be for their cons, their thefts, their competence? Or would it be for this possessive, necessary, codependent thing between them that Eduardo didn’t know he needed until he had it?
Eduardo would prefer to never see that choice be made, if it’s all the same, to never see the inside of a jail cell; but if did, he’d want to be remembered for Mark, because they are better thieves than most around them, but no one comes close to the way he loves Mark.
Eduardo takes Mark to the bedroom, lets Mark push him onto the bed, buries kisses in Mark’s hairline and lets three months melt away in the intertwining of their limbs.
*
“That’s Divya,” Cameron says. “I don’t believe you’ve met.”
Divya waves, a sharp, mocking gesture. Eduardo watches the way he stands a little off-balance, keeping the weight off his left leg. It looks no different from the other, but Eduardo looks at it and thinks about the mess that can be made of a knee when it takes a bullet.
Divya follows his gaze. “Remind me to thank Zuckerberg for that when I see him next,” he says, a cold smile curving his lips.
“I’ll be sure to do that,” Eduardo says. “Most people take responsibility for their own ineptitude when they fumble a job, you know.”
Tyler snarls, wordless. Divya stops him mid-lunge with a hand to his chest. He says calmly, “I’ll take responsibility for what’s actually my fault. Trusting Zuckerberg even halfway, for example.”
Cameron cuts them all off with a sharp gesture, says smoothly, “This isn’t what we’re here for; let’s not waste any of our time.”
“By all means,” Eduardo says pleasantly, “keep wasting. I’ve been missing intelligent conversation, but one out of two isn’t too bad.”
Cameron eyes him amusedly, in a way that makes Eduardo’s skin crawl thoroughly. He’s a gentleman, Cameron is, all the way up until he has you backed against a wall with a knife at your throat. Honesty might be a strange thing for a thief to value, but still—Eduardo prefers Tyler’s blatant aggression to Cameron’s deceptive smile.
“No,” Eduardo says when Cameron is done explaining what they want from him; and again, “No,” and again, and again, but it’s no use:
“You tell him that someone wants Facebook from him, nothing more. You don’t tell him who we are and you don’t tell him where we are,” Tyler says, and Divya grins, slow and chilling, the physical embodiment of the wordless or else.
“Ask me if I ever miss,” he says calmly, miming a shot with his hands.
Eduardo doesn’t need to.
Mark’s voice in his ear is both the sweetest thing he’s heard in months and a sharp hook in his chest, and Eduardo shuts his eyes, tries to put all the unspoken warning in his voice that he can. He doesn’t think for a second that Mark will listen, but he can still try.
Stay away from all of this, he pleads with his voice underneath the words he has to relay.
Mark says his name again and hangs up, and Eduardo knows what it means:
I’m coming to find you.
*
They keep him for months, moving around to different houses so he doesn’t get too comfortable in one place, and Eduardo learns how to rile Tyler up in three words or less, how to make Divya bare his teeth in a menacing smile, how to momentarily shatter Cameron’s affable mask for a glimpse of the danger underneath.
He counts the days, tries to escape once, smiles afterward through a bloody mouth because when Mark finds him he will ruin them, and Eduardo will not do a thing to stop him.
“If I were you, I’d start running,” he says casually on day fifty-four, watches Cameron frown with satisfaction; he is afraid and hates being afraid, so he closes his eyes and tries on Mark’s skin for size, looks at them blank-faced and biting, watches himself unnerve them as if from a distance, and waits for what he knows will come.
*
It’s a Tuesday, or maybe a Friday, or a Sunday, perhaps, when Tyler says, “We’ve got a job,” and leaves Eduardo cuffed to the bed frame before they go, as a precaution.
Eduardo is still there a few hours later, though he could probably get free if it were a necessity, when he hears a distant commotion and sits up straight—it’s too much noise for three returning men. He shuts his eyes hard in the hopes that he’ll pick up more sound that way, listening, listening, listening for what he’s been waiting for so desperately, and then his eyes fly open when he hears the turning of the doorknob.
It’s a woman through the door first, gun drawn, checking every corner and behind the door before she turns to him and calls out, “He’s in here!”
Eduardo recognizes her when she kneels down next to Eduardo, fumbling with the cuffs around his wrist until they release.
“Amelia Ritter,” Eduardo says, priding himself on the stillness of his voice, though his heart is hammering in his chest.
She glances up at him, lifting her eyebrows a little. “Present,” she says, rising to her feet. “When you guys were stalking Chris’s team, did you learn that I prefer Amy?”
“We did,” Eduardo says. “And I wouldn’t call it stalking, per se.”
“I would,” Amy says cheerfully. “It’s okay, though. Chris’s sparkling personality has driven better men to worse lengths.”
Eduardo is actually startled into laughter, though it might mostly be the heady relief flooding through him, and his mouth is still twisted into a grin, he’s still rubbing the red line on his wrist, when Mark walks through the door.
“Oh, yeah,” Amy says quietly from somewhere behind Eduardo. “He might have missed you a little bit.”
Eduardo hears her distantly, like he’s behind glass with Mark the only real thing in front of him; he doesn’t look at her because he is physically unable to tear his eyes away from Mark, who walks forward and stops a few feet in front Eduardo, white-faced and thinner than when Eduardo last saw him, the most beautiful sight Eduardo has ever seen. Mark eyes are fever-blue and intent on Eduardo’s face, and his mouth is pressed in a tight line of repressed emotion. For every moment he’s been alone, Eduardo has thought about what he would do when he saw Mark again, and now that he has, he finds he’s too afraid of breaking the illusion to reach out and try to touch him.
Shaking silence, and then: “I’m going to tie you to the bed for the rest of our lives,” Mark says at last, a fervent promise that breaks on the final word.
Eduardo laughs; a wet sound, blurry with rising tears. He reaches out blindly, wordlessly pleading come here with everything in him, and Mark closes the gap between them, forehead knocking against Eduardo’s chest, hands grabbing at whatever part of Eduardo he can reach, folding himself into Eduardo’s arms.
There’s more than a few FBI agents in the room now, studiously pretending not to notice them, and Eduardo does not give a fuck.
He hides his face in Mark’s curls and tries not to shake apart right there in Mark’s arms. “Only if you’ll be there too,” he jokes unsteadily.
“It’s cute that you think I’m letting you go anywhere without me ever again,” Mark says. “Bathroom included.”
“Oh, no, that sounds awful,” Eduardo says, smiling around the words, possibly definitely crying a little bit; but fuck it, he’s entitled.
Mark finally draws away from Eduardo’s chest, grabbing Eduardo’s wrist in a death-grip in compensation. His eyes are tinged red, and he glares indiscriminately at everyone in the room, daring them to comment on it. No one does.
Chris Hughes is leaning against the wall with his arms crossed, watching them patiently. When Eduardo catches his eye, he shoos everyone else out of the room and walks over toward them.
“All in one piece?” Chris asks, clearly evaluating Eduardo’s condition with one up-and-down flick of his eyes; Eduardo likes that he asks, anyway.
“Worried about me, Special Agent Hughes?” Eduardo asks, a little teasing.
“Yes,” Chris says frankly, eyes flicking subtly toward Mark, before his mouth eases into a smirk. “If anything had happened to you, you wouldn’t have gotten to come over for dinner and meet my husband, and I do hate to disappoint him.”
“Dustin thinks we’re romantic,” Mark says in tones of great disgust, but it fails him a little when he can’t stop staring at the slow, steady glide of his thumb over the back of Eduardo’s hand.
“I am,” Eduardo says. “You, not so much.” Mark looks up at that and attempts a scowl, only it apparently gets lost somewhere when Eduardo smiles at him, a giddy, tender smile that Eduardo couldn’t keep off his face for all the money in the world.
“I staged a daring rescue, that wasn’t romantic?” Mark asks, hand resting on Eduardo’s lower back when they leave the room.
“You assisted in a daring rescue,” Chris amends blandly. “Let’s not get ahead of ourselves.”
“And the first time I see you in months, you’re wearing another man’s jewelry,” Eduardo says, tapping his foot against Mark’s visible tracking anklet, feigning a wounded expression.
Chris begins to laugh, and Mark shakes his head and crumples his mouth to forcibly tamp down a grin. Eduardo is struck, again, with the force of his own relief—that he has Mark with him now, that he can tease him and watch him pretend to be unamused, that he can reflect yet again on how bad Mark is at hiding from him.
Mark looks up and catches his eyes, and Eduardo is struck dumb at seeing the mirror of all he is feeling right there, though he shouldn’t be; at this point he knows well enough that they are, if nothing else, a matched set in their need for each other. Eduardo thanks god for that, because he can’t believe anyone else in the world could stand up to the force of it, from either of them.
“I didn’t think we’d find you,” Mark says quietly when they’re standing aside and watching Chris direct the other agents to finish up at the scene, hiding the words in the scant space between their bodies, a confession for Eduardo’s ears alone. “I’d wake up and you wouldn’t be there, and I’d think what if— ” He breaks off and swallows back the rest of his words, grimacing like he doesn’t like the taste of them.
Eduardo considers his own long nights of holding the insubstantial memory of Mark’s body to himself; of his anger, his fear, his longing to be home; of listening to Mark’s badly-hidden desperation and being unable to do anything about it, dreaming about touching Mark’s face and feeling the movement of his mouth underneath Eduardo’s own.
Anger, fear and longing: not a shred of doubt.
Eduardo takes Mark’s hand and says with sweet certainty, “I was only counting the days.”
- *
They don’t tell you when you’re looking to be in charge of an FBI team that fifty percent of your job will be paperwork. Chris drives back to work after he’s had dinner with Dustin, throws his jacket onto a chair and grabs some coffee before heading toward his office.
“What if we don’t find him?” Mark asks, voice emerging from the darkness; he’s sitting in Chris’s office with the lights off, and when Chris jumps, swears, flicks the lights back on, he can see Mark staring down at his hands with a blank face, his mouth set in a tight, miserable line.
“Didn’t you go home already?” Chris asks instead of answering Mark’s question, searching for the right thing to say: Mark will not accept platitudes of any kind, but Chris can’t stomach the thought of throwing any more bleakness onto the weary curve of Mark’s shoulders.
Mark’s eyes flash a little when Chris calls it home, though he says nothing; it’s home for lack of a better word, but that’s not what it is, Chris knows. Mark can make a home anywhere he chooses to do so, but not while he’s got that Eduardo-shaped empty space by his side.
“Yeah,” is all Mark says, and the careful shape of the words leaving his mouth tips Chris off even before Mark continues: “Sean got me drunk. But he said he’s not very good at this part so he dropped me back here.”
“I might not be much better,” Chris says honestly, running a hand through his hair and sinking into a chair.
“Are you going to lie to me?” Mark asks, and maybe he’s overstating his drunkenness, or maybe Mark Zuckerberg refuses to let even alcohol take away his self-control, because his eyes are as sharp as Chris has ever seen them.
“No,” Chris says quietly. “I won’t.”
Mark nods, abrupt. “Then let’s just start there.”
Chris hesitates, watches Mark stare unfocusedly into the space between them, like he’s searching it for answers that aren’t there.
“I’m going to help you with this,” Chris starts, leaning forward and bracing his elbows on his knees. “Amy and Marilyn are going to help you with this. The four of us are, to be frank, highly intelligent, and a person can’t get much more motivated than you. You may or may not have Sean Parker doing things of questionable legality that, if they are in fact occurring, I really don’t want to know about. Just—don’t write off our chances yet, Mark.”
Mark’s mouth is twisted unhappily, but the tension in his shoulders eases a little bit. The sight of Mark like this sets Chris’s teeth on edge; when Mark is at his usual confidence, Chris may want to shake him until the arrogant smirk drops from his face, but there’s no denying that Mark looking this defeated is wrong.
“And tell me this,” Chris says suddenly. “You know Eduardo best. You know what he’s like. Now, can you tell me that he isn’t doing everything within his power to make sure that he comes back safely to you?”
Mark finally meets Chris’s eyes properly at that. He doesn’t answer, but he doesn’t need to: Chris knows that Eduardo Saverin would tear the world apart with his teeth before he’d let it take him away from Mark a second sooner than he wanted.
Mark nods to himself, gets to his feet. He lets Chris pat his arm comfortingly with uncharacteristic patience, which is all the thanks Chris is likely to get; he doesn’t look any less worried, because Mark needs answers in absolutes, and he knows there are no absolutes here. But he looks a little less wild, a little less like Chris needs to worry about waking up some morning and finding an empty tracker and no sign of Mark; so that’s something, at least.
“If we don’t find him,” Chris makes himself say, gently, as Mark is about to walk out the door, “I won’t tell you it’ll be okay, and I won’t tell you to stay, and I won’t tell you I’ll let you go if you run. You probably will run, and I’ll have to find you again and bring you back. But you’ve got people here who want to help. Whatever happens, you don’t have to do it on your own.”
Mark swallows, a vulnerable movement that makes him look so young, for a moment.
“Thank you,” he says awkwardly, like the words are unfamiliar, unpracticed, and when Chris watches Mark make his way slowly down the stairs, he wonders for a moment if he was hearing those words in Eduardo Saverin’s voice, instead.
*
“Please don’t tell me I have to thank Sean Parker for rescuing me,” Eduardo says a little desperately.
“He only rescued you a little bit. You could thank him a little bit?” Mark says innocently. Eduardo glares. “He put out word about a sculpture being moved,” Mark goes on to explain, “which is why they ended up leaving you alone today.”
Eduardo sighs sharply, eyeing Sean, who is currently poking around Mark’s fridge, from across the room. “You know how I’m supposed to say that if anything happened to me you should move on with your life?” he says idly, still staring at Sean. He continues, pointing a finger at Mark sharply, “If something ever happens to me, do not fuck Sean Parker.”
Satisfied by the thoroughly horrified look on Mark’s face at the idea, he crosses the room and stops by Sean’s hunched-over form, waiting until he straightens up with a piece of pizza stuffed in his mouth.
Sean takes a bite, chews, and then says with a grin, “No, no, no need to thank me, I wouldn’t want you to strain something.”
Abruptly, unexpectedly, Eduardo grins. Those months alone really must have warped his mind, because he realizes now that he’s actually missed Sean. A little bit. A tiny infinitesimal amount.
“Thank you,” he says, because he wouldn’t want Sean to think he’s got him all figured out, right? “For looking after him, too,” Eduardo says, jerking his head in Mark’s direction, and Sean shrugs one shoulder.
“Yeah, well, I didn’t really want to see the onset of the Apocalypse,” Sean says. At Eduardo’s questioning look, he continues, smirking, “You know, where he snaps and takes out the whole world through his laptop? Otherwise known as the eventuality the rest of us have to look forward to if you’re ever not around.”
Eduardo claps a hand over his mouth to hide his grin.
“Yeah, you would like that, you codependent freak,” Sean says rolling his eyes. “If you really do want to thank me, though—Mark refuses to properly introduce me to Amy, maybe you can change his mind?” he continues hopefully, and Eduardo laughs.
“I’ll see what I can do,” he says amusedly, and decides to go before one of them says something to break this uncharacteristic accord.
“Glad you’re okay, dude,” Sean says from behind him, and it’s loud enough for Eduardo to hear, but quiet enough that he knows Sean doesn’t want him to acknowledge it; so he just walks back over to Mark and silently resolves to cut Sean slack the next couple of times he tries to take them to a strip club and buy Mark a lap dance for the sheer hilarity of it.
Chris is talking to Mark when Eduardo comes over again, and Chris turns to him, says, “I’ve got to go back in to work now, but I’ll call you in if we need anything else for your statements, okay?”
At their nods, he wordlessly clasps Eduardo’s arm, pats Mark’s back in goodbye; but as he’s about to leave, something appears to strike him, and he turns around to eye them intently.
“I’m taking care of this,” Chris says quietly, meaningfully. “You two are going to testify and we’re going to put the Winklevosses and Narendra away. If I were an idiot, I’d tell you not to take additional matters into your own hands, but as I’d like to think I’m not—don’t let me hear about anything. Nothing comes back to you or me, got it?”
Eduardo grins, nudging Mark with his hip. “He does like us,” he says delightedly, and throws a sloppy salute in Chris’s direction.
“We’ll keep that in mind,” Mark says easily, and Chris just shakes his head, mutters to himself, “Oh god, there’s two of them now,” as he turns to go. He doesn’t look too upset, though, all grumbling aside, and he smiles a surprisingly sweet smile at them before they see him go out the door.
“He’s the only one who’d catch me, anyway,” Mark murmurs, and Eduardo hides a grin in Mark’s hair, says quietly, “We should probably keep that to ourselves. I don’t know how reassuring he’d find it.”
Mark shivers from Eduardo’s proximity, maybe, or the feel of his breath ruffling Mark’s curls; and like that, Eduardo realizes how long it’s been since he’s had Mark’s skin under his hands, how long since he’s been able to kiss all the eloquence right out of his amazing head, and he tightens his arm around Mark reflexively. Mark stills under his hold, like he’s had the same thought at the same moment, and Eduardo’s heart is pounding, and neither of them are moving, until—
Mark pulls away from Eduardo forcibly, like it’s the only way he’s able to make himself do it, and turns to the corner where Sean is pulling books out of Mark’s bookshelf and putting them back in some order that is only immediately apparent to him.
“Sean, time for you to go now,” Mark says decisively, and Sean looks up, eyes traveling from Mark’s face to Eduardo’s, before he smirks and winks at them understandingly.
“Life-affirming sex time, got it,” he says easily. “Have fun, guys.”
Eduardo can’t even make a face at him, there’s so much tension rising up in him with no outlet to escape that he’s practically vibrating, and he just watches, hands fisted at his sides, as Mark walks Sean to the door and says something to him quietly before he leaves.
Finally, they’re alone, and Mark shuts the door with a click. He stands with his back to Eduardo for a long moment, head bowed.
He turns around at last, and the look on his face makes Eduardo’s mouth go dry.
“Come to bed,” Mark says quietly, and his expression breaks open when Eduardo crosses his arms in front of himself, draws his shirt over his head in one fluid motion. His hands make quick work of his jeans, and his underwear, and he kicks his socks off until he’s standing naked under Mark’s gaze, except he’s always naked in front of Mark, clothes or no clothes: there is nothing left of him that Mark doesn’t know, and Eduardo has missed it vitally. Being known.
“I love you,” Eduardo says, because for months he has had no one to say it to; and then he follows Mark to bed and says it again: whispers the words directly into his ear, and sketches them out with his fingertips on Mark’s back, and bites the shape of them in uneven bruises on Mark’s white throat, and Mark takes it all from him with greedy intensity like he will never have enough.
They rut against each other with no finesse, just pure blind need; Eduardo finds himself unable to take his hands away from their shaking exploration of Mark’s face, his chest, the planes of his back for long enough to even take his cock in hand. When he tries to pull away from Mark’s hungry, half-open mouth, Mark snaps, “No,” and yanks him back, invading Eduardo’s mouth with tongue and teeth like he’s taking a battlefield, wet and furious, and Eduardo gasps in the back of his throat and thrusts against Mark until he comes all over himself like he’s dying, Mark following him scant seconds afterward.
That’s the first time.
Eduardo rides Mark the second time around, drinking in the taste of their shared desperation, cries out loud when Mark tightens his fingers around Eduardo’s hips, cries out again for no other reason than that he loves the dark flare of Mark’s eyes when he hears it. This is too raw to be beautiful, or maybe it’s beautiful because it’s raw—either way, he takes it slowly to watch Mark’s eyes flutter closed, delicate lashes casting shadows on his cheeks, and Eduardo says, jagged like someone tore the words out of his chest, “Every day, I—I thought about you—”
Mark makes an inarticulate noise that catches Eduardo low in the gut, eyes flying open. “Wardo,” he says, wondering, shaken, and Eduardo has to look away then, burning up from what he sees on Mark’s face.
They doze off after that round, and Eduardo wakes a few hours later to find Mark mouthing a trail down the curve of his spine, decisive and insistent; he muffles a moan in his pillow and spread his legs apart, and Mark lifts his head and says firmly, “Louder, Wardo,” and when Mark takes him apart with his tongue and his fingers, Eduardo is helpless to do anything but oblige.
Of all the things they’ve ever stolen, ever owned, this is what Eduardo holds dearest: Mark’s lower lip going white as he sinks his teeth into it to hold back a groan; the sweet tender pain of Mark’s hands gripping his wrists tightly; the look in Mark’s eyes when he runs the back of his hand down Eduardo’s side, watches him shudder from overstimulation, and does it again to see it one more time.
“Do you want to leave?” Mark asks quietly, later, and it’s too dark to see his face properly, but Eduardo traces the contours of his expression with careful fingers. “We can. Sean will help, we can pick right up and go wherever you want.”
Eduardo shifts, sheets slipping down his back as he tucks his head under Mark’s chin and presses a kiss to Mark’s throat. “You like it here,” he says. “I can tell.”
“That’s irrelevant—” Mark begins stubbornly, and Eduardo doesn’t mean to, but he starts to laugh: the idea that Mark still thinks he needs to prove to Eduardo how he feels—
“You think I don’t know what you’d do for me?” Eduardo asks. “You think I don’t know that you’d drop everything to go wherever I want? You’re an idiot, and I love you. I don’t need anything but that: here, a continent away, or under the sea; I don’t give a fuck.”
Mark is quiet for a long moment, before he says, “I think you’d need a little more than me if we were living under the sea, but I take your point.”
“Asshole,” Eduardo says, choking on his laughter, and oddly, it’s that that brings tears to his eyes: it’s probably fitting that it takes Mark being a dick in the face of sentiment to drive home the fact that he’s really there.
Eduardo blinks a few times to ease the burning in his eyes, and Mark says, “Yeah, but you’re stuck with me. Sorry, Wardo.”
“God help me,” Eduardo says, and Mark kisses the tears from his eyes, the laughter off his lips, and Eduardo is home.
iv.
For a while it seems like the remaining three years will never go by, let alone go by without Chris killing Mark in a fit of exasperation; but he doesn’t, and they do, and now Chris has sequestered himself in his office because he knows what’s coming.
Chris can feel a pair of insistent eyes boring into him from the doorway, but he refuses to look up from his paperwork. They have to have this conversation, but that doesn’t mean he has to help it along in any way.
Mark clears his throat, shuffles a little, and finally walks all the way up to Chris’s desk, until Chris can’t pretend he hasn’t seen him anymore. When he looks up, he sees that Mark has what looks like two airplane tickets fanned open in his hand, and Chris feels sharply, stupidly disappointed, before he forcibly shoves that feeling away.
“Big plans?” he asks mildly, priding himself on his composure. He’d expected this, after all; as much as he might wish Mark and Eduardo would think of their hard-won friendship as a reason to stay, he knows they can’t. Their time is up, he’d opened up the cage and shaken them free. They can go anywhere they want, and they will: people like them aren’t meant to stay tied down forever.
Mark smiles, and that’s what catches at Chris: it’s not a smirk, it’s a smile, the open kind that he’s seen from Mark rarely, because Mark thinks no one can take a grown man seriously when he’s got dimples like a chubby three-year-old.
“I’d say so,” he says, brimming with inexplicable mischief, and when Chris narrows his eyes at him confusedly, he smiles wider and drops the tickets on Chris’s desk. Despite his apprehension, Chris picks them up to see just whose problem those two are going to be from now on.
Paris he reads, and then, even as his stomach drops, he sees the name on the first ticket and stops.
It’s his own.
When he looks back up, Mark’s smile has turned into a smirk, now; but then, Chris’s face probably looks ridiculous in his surprise, like a goldfish.
“There are no cases to be finished right now, I talked to Erica and you’re clear for two weeks, and whatever comes up, we can take care of it,” Mark says, with the same stupid hands-in-his-pockets posture he’s had since Chris first pointed him at a desk four years ago and said, “Sit here, and be good.”
“We?” Chris asks, questioning, biting the inside of his cheek as he waits for the response.
Mark shrugs, staring at the floor, mouth still quirked. “Dustin’s got your things packed,” he continues in a spectacular example of a non-answer, half-turning. “Go have fun with your husband, get him out of my hair. It’s probably in your best interests, anyway; I think Wardo was teaching him how to sneak in through the third-story window last week.” With that parting reassuring remark, he’s out the door.
Chris stares after him for a few seconds before coming to his senses and leaping out of his seat. “Mark!” he calls out, scrambling after him, and watches Mark stop in his tracks.
“Mark, are you—” Chris says, aware that there are nosy eyes watching them from all around, frustrated at his inability to put together the question he desperately wants to ask: what are you doing now that you have the choice?
Mark eyes him for a long moment, blank-faced, before he says quietly, calmly, “I’ll see you when you guys get back. Okay?”
It’s like the breaking of a storm: Chris finds himself grinning wildly, reaches out to grab Mark’s shoulder and shake him a little. Mark looks vaguely uncomfortable. All these feelings are probably making him itch.
“Thank you,” Chris says quietly, and knows Mark can tell it’s meant for far more than the trip alone.
“Don’t be stupid,” Mark says shortly, ears going a dull red, and runs off to hide behind his desk under the guise of working.
Still grinning to himself, Chris goes back to his office so he can pack up and go home to Dustin, and tell him that today Mark Zuckerberg basically said, “Thank you for arresting me when I escaped from prison.”
Maybe when Chris gets back he’ll thank him for breaking out in the first place.
--
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