Disclaimer: I don't own RENT.
Close Up
twenty facts about Mark Cohen that the world at large doesn't know
i. Mark was given his first camera when he was seven for Chanukah. "Maybe it'll get him to speak up more – asking people for their pictures, you know?" his father had said. He came back from the store the next week with stills of his mother's garden.
ii. He dropped out of Hebrew school the day after his bar mitzvah; he was a man, what more was there to learn? His parents reregistered him the next day.
iii. Daniel, his older brother, was the most popular guy in school. Class president, rugby captain, valedictorian; he was in a car accident Mark's junior year of high school on the way back from a college basketball tournament. Mark was the first one to make it to the hospital, and he felt it was the first time his brother had ever really looked at him. Daniel never walked again.
iv. He met Thomas Collins and Roger Davis on his first day of high school. They had seen him talking to Maureen from across the cafeteria and waltzed over after she had left, Roger asking how he had "scored a chick like that." Mark glared at them and walked away, eating his lunch in the quad instead.
v. Much to Mark's ire, Tom Collins wound up being in the same Honors Algebra class as him. The other boy lingered after class until he and Mark were the only ones left in the room, winked at him, apologized for his "inept excuse for a friend," and walked off. Mark found out the other boy was gay that afternoon, and introduced him to Maureen the following day.
vi. The first and last time Mark punched someone was the first time he caught Roger shooting up. He busted his knuckles and the other teen's lip, and decided that countering idiocy with idiocy was not the solution.
vii. He always thought that Maureen Johnson was the most infuriating girl he had ever met, but wasn't half bad for a first kiss. She said it had been wet. He thought it was perfect, and said so. She smirked at him, and hit him in the shoulder. She always won.
viii. His grandmother died on his nineteenth birthday, the same day his niece and nephew were born. Mark always thought it was sickeningly ironic; his mother thought it was a sign. A sign for what, he never knew, but he loved those kids.
ix. On his twenty-first birthday, Roger, Collins, his sister, and Maureen bought him his first round of shots at the Life Café. Still a lightweight, Maureen easily conned him into singing karaoke with her. He was so drunk he didn't notice his girlfriend winking at the bartender as she handed Maureen another beer.
x. Cindy's children, having been raised catholic, gave Mark a pair of macaroni Christmas baubles the year they turned five. He thanked them, and smiled, and hung them up in the window. They sent him four the next year; "so Mr. Roger won't feel left out."
xi. He majored in Cinema Arts at New York University until he got a frantic phone call from Collins, telling him that Maureen had been hospitalized. He dropped out, too afraid to leave her alone; if she didn't want to eat, he was going to make her.
xii. .Mark never was the jealous type, but when he met Joanne in that frigid lot, decked out in suspenders and doc martens and an air of superiority, he realized why Maureen fell for her. That bothered him; they couldn't be more different and they couldn't be more alike.
xiii. When Allison filed for divorce, Benny spent a week on Mark's couch. An hour after he left, Mark found a hundred dollar bill under a magnet on his refrigerator, 'RENT' printed across it in a sharpie scrawl. He just laughed, and left it where it was.
xiv. Try as he might, he couldn't bring himself to hate Joanne Jefferson. A month after the two had started dating, the lawyer showed up on his doorstep, Maureen having gotten drunk at a bar and wandered off to god-knows-where. She bit her lip as she glanced past him, asking if he had seen Maureen. It was like looking at himself in the mirror.
xv. Angel scared him; it wasn't right for someone like her to die so young. After her, it was only a question of who was next, because if Angel could go, then what was stopping him?
xvi. He bought his niece and nephew a wagon for their eighth birthday, and was immediately enlisted to pull them around his parent's yard in it. His sister laughed at him, and asked him why he didn't have kids yet. "Because I haven't found her yet." He smirked, and walked away.
xvii. On the one year anniversary of Collin's death, he saw Maureen at the cemetery, perched on the edge of his and Angel's tombstone, mumbling under her breath and staring at her clasped hands. He backtracked, smiling to himself; he wasn't the only one who still spoke to them.
xviii. Mark's dream always had been to be a photographer for National Geographic. Then his parents bought him a used motion picture camera for his eighteenth birthday; some things were just impossible to capture in a single frame.
xix. The night Maureen left him was the night he was going to propose. The box felt heavy in his pocket as she shoved her clothes into a duffel and kissed him on the cheek. She thought that he didn't see the tears on her cheeks as she rushed out, but he followed her, holding the hair off her face as she retched on the pavement outside.
xx. He still loves her.
As before, any of these can be used as a prompt for an individual fic, so long as you let me know in a PM. Thanks for reading, reviews are much appreciated.