A/N: First, I am truly sorry to anyone who is following Wish I Were Here or any of my other WIPs that I've neglected the past few years. I am struggling a lot right now in life, with relationships, and with my own mental health. I'm turning 20 this July 7th, which is just… mind boggling to me… I honestly can't believe that I've made it this far, and that I'm still alive. This piece is inspired by my first two years of adulthood, which were difficult and horrible but beautiful at the same time, and all of the people I have loved who have loved me in return. The title comes from a lyric somewhere in Sleeping at Last's "Atlas: Year One", which I highly recommend for anyone who needs something soothing and comforting to listen to.
I hope that even though this fandom is small and inactive, that someone will read this and that some part of it will touch them or give them hope. If you are feeling hopeless, lost, or alone, know that I am too, and if we're alone then we can be alone together. There are always small things worth living for. That's what I'm telling myself, anyway. Love you all. xo Toni
With Our Eyes Closed
It's 2am.
That's all he can really focus on at this moment, this- strange, floating fraction of a second. Time slows down at night for some reason Roger has never been able to pinpoint. (He reminds himself, again, to ask Collins about that whenever he decides to come back from his latest illegal excursion.)
There's the burnt out stub of a cigarette between his fingers, mostly ash that he could flick away and over the rail if he were so inclined. He can't quite muster the motivation to actually do it, though, which is how Mark finds him on the fire escape in the middle of the night again, gently prying his fingers apart and wrapping a flannel coat around his shoulders. It smells like him, gas station hair gel and too-strong tea and bike grease. Smells like home.
Roger pretends he doesn't see Mark watching him inhale. The glance warms him somewhere awkwardly close to his heart nonetheless.
"You want to talk about it?" Mark says softly, as though even after all this time he thinks that muted city nighttime could be shattered by something as feeble as a single human voice.
Roger doesn't snort, as he might have a year ago, just shakes his head and lets Mark settle in beside him. He lets his hair fall forward into his eyes (God, he needs a fucking haircut, but he'll be damned if he spends the money on it and he just can't muster the motivation to hack it off himself) and stares down all those stories to the pavement below - an inky sea littered with abandoned soda cans and vodka bottles and bits of wet, torn cardboard. There's a glint of something that might be shattered glass. He wonders how many people might have gotten bits of it stuck in the worn down soles of their shoes. He wonders just how much diseased blood the concrete has seen.
Could be his. He's lost count of the number of times he's thought about just climbing up and hurling himself over the edge of the balcony. He and Mark used to talk about it for hours, all the time, just back and forth banter like it was nothing. Throwing their lives away in the hypothetical just to pass the time.
"You're up late," he says, finally. His voice is scratchy from disuse, but it always is lately. Too many words in his head, and none of them worth saying.
Why depress everyone else? No one is fucking happy in this shithole. Not even Mark. He might be one hell of an actor, but that doesn't mean shit, and Roger knows it.
Mark lets out a quiet breath beside him, resigned. He nudges him with an elbow, very gently, but enough that he can feel the warmth of him. He doesn't always realize how cold it is until Mark comes out to drag him back inside and ply him with coffee, or with a nest of blankets on the couch where there are fewer bleak memories to haunt him.
He has come to realize, extremely belatedly, that he's lucky to have Mark. The meddling bastard.
He doesn't know how long they stay out there, not saying anything. It's not unusual for them to see the sun rise together, all pink and baby-new – so hopeful it makes Roger sick enough to finally go to bed, if only so he can pull the blankets over his head.
Finally, in the murky depths of his midnight musings, he remembers to nudge Mark back. He glances over again, despite himself, and catches the tail end of a swift, satisfied grin.
Mark is better than Roger at pretending not to feel things.
The arms of Mark's coat are tickling his wrists and he rolls his eyes, slipping into it because it's cold and because it's Mark's, and because it makes Mark smile again. A bit wider this time. He silently, smugly chalks that up as a victory. Roger: 1. Life: … well, he doesn't want to think about that number. No need to discourage himself like that.
His voice spontaneously decides to start working.
"Been thinking about getting the hell out of here."
"Aren't we always?"
To his credit, Mark doesn't look like he's in physical pain at the thought, but Roger makes sure to reach out and squeeze his hand too-tightly for a moment just to make sure.
"… Why? I mean, I know…" He trails off, unsure of where to start, what to say. Too many things have happened here, in this shitty run-down apartment in this shitty run-down neighborhood. Too many police raids and lost loves, and the bathroom will never not be April's graveyard. They both know this.
Roger licks his lips, tries to choose his words more carefully this time. "I just… don't really know what to do with myself anymore."
Mark stares uncertainly.
Since April, or since Benny, or since the diagnosis?
Roger blinks up at his best friend and wills him to understand.
All of them. Everything.
He thinks Mark is the only person who would understand, anyways.
(He doesn't know how the hell they ever got to this point with each other, after so many slammed doors, so many disappointments.)
Roger shifts just a little closer and Mark follows suit, and the two of them stay huddled, silhouetted against the old industrial loft like lovers on the covers of paperback romance novels, foreheads tilted together.
(He doesn't know when he started seeking Mark's eyes like little points of light in the dark always threatening to close in around him.)
He doesn't say another word, even when Mark eventually leads him inside with those sweaty palms of his. Neither of them ever mention it.
(He doesn't know when he started sounding so fucking clichéd again, either.
Or maybe he's only just becoming aware of it.)
Pathetic, Davis. Seriously.
It's another night where Roger can't stand the sight of his own bedroom. Mark seems to understand this from the tension in his shoulders alone when he's presented with the doorframe, and simply leads him a few steps past and into his own room, where April never slept, where Roger never shook or screamed, where there are no ghosts to watch them fall asleep together.
And if Mark's arms slide around in him the night, again, he can't say he doesn't appreciate the extra warmth.
There's a girl living just underneath them, looks like she's barely old enough to vote let alone be making eyes at guys closer to thirty than to twenty.
Roger is wondering why his brain decided to remind him of this information five seconds after regaining consciousness, but he's interrupted by his roommate's annoyingly chipper morning voice.
"Hungry?" Mark asks, grinning all lopsided and charming like the smug little bastard he is and holding out a plate full of (possibly undercooked, definitely better than stale cereal) eggs in one hand, a mug of steaming coffee in the other. It's clear from his stance and his expression that he expects Roger to take both if anything, and Roger bites the inside of his cheek and glowers as he reaches out to reluctantly grab both dishes to his place at the coffee table.
Their kitchen table, an old metal piece of junk they got at a yard sale once when Collins took them on an impromptu road trip into the burbs, has been broken for several months. Neither of them has the cash or the patience to go out and purchase a replacement. The floor isn't any more or less comfortable, anyway, and the coffee table isn't likely to fall through on them anytime soon.
It's just about noon – which is pretty good considering they'd been up probably until about 5am, because Roger distinctly remembers the aggravation of birds chirping directly outside the window just before he finally dropped off. The days tend to slip by in a blur of discomfort and monotony like this: Mark makes him eat, makes sure he takes his medication, asks him if he wants to talk whenever the silence stretches out longer than it takes him to clean the dishes or some minute part of his camera or the chain on his bike.
Roger does nothing but mope, doodle in an old spiral-bound notebook with more wire than pages ever since he tore out every scrap of lyric that reminded him of his dead girlfriend's existence, and make maudlin comments when the mood strikes.
Life isn't bad. It's decent. Whatever.
At least Mark is here.
"Take your AZT," he reminds him, as if on cue, and Roger closes his eyes and resists the urge to groan as he snatches the bottle off the counter.
"Yes mother."
There are an awful lot of things wrong around here, and in general. At least this feels right.
He flicks a tiny piece of bacon and smirks at the way Mark squawks when it sticks to his cheek, hastily diving out of the way as the retaliation begins.
Mark feels like home more than this shitty apartment ever will.
It took a good five years of adulthood for Roger to realize that he was not the average red-blooded, skirt-chasing young man.
It took him exactly two one night stands and one horrendous relationship to solidify the idea.
He doesn't think about it often anymore but for some reason he's thinking about it today, watching Mark choke his way through one of his cigarettes like he hasn't had at least two full packs of them since they'd met six years ago. His cheeks are rosy, flushed with cold and exertion, probably with faint chagrin, too.
Roger really, really wants to kiss him.
And even that's not really surprising, nor unprecedented. They'd certainly kissed before. More than once, more than intoxicated fumbling, more than meaningless flirtation.
They kiss in the dark, sometimes, lips bumping into each other almost in surprise. They lean into one another and kiss in the doorway just before Mark leaves for work. They clutch at each other occasionally, heated but never angry, maybe frustrated, maybe just expressing it in a way that just doesn't translate, and they don't really talk about it because it's something familiar, something they've always done.
Well. Always, since April. Probably once or twice before her, too.
Collins hasn't really been around long enough to comment.
But some things don't need an explanation. Some things, like Roger wanting love but not sex, not the same way everyone else seems to want it, just are the way they are, and they don't need to be justified.
It still bothers him that he doesn't know the answer.
Mark looks up at him balefully, coughing. "Why do you keep letting me do this?" He still holds his cigarettes so awkwardly. Roger wants to pluck it out of his hand and adjust it, show him how it's done. He wants to lean in and kiss him hard, blow smoke into his mouth, except that probably would just end with both of them choking, and it's hardly romantic.
Roger's not entirely sure what they're doing is romantic. He doesn't know if he wants to put a label on it yet. Or… ever. Never actually sounds pretty good. "It's cute," he says drily.
Maybe that's just him. Maybe he's just one of those douchebags, emotionally disconnected, impossible to date, only interested in fucking-
It would make sense, if he were interested in fucking at all.
"You're getting off on this," Mark accuses, taking an almost-successful drag as if to prove a point. Roger rolls his eyes, ruffles his hair like he's nineteen.
"You know it, four-eyes."
Mark swats his hand away.
His hair is getting lighter. He's not as ginger as he was when he first came to the city, freshly dropped-out and still gangly with adolescence. It makes Roger a little sad. One less thing to tease him about. There's something nostalgic about Mark with his baby fat and his hair so red it clashed with his face.
Suddenly, he wants to dig out some of those old film reels in Mark's closet.
"Do you ever think about moving back home?" he hears himself asking, feels Mark freeze beside him, and when he looks up the expression on Mark's face is somewhere between disbelief and amusement.
"Um, no?" He laughs – it's awkward but not quite forced. He lets the butt fall to the pavement and crushes it out of existence with his sneaker, which had seen better days. "Why? Wanna come get a place in Scarsdale with me, Rog? Thinking of converting?"
"To what?" Incredulous, he lifts his chin and finds Mark slightly closer than he'd anticipated. Not in a bad way.
(It's never a bad way.)
"Suburban life," Mark deadpans, his glasses slipping down his nose and ruining the effect. "The American dream. A white picket fence, maybe a dog –"
Roger resists the urge to push them back up and lean in. Barely.
"Two dogs –"
They don't kiss outside of the apartment. It's not a rule but it's never been done, and so Roger's not sure if he's allowed, if he should, if it will break this fragile thing between them like it was never more than a dream. He's not sure he could handle that. Everything in the past few years has felt like a dream – the pink stains in the bathtub, the come and go of Maureen's loud mouth on their answering machine, Collins' in and out routine, Mark's coat and Mark's mouth and Mark's arms around him in the dark.
He's dimly aware that he's fucked. Fucked, fucked, fucked, and Mark might already know, and he doesn't know where this is going to end up for them because things keep changing without either of their consent and he's terrified.
"- and two and a half kids…" Mark's still going and Roger almost chokes at the mental image that conjures, turning away to disguise the sudden movement as laughter.
"Yeah, right," he manages, and because Mark isn't a complete asshole he doesn't call him on the strange, false quality of his voice just then.
He passes the cigarette instead. "Finish this, I'm not going to make it."
Roger lifts it to his lips and pretends he can taste anything but ash. Mark's lips, which are just as chapped as his, curve into a wry smile.
"Don't start what you can't finish, Cohen."
It's not exactly true that Roger doesn't want sex at all. He just doesn't want it with particular people – he wants it, sure, his dick is perfectly functional, but it's the whole 'other person' part that puts him off every time.
He'd gone out with a couple of groupies – girls, a boy, with dyed hair and tongue piercings and exponentially more experience than he ever hopes to have. It had seemed like the right thing to do, then. Heroin and the high of all those eyes on him had led him backstage, into dark alleys and bathrooms he would probably never have lingered more than a handful of seconds in otherwise.
That was years ago. Roger isn't even sure he's the same person he was then.
April hadn't fixed him, either. And as he got older, Roger slowly came to realize that he didn't need to be fucking fixed.
There's nothing wrong with being a slightly different kind of asshole than most guys.
Maybe he was just meant to be alone. He couldn't give April what she wanted, needed – he couldn't explain to the girl downstairs, whenever their eyes met on the stairwell, that he's already tried that, that it just doesn't work for him.
At this point there's really only one person in the world he thinks he might be comfortable with taking him to bed, and it's not because of some star-crossed burning passion. It's because they've done it before, countless times, naked or not – breathing each other's breath, falling asleep in each other's arms.
Sleeping with someone doesn't always have to involve sweaty sheets and bitten-back curses. It can just be sleeping, with. With.
With his best friend.
With- well, whatever Mark is to him now.
Whatever they are to each other.
It's not a sex thing. Doesn't have to be a sex thing.
That would be ridiculous. This is Mark he's talking about.
He still remembers Mark as a skinny, gangly little virgin, can still taste the laughter on his tongue as Mark spluttered and protested. They were young, then. They're young now, objectively, but then they were young.
Back then he wasn't – and they could have –
Maybe. It's too late to think about that, though. He tells himself this firmly, compulsively peeking back over the edge of another ragged page in his notebook, more scribbles than actual words.
Mark is nodding off over the Village Voice right now, propped against the couch with his knees curled up beneath him. His breathing is slow and deep, just barely gusting Roger's knee. The paper is starting to slip from his lax fingers.
He hasn't been getting enough sleep, lately, not that anyone really does anymore. It's another one of those secrets Roger has discovered, about adulthood – there is no eight hours, eight glasses of water, 9 to 5. There are a lot of late nights, but not of the kind he used to indulge in – the kind he had expected. There is gnawing worry, the increasingly bland taste of generic box macaroni and cheese bought in bulk or out of midnight desperation at the 7/11 on the corner, tap water that tastes just slightly too tangy, the scrape of his pills in the back of his throat when he takes them dry rather than get up.
Mark would scold him for that.
And then there would be a glass of nasty tap water waiting for him on his nightstand every morning. He's sure of it.
Mark's lips twitch and then fold downward, almost as if he can read his mind. Roger lets out a silent breath and lets his head fall back, staring at the ceiling.
It's on afternoons like these that he wonders, in an endless loop, if there isn't an answer to any of his questions. Everything feels like so much – the world outside of their apartment is so busy, constant, the city that never fucking sleeps even when you desperately want it to, even when you're so goddamn tired of it all…
But here, inside, with Mark snoring very close to his skin, he feels perfectly calm.
He wonders if they did have sex, if it would be the same.
No panic, no rush to the end – Mark's hands and Mark's eyes and Mark's lips, quirking and then soft and chapped and wet against his.
The sun is somewhere out of view now, but the skylight still gives him a clear strip of hazy blue sky to pick apart and question and be utterly, completely frustrated by.
There are no answers in the sky, or the ceiling, or the spring digging into the small of his back right now. There definitely aren't any in this empty, ravaged diary – just more questions. Always more.
Mark, who always seems to make it okay not to know – or, at least, tolerable – isn't awake to reassure him that he doesn't need the answers, but Roger still feels it in the sleepy way Mark's head lolls back against his ankle.
He feels the ghost of a grin on his own face at that simple gesture of trust.
Maybe it's just being trapped here like a rodent, another meaningless body wasting oxygen, but there is something poignant about the feeling that wells up between his ribs and in the back of his throat when Mark's lips brush unknowingly against his skin, the faded ink of a tattoo Roger can barely remember getting visible just beneath his cheek.
He has been ignoring it for months – maybe years, maybe his entire life, perhaps soulmates are real after all and this is some epic romantic tale after all, a love story worth singing about.
But. But.
This is Mark.
Oh, God, this is Mark.
He takes a slow, deep breath and lets it out again.
What is he thinking, anyway? Why does it have to be romance? Why does it have to be anything?
The other thing that he's discovered over the years is that no matter how old he gets, he still hopes. It's a stubborn, stupid, awkward thing. Logic never seems to win when it comes to things like April, like glory, like soulmates and happy endings.
Even with poisoned blood and debt up over his ears, even with every ounce of his hard-earned common sense, it won't get the fuck out of his head.
He concludes (forces himself to) that he just has too much time to think these days. Should probably keep on trying to find a job – dig out that resume and dust it off, if it's even legible anymore. Get out of the fucking apartment and do something with himself.
If anything, he wants to prove Benny wrong. Wants to prove himself wrong.
If he can just stop thinking about Mark like a life raft, maybe he'll stop feeling like a pathetic, gasping leech, already half dead.
Mark mumbles something into his skin, a little warm huff of breath that feels like his name. Or maybe he's just being narcissistic again. Sounds like him.
He tugs the paper from his friend's lax hands and lowers himself to the floor between Mark and the couch, wrapping one arm around his torso and folding the other up underneath his head as he spoons up behind him on the hardwood.
This, he thinks hazily as his eyes slip shut, may throw a wrench into the whole "getting a job" plan.
He does get a job, though. The bills are starting to pile up and Collins is a surprisingly good business reference, even when neither of them know where the fuck he is this week.
It's just bartending, but it's more than he's done in months – wiping glasses, mixing drinks he hasn't made in years since alcohol was new and exciting and still a rebellion, making an uncomfortable amount of eye contact with drunk girls batting eyelashes and the cocky middle-aged men campaigning to take them home, and trying (trying) not to be annoyed when people slide coins and coins across the countertop at him instead of just fucking handing them to him – and he comes home every morning exhausted to find Mark red-eyed and bleary but awake, staring glassily in the direction of the front door. They sleep on the couch more often than not, nowadays. Neither of their beds feel right anymore. His back is screaming, but the rest of him doesn't give a single fuck as long as he still gets to feel Mark pulling him sleepily closer, half on top of him to avoid falling onto the floor as the sun rises too soon, too soon.
The sun keeps coming up each day, and Roger keeps being sad, and Mark keeps waking him up with a glass of water and an aspirin to wash down his AZT with.
He wonders if Mark can read his mind, and then contemplates whether that might be easier than trying to verbalize any of this.
He doesn't know if he'll ever be able to.
He doesn't think it matters, but maybe it does to Mark. That's his biggest worry, now, that and biting his tongue to keep from starting a barfight every other night, so used to their banter that he can't keep from muttering under his breath on the job.
Still. He can't ask a question he doesn't know how to word.
Mark is always there when he wakes up, once in the morning when he's lugging his bike down the stairs and once in the afternoon when he's dragging his feet back up all seven flights, banging the handlebars carelessly against the rail and the wall and his own shins all the way.
Roger kisses the bruises, stretched out in bed with him, and pulls the socks off of Mark's tired feet so that he can rub them, inwardly pleased that his old guitar callouses can still be put to work. He hasn't done anything with the thing in months, other than pick it up and try to tune it for ten minutes before throwing it back into the case and into his closet in frustration.
"I could die right now," Mark moans. "Literally die. Don't stop."
Roger privately thinks that he could do a lot of things with that command, but he restrains himself. Don't go there. Don't do that.
He doesn't know that they can go back once they sleep together. He doesn't know if he'll want to, which scares him more.
What is he supposed to do with all of his feelings now that his dreams are dead, guitar strings old and ready to snap? What is he supposed to do, with Mark writhing beneath him, tempting him, making him question everything?
He still gets the feeling that he's broken. This is right, somehow, right but not in the right way. The normal way.
He wonders if he'd met Mark in high school if they would have fallen into bed together like this, if they would have spoken at all. If they hadn't, he's sure his heart would have broken. Fallen right out of his chest in the hallway for no apparent reason as Mark passed by, blissfully unaware, hugging his books to his chest like the skinny little nerd he probably was. (Roger's seen his senior picture. This isn't an unfair assumption.)
"Better not die before me, motherfucker," he says instead. Mark kicks him in the stomach and they tumble over the edge of the bed in a tangle of limbs, snorting with laughter.
It's funny because it's not funny at all.
The struggle stops abruptly when Mark rolls on top of him and kisses him forcibly, hanging onto his face desperately with both hands, and Roger opens his mouth to his searching tongue with a content sigh.
They're both morbid bastards, but some truths are too much to even laugh about when another day has scraped them raw already.
Back when he was in the band, and they had a different drummer and a different name every other week, Roger had a lot of good reason to be annoyed with random strangers thinking that he and Mark were a couple.
He remembers Trevor leaning in one day while they were practicing and yelling over the racket, "So what's Cohen fuck like, anyway?"
He remembers the spectacular way his knuckles had bruised afterwards. The look on Mark's face when he saw his black eye, how he'd tripped to his side and dropped his camera on the couch in his haste to get to him, fingertips brushing the inflamed skin in horror. "What did you do?" he'd groaned, eyes already scanning down his body critically looking for things to touch and test and bandage the second he could force Roger down onto a chair for him to tend to him.
He remembers the adrenaline climbing up his spine and throbbing in his limbs, at the base of his skull, how he'd forgotten April entirely in the moment their eyes had caught on each other's and how he'd wanted so suddenly and out-of-nowhere to lunge forward and grab Mark and kiss him, recklessly, like he'd die if he didn't.
And he remembers, too well, the little stuttered gasp that Mark had given when he'd leaned in to do it, and how he'd run away with his tail between his legs to chain smoke and anxiously rub his swollen knuckles all night long, wondering when and how Mark Cohen had burrowed under his skin and into his chest and taken up residence.
Honestly, sometimes Roger wonders how the fuck he didn't see this coming.
Maybe he's just fucking stupid.
Maybe he's just arrogant. Too attached to what was never heterosexuality, too attached to hazy ideas and praise and rebellion. April was rebellion – she was so much smooth, exposed skin and tangled hair, getting tattoos on drunken impulse that he'd later try to carve out of his skin with her name caught in his throat like a scream of grief, she was needles and a rush like he'd never known, like he could do anything he fucking wanted to, like everyone loved him or at least, she did, and that was enough to keep him soaring.
It wasn't enough. Not that she wasn't, but he wasn't, they weren't. Something. Something went so wrong. He wishes he could remember that, instead of this obsessive rehashing of the entire history of his flirtationship with his roommate, though he's not really sure which is more confusing.
But who says that being with Mark couldn't be rebellion, too? If "being with" is really the word to use here.
He can't think of the right word. That's not really surprising. He never can, never has been able to. That's why all of his songs have been shit, why he never got signed and why none of his bandmates called him up when they got the gang back together to play at the Pyramid Club last week. He'd seen the poster on his way to work last night, had taken the pain and held it in and plastered on the fakest smile any of his patrons had ever seen.
His manager had asked if he was having an episode. Roger had flipped him off in full view of the customers. He's really fucking glad that he works at a bar, sometimes, and not behind the counter at a McDonald's, which would have been the next place he applied.
Mark is in the shower right now and Roger is listening to the water hit the stained porcelain, thinking too much and tapping his pen on a blank piece of paper. He is resolutely not thinking about Mark naked. About what might be taking him so long in there.
He really, honestly doesn't even enjoy sex that much, so he's not sure why he's so fucking preoccupied with it lately except that Mark is always so close and warm and attentive, and Roger hasn't made someone orgasm in coming up on two years.
Before he can stop himself, his brain comes up with an image of Mark's face cracked wide open with pleasure, flushed and wet and tipped back toward the ceiling –
– as Roger steps between his legs and shoves him forward against the shower wall, as his hands reach back and scramble for purchase on his thighs and his fingers curl around –
He hates his brain, and he hates himself, and the pen nearly cracks in two from the force of his grip. He throws it across the room and dumps the notebook onto the floor for good measure just as Mark steps tentatively out into the room with a towel clutched around his waist, still dripping, eyeing Roger with questioning concern.
"Need laundry?" he bites out. He regrets the tone of his voice immediately, wants to backtrack and frantically ramble that he's not really upset with him, that he's just such an asshole, but Mark raises an eyebrow.
"Still thinking about Scarsdale?" he drawls instead of answering. Roger stares at him for a heartbeat before he narrows his eyes in understanding, and Mark just smirks, turning around and waltzing back to his bedroom with his balls clearly in view, dangling between his legs wetly.
"You're hilarious. Put those away, I'm going blind over here."
Mark's laughter echoes down the hall behind him.
Roger scrubs the heels of his hands over his eyes and tries to breathe. Tells himself not to follow him and just take the risk.
It's distracting enough that he doesn't really realize until hours later that he hasn't thought of leaving in a week. Mark snores beside him, and Roger stares at the ceiling and wonders at the ache in his chest where April used to be, where Mark has grown over her and everyone before her like a fresh skin under a scab.
If Mark is home, then Roger supposes that he doesn't really need to go anywhere.
"Rog," Mark sighs quietly in his sleep, rubbing his face into his own shoulder. His arms are curled possessively around Roger's, hands gripping his bicep, knees gripping his hand, keeping him still and present and from trying to sneak out and freeze to death on the fire escape again.
There's a good chance that Mark would agree with him, but he's afraid to ask him. It's like they're living in a soap bubble, or something equally clichéd, seeing everything but each other through a shimmery transparency. The way Roger figures it, there's only so long that that can last – and he still, after hours and weeks of furiously racking his brains, can't remember how they got here. Or if they always were here, and just didn't realize it until they were alone.
There's so much on the line now, with April and Maureen out of the picture and Collins always away. They have no one else – no one to fall back on, nothing else to live for. Or… okay. Maybe Roger is projecting a little on that last one.
Just because Mark looks at him like he's everything doesn't mean he feels that way.
Maybe Roger is the only one in a bubble. He can't rule that possibility out, reasonably, no matter how many slow, deliberate kisses Mark has given each of his scars.
But.
If he bursts the bubble… what will be waiting for him on the outside?
Roger is pretty damn good at avoiding shit like this.
He works extra shifts and buys some new strings for his Fender, spends countless lazy hours strumming away on it unplugged on the couch while Mark watches entirely too avidly and pulls old, excruciatingly embarrassing film reels out of the closet to reminisce over. They get a stupid amount of pizza and keep it in the fridge, eat nothing but grease and cheese for days while they laugh about jokes they told years ago until they cry and kiss to make it better.
He doesn't think about it, and everything is fine. Fine. He could live like this. He doesn't need answers, not even one, doesn't need to know what Mark is thinking or if he can be in love with someone when he's not sure what the definition of in love even is.
He's wondering if Trevor is ever going to respond to the message he'd left on his machine last night when Mark barges in, on edge, and changes everything.
Something about "civil union" rings a bell, but Roger can't put his finger on it. He squints at the paper Mark had slid nervously across the coffee table without comprehension, trying to remember the last time he'd even seen a legal document – probably when April took him with her to buy that piece of shit Honda he'd had to trade in a couple of months ago.
The word "application" breaks through his groggy confusion at the same time as Mark starts making that awkward little noise in the back of his throat, the one he used to make whenever Roger left the bedroom door open when he and April retreated for the night.
"It's just an idea," he stammers out. "I just thought –"
Roger stares at him, head cocked warily, fingers curling more tightly around the piece of paper in his hand. It's already got some wrinkles in it, like Mark had been fingering it with sweaty palms for hours, maybe days, trying to muster the courage to thrust it in his face and plead, sign?
He just thought. Thought. Thought what? Thought they could – should –
"You're not still thinking of leaving, are you?" Mark's anxious, incredulous voice pierces his confusion and brings everything into stark, startling clarity for a beautiful moment.
The room spins in his peripheral vision. He fumbles through old issues of the Voice and rent notices, napkins, takeout menus, knocking random sheets of paper off of the table in his desperation to find a pen.
If he is Mark's home then nothing, nothing, is going to stop him from taking a ballpoint and stabbing that bubble open like he's breaking out of jail.
"What, no proposal?" Even to his own ears his voice sounds strangled, but it's hard to care through the tears welling inexplicably at the corners of his furiously blinking eyes. The chewed ballpoint in his hand hovers shakily over the line printed there at the bottom of the page, just below Mark's tidy, cramped signature. "Real classy, Mark."
"I wasn't sure you'd –" Mark seems to swallow the words, adam's apple bobbing anxiously as he stares down at Roger's knuckles moving beneath his skin, watches the tip of the pen descend. There are so many words that could fit there in the hanging silence. So many things that Roger has been pulling his hair out over for weeks, for fucking months, and hadn't been able to get past the tip of his tongue – so many what ifs and tamped down desires and ideas and epiphanies. So many silent affirmations, deliberately misinterpreted; so many nights they'd laid silently together, never asking the questions on both of their minds.
So many questions, so many words, so many wasted seconds.
Roger doesn't have a lot of seconds left to waste in his life.
Mark lifts his eyes, large and blue and ultimately vulnerable – more so than they ever have been at 2am, even though it's only 6, and before they even meet his, Roger wants to kiss him.
He wants to fucking kiss him.
He slams the pen down on the table and lurches to his feet. Mark, to his credit, doesn't flinch when Roger grabs him by the shoulders and hauls him toward the door – he's too busy trying to stifle the watery grin that had begun stretching across his face as Roger scribbled his middle initial – but he does squeak, "Wait- where are we going?"
"Didn't even think to hide the ring in my glass," Roger mumbles, and closes his eyes against the glimpse of that Marquez girl's bemused expression as he shoves Mark up against the wall of the stairwell and roughly covers his mouth with his own.
Nothing and everything about this is romantic, all at the same time. Nothing has changed. Mark is still Mark and this still isn't really "normal", isn't really what anyone expected. He's not even hard – Mark isn't either, with his fingers tangling in Roger's greasy hair, hips arching towards him regardless like they can't get close enough. Roger sort of wonders if they'll ever be able to – if anything will ever be enough to make them both feel whole, apart from each other. If they'll ever be able to absorb enough of each other's touch in the night while they're sleeping wrapped around each other to stop wondering about what their lives even mean, if they even exist.
"You know I love you," Mark says in that terrible, vulnerable voice. Roger endeavors to kiss it out of him.
"Don't have to say it out loud," he mutters, even though his heart is beating in time with Mark's breaths right now. He feels those nervous hands fluttering up over his hips, pressing more firmly around his waist, squeezing to make sure he's really there.
He wonders how often Mark dreams those confusing scenarios about him, too, whether they ever lie in bed pressed together, both wondering…
"I want to," Mark whispers.
The lens of his glasses is smudged. This close, Roger can actually see the individual grooves of the thumbprint. (Is it his? It's probably his. It usually is. He just, he can't think right now.)
There are a thousand things he wants to say. So many songs he never wrote, never finished, never sung for anybody. So many scratched out, shaky lyrics to his heart-song. Mark knows the tune to all of them, somehow, knows that this is the right lyric right now. He knows him so fucking well.
"I love you," Roger says, instead, because repetition is the key to the chorus, because it makes Mark smile again and laugh wetly against his lips.
His thoughts jump crazily backwards, unevenly around – the "I love you"s of the past echo forward, from his mother and his first girlfriend and from April, from Collins, from Mark. It's meant so many things. Carried so much weight. Left him so jagged, so fucking afraid.
But he doesn't have to be afraid now, he thinks hazily as Mark places a hand deliberately over his heart and holds his breath just to listen. It makes his chest ache to think that he's not the only one who checks to see if their heartbeats are still in sync.
No, this is Mark. He doesn't have to get anxious, get finicky over a few little words. He knows that they both know what it means.
"Hey." He punctuates the silence after a long moment, holding each other upright as the sun sets and leaves them in darkness. Mark leans forward and rests his head against his chest, nodding his assent, and Roger flicks the tip of his nose with a snicker. "What are you thinking?"
When are we doing this? What will Collins say? Does Collins know? Don't you care that I'm going to die soon and leave you alone? How long have you been thinking about it? Did you know that I was thinking about you too?
A slow, Cheshire cat grin spreads across Mark's face mashed up against his sternum, like he can hear what he's thinking. He pinches Roger suddenly just beneath his armpit and then jerks back before he can retaliate, glasses glinting, hair in mischievous disarray.
Did you know that I could never leave you?
"Well… I was thinking we could hyphenate."
It's 2pm.
The ring on his finger doesn't feel heavy and stifling. For some reason, he always imagined that it would – it's only now that he's practically married that he recognizes the lifelong unease that the idea of "marriage" has always given him, just in time for it to dissipate completely.
Roger brushes his thumb over the skin-warm silver ridges without looking down. He raises his mug blindly to his lips, preoccupied.
Mark is still sleeping, huddled into a ball under all four of the blankets like a hedgehog. That's the best comparison that Roger can come up with when he's only two sips into his first cup of coffee and standing over his partner like a complete stalker, observing the way his overgrown hair spikes up with sweat in his sleep, pale and soft. He just barely restrains himself from reaching over and tousling it.
There's no need to wake him up on his day off. On a Sunday. Even if it is past noon. Fuck, Roger doesn't even know why he's up except that he just couldn't sleep anymore, too used to late nights at the bar and at practice with the guts, and the promise of caffeine if he dragged his ass out of bed was too great an incentive.
Weeks have passed. Life has gone on. Things aren't that different, except for their initials. Mark is still Mark, still loveably overbearing, and they're still fucked up in tandem. Roger is still so deathly afraid of infecting him that he keeps his razor and his toothbrush in a labelled box beneath the sink where Mark can't accidentally use them. They say "I love you" in the still silence of 2am on the fire escape as they pass a cigarette back and forth and back and forth until it's nothing but ash to shake off of their feet.
They still don't fuck, either, though Roger still wonders if they will. He would bet money that if they did, it would be the first time in his life that he was able to fall asleep afterward and feel whole instead of fucked up and defective.
Nothing feels missing, and nothing feels wrong. As the days pass, Roger slowly comes to understand that Mark doesn't feel deprived of anything.
He still thinks about it, though. Mark probably does, too. Hell, Mark jerks off sometimes with him in bed, let's out his quiet, labored breaths against Roger's shoulder blades and shudders and lets him card his fingers through his hair afterward like a promise. So maybe someday they'll give it a go. Or maybe they won't.
He thinks that he could be pretty happy with his life either way.
And when Mark sleepily blinks one blue eye open, struggling to focus, and croaks, "Do I have something on my face?" Roger cheerfully raises his middle finger and passes his half-drunk coffee over into Mark's grateful grasping hands.
Nothing has to change. Nothing has changed, really, and it doesn't make him as sad as it used to.
They don't have to be normal. They don't have to be anything more or less than friends. This will work because they're already home, because "I love you", because everyone in the world is walking blindly towards their death and they've got each other's hands to hold.
Roger leans down and carefully picks his guitar back up out of the case on the floor, grinning at the way Mark's eyes light up. He strums once, twice to be sure that it's really tuned.
"You wanna hear what I've been working on for the show on Friday?"
"Only if it doesn't sound like Musetta's Waltz."
"Yeah, yeah."
It sort of does, but Mark doesn't mention it. Instead, he waits for Roger to set the guitar back down again and hooks their pinkies together. Their rings look sickeningly sweet beside each other, two plain silver bands. Roger wants to take a picture and plaster it all over the city – look at this, look at us, me and my best friend, me and my lover. Look at what we have, whatever it is, whatever we are. Look at how happy we are.
Because they are. Happy. For the first time in years, Roger realizes that Mark isn't acting. Whatever this is, whatever they're calling it, has settled over them like a blanket to keep out the chill of reality. At least for now.
And suddenly, like the best worst epiphany, Roger realizes that he can be happy and miserable at the same time.
And with Mark's hands mug-warm and curling around his, and no ghosts watching them from the bathroom or the film reels in the closet, he thinks that he can probably live with that.
FIN