A/N: I feel like I haven't written any decent angst in forever and since my period is making my hormones wacky, and my feels have been all out of order lately anyways, I figured I'd give it a go. Marky never fails to help me get my angst on. Are you ready? Set? GO.
Disclaimer: Mark and Roger still elude my ownership. Boo.
Breathe Too Deep
Everybody thinks that with Mark, it always comes down to Roger.
No matter how much he tries, how many times he explains and re-explains and futilely protests, they're thinking it anyways. It seems painfully obvious, to everyone except maybe Roger himself, that Mark is totally pathetically in love with his roommate and will be for the foreseeable future. But in reality, what it all comes down to is detail.
When you obsess each day over shots and angles, lighting and shadows and the tiniest features that give an image that fleeting charisma you were searching for, it always comes down to detail. It's his profession, his passion, and the only thing that he can hide behind.
So yeah, Mark's in love with Roger- big deal. It's been years since he figured it out and years since it mattered, because everyone knows that he's never going to do anything about it. He's had Maureen and he knows that while love is fine and dandy, it's just not worth it. When Roger leaves, actually packs up and drives off like he's been saying (like they've all been saying) since they got sick of the city a month into living there, Mark doesn't miss him because he loves him.
He misses him because he's his best friend.
He misses him because there's so much else, so much uncertainty and strain and he doesn't know if he can deal with it.
Roger's absence makes it all too apparent that Mark's life is taking a turn for the worse.
What it really comes down to, then, has nothing to do with whatever long-buried longing he has for his best friend and everything to do with the year that preceded it. This time last year, early November, the chill had begun to creep in just as Roger's withdrawal symptoms had become somewhat bearable. He'd stopped begging for a hit, just one, and stopped locking himself in his room for days at a time, stopped throwing up, stopped mourning April like a lost puppy. Last year Mark'd had so much optimism, even if he was so, so tired already after half a year of hell. Through everything he can always count on something. On Collins, on Roger, on his film. And now…
Now what does he have?
His film is a piece of crap. He's ready to scrap it, but somehow he can't bring himself to actually bring a lighter to the film- maybe it's just because he remembers all of the shifts he worked at the Life to pay for it, or maybe it's just the nostalgia that makes his insides burn uncomfortably. Mark is awful with emotions. He wishes that he didn't have them at all, could just keep facing the world with that small smile and shove his glasses up his nose and just not feel anything, but he's already tried that and it doesn't work.
He's a sellout. That's one of the details, the things that keep bothering him when he closes his eyes in bed at night. The word haunts him, a recollection of the early days of his bohemian life- everyone was a sellout, everyone but them, and they'd sneer and they'd trudge on down the sidewalk and Mark would tilt his camera just so and Roger would loudly proclaim that he was going to be a rock god and the world was still bright with possibility, even in the slums. He wonders where his enthusiasm has gone.
When had he become a robot? When? Where were the nights of feverish scribbling, ideas for screenplays and documentaries and novels pouring onto a page in a deluge of black ink from a cheap pen that Roger had probably chewed on already- what had he become?
He had known, been warned and been prepared, that the city might wear him down eventually but he'd never imagined it feeling quite like this.
And besides the fact that he's just so drained, so tired all the time no matter how much sleep he gets, how much he eats, there's more than one detail that makes every day so difficult to drag himself through.
The world, he's determined, is not full of happiness. He's not a child anymore, not some idealistic teenager fresh out of Brown (freshly dropped out, but who's counting) who thinks that everyone has their place and everything will work out. Sure, for Roger he might be able to muster that sort of optimism, but now he doesn't know where to draw it from.
He remembers April, gone out in a flash of fiery passion just like her hair, just like she'd lived right up until that cryptic lipstick message on the mirror and the swirls of ruby water caressing her pallid face in the bathtub. Perhaps that was the turning point. He remembers thinking, where's the justice in this? What has April done that's so bad? Bad enough that she's dead at twenty two, leaving her friends dazed and horrified in her wake, a zombie of a boyfriend hooked on drugs and riddled with disease.
There was no justice for April. He searched for months- every moment he wasn't by Roger's side, holding him while he shook or holding him down while he screamed and flailed his fists in angry desperation at the injustice of it all- but no signs emerged. No God painted a rainbow on the sidewalk in her memory, no flowers bloomed on her grave. Nothing got better when everything got worse, not even a little, and Mark, baffled, let it slide because he had other things on his mind.
Other things like Roger, who had always managed to keep his head above water even if he doesn't know it.
Now it trickles down, to Maureen and her abandonment, to Collins disease, to Angel's inevitable spiral towards death that they'd all watched in morbid fascination until it was over and the church bells were ringing in their ears, the casket lowered into the leaf-strewn ground. It comes down to all of this. To Mimi, her tiny body racked with those same horrible shudders he'd endured with Roger a year beforehand. To pure loneliness as everyone around him lost the ones they loved, and everything shattered.
Suddenly the cracks in the sidewalk aren't so interesting, and Mark couldn't give less of a fuck about the plight of the homeless staring back at him from the other side of the lens. Everything begins to blur together, color fading into black and white and then to a uniform gray that he can't escape.
And then Roger leaves. Life loses meaning.
Mark hasn't been able to find passion in anything for weeks, if he's being honest with himself. To bear witness to so much, and he's still so young, he's only twenty five God dammit, but he can't take it anymore and he hates that he can't. Mark has never simply not been able to do something like this. He's never just given up, but now he's thinking about it.
Every day has become an endless dragging of his feet on the ground, a monotone, a flash of images before him that he barely sees. Why does it matter? Why? He hates himself, and then he hates himself more for being so disgustingly self-deprecating, for drowning in his pity for his own pathetic existence. Without Roger, whose always been there and always kept him sane even if just barely…
Well, that's the last straw.
He quits his job. He stays in bed. The phone rings, but Mark doesn't see why he should answer it. Let Maureen and Joanne and Collins live their own lives, it's none of his business. And he's none of theirs.
When it comes down to it, Mark is running out of options about as fast as he's losing pounds, which is alarmingly rapidly. He wonders vaguely if he's just become dumb- his thoughts are so limited now. Mechanically going through the motions, and not even that, some days. His camera is growing dusty on his nightstand but he hasn't slept in his room in days, because that would require passing Roger's bedroom and then he'd be reminded and it's not that it hurts, it's that it doesn't and it's scary, too much to think about.
So when the details don't mean anything anymore, Mark finally decides that enough is enough. It's almost an abstract thought. It would just be so easy and it's not like he hasn't thought about it before, just not seriously, not without someone close by whose willing to grab him and pull him back to safety if he really does try to fling himself over the edge.
He finds himself standing on the roof in the bright November sunlight. The sky is blue, the traffic is blaring, and everything just seems so sickeningly normal like Mark hasn't known in daysweeksmonths and he takes one deep breath of fresh air, one last breath-
Roger has always been the only person. Always there, even when he's moping, always there for Mark and he doesn't even know it.
His voice does it. That single utterance, beautifully awkward, familiar. "Hey."
Color seems to burst back into the world for one startled moment. It doesn't stay- the gray returns in a matter of seconds as he whips around to search for Roger's stubbly face, overgrown hair, leather jacket he's really back but it will eventually. Now he knows that it will.
He doesn't know how it happens. All of a sudden he finds his arms around him, Roger's wrapped around him in a suffocating hug and they're laughing, reuniting after what feels like an eternity of endless disappointment and sinking depression.
So maybe it does come down to Roger, after all. That's fine. Everybody knows that already.
Maybe someday Roger will, too.