Disclaimer: Don't own RENT. Nothing to do with it.
Summary: PostRENT-fiction. One shot featuring Roger and Mark. Not M/R, I promise.
Notes: This is sort of random with no plot and definitely no point. I enjoy it, though, and hope you do too. Thank you for reading, as always.
Days Spent Obsessing Over Details
January 2nd was April's birthday. Roger made the effort to look presentable. He combed his fingers through his hair, put on clothes that hadn't been slept in for weeks. He sat in the snow, and pretended she would come back to join him on the walk home.
The cemetery was cold, frozen over, white with winter. He shivered and moved close against the stone. The air smelled dead, but clean. Sterile. Anything but comforting. Like hospitals. Clean and white and acrid foul green walls and pills and drugs and hope and pain and death.
Roger closed his eyes.
Mark climbed into bed with his tea. The shadows moved on his walls and he closed his eyes and took a drink.
Roger and Mimi would be arguing right now.
Collins would be reading in the other room.
Maureen and Joanne would be arguing in another building, in another place.
And no one would notice him.
A bittersweet victory.
The hospital bills were on the table beside Roger's guitar. Mark cleaned out his tea mug, dropping the tea bag into the garbage.
Roger was starting to look old. His eyes were swollen, sore and red. Sunken into sallow, sick skin. His nights in the cemetery visiting his girls didn't help him. Mark thought of Roger and his guitar. His fingers were long and thin. Beautiful and able. He wondered if he had footage of just Roger's hands playing guitar.
Mark tore off a piece of bread from the loaf on the table. Beside the guitar and the bills. They stacked their lives together that way.
Roger opened his eyes. He felt numb to the world around him, realizing he was cold from hours in the snow. He had fallen asleep in the cemetery again. Slowly he pulled himself to his feet.
He slept on the couch because the mattress in his room was stained with blood no one had bothered to clean.
Mark didn't have the stomach for blood. And if Mark didn't do it, it didn't get done. But Mark didn't know that the stain had seeped through the sheets and left its rusty reminder of his dead girlfriend.
The rest of Roger's room was spotless and empty. Full of mostly Mimi's possessions and clothing. Her makeup on a small table next to his bed.
But Mimi was dead.
Mark tried to read. His tea grew cold staring at the pages. Sometimes he liked to watch foreign movies. Sometimes he let his old film reels run. Sometimes he listened to Roger play halting, bitter melodies hindered by his anger and pain on his guitar.
Sometimes just sitting in the same room was enough.
He drank cold tea. He wanted to find a world where Mimi and April and Collins and Angel could have killed AIDS.
He hoped it was where they were. He hoped Roger would be happy there.
"I meant to die," Roger had told him a few weeks ago. "But the pills were sort of, I don't know, pretty. And I wanted to save them. And then the water reminded me of you."
Roger would take baths until the water turned cold; then he'd stumble, shivering, back into his room for warm clothes.
"The razor caught the light in this one way. I don't know, I just thought everything was so beautiful. The light was on under the door to your room and I thought about you trying to read."
Roger had smiled.
"Your tea was cold."
"I could die tomorrow." Roger said.
"It could be worse," Said Mark. "You could fall in love."
The silence between them dragged out until the mood in the room was a droning whisper of discomfort.
"I guess it doesn't matter that I always took you for granted." Roger said.
Mark wanted to wake him up because he wanted to make him believe what he was seeing.
But he was fairly sure Roger already knew.