Streetlights and Starlight
by alwaysflying
Author's Notes: Okay, well, my birthday's on Tuesday. So I would like to extend a challenge to my readers: guess how old I'm turning. I will not tell you the age unless you are correct, but I really want to know what people think. And if you're wrong, I'll at least tell you if my age is within fifteen years of your guess.
Disclaimer: No, I still don't own RENT. Isn't that funny?
When Roger returns to the loft (shoulder sore from twenty minutes of banging against the building's front door), he immediately catches sight of Collins, Benny, and Mark dining casually around the table. "Oh, hey, Roger," Collins calls lightly, looking up from his soup. "Come join us. It's great." Collins coldly meets the teenager's constricted pupils and then adds, "That is, if you can look up from your smack long enough."
"That was cold," Mark laughs, slapping Collins playfully on the shoulder.
And again, Roger is struck by a feeling of déjà vu. He remembers standing before the very same calculating ice-blue eyes and feeling just as ignored, abandoned, and misplaced. Just as he did in high school, Roger shuffles away, wishing (not for the first time since Mark's arrival) that he had his own room, a door to slam or at least close, to prove his point. As he curls up on the couch and the tempting aroma ghosts over Roger's nostrils (and, he believes, the scars on his arms as well), Roger lets his eyelids droop shut. Maybe Mark will be gone in the morning, he tells himself, and that alone is enough to sing him to sleep with his own written lullaby.
Collins, Benny, and Mark remain at the table, indifferent to Roger's unconsciousness. "So, Mark," Collins states casually, "how did you and Roger know each other, back in high school?"
Mark shrugs. "I don't know, to be honest," he replies abashedly. "I didn't know him too well. There were a lot of kids like him, so I probably don't even remember him personally more than I remember a group of kids."
"And what were they like?" the philosopher presses.
The blonde sighs. "Well, I have to admit that Roger was a special case. If he is who I think he is, he never had any friends. He wore eyeliner and dark clothes, and never socialized or even tried to. He wanted to be a rock star, but I think he knew as well as the rest of us did that it was never gonna happen." After a pause, Mark adds, "And he was gay. I remember that. He was definitely gay."
Collins nods. To break the silence, Benny begins gathering plates and cutlery, and Mark and Collins follow suit. As they proceed to wash and dry the dishes, Collins turns to Mark again. "Did you ever have a conversation with him?"
Mark shakes his head. "Not that I can remember," he tells Collins. "I don't think so. I was always with my friends, you know? It's high school. People are exclusive."
"And you realize that now," Collins states. "Well, that's good. In high school, I was more of a rebel. Always breaking rules. No, not breaking them so much as challenging them. My teacher said for us not to call each other names, so I simply refrained from calling anyone anything – aloud, that is. And so on."
Benny chuckles. "Ever the whiz kid, our Collins," he says, affectionately slapping his loftmate on the back. "Betcha he was tapping away on computers even when he was in school."
Collins shakes his head. "Nope," he says regretfully. "My school was poor, and besides, computers are just now becoming major. Back then they were these shitty little machines."
Mark coughs. "They still are, in my opinion," he ventures. "My motto's always been, why put into a machine what you can do by yourself?"
Benny's head snaps up. "Like your films, for instance?" he asks sharply. Mark and Collins stare at Benny, startled by his tone of voice.
"Um, yeah," Mark mumbles. The three men lapse into silence, broken only by the clatter of three empty coffee mugs being placed on the table, then a rushing noise as coffee is poured into each mug respectively.
It is only after twelve minutes that Collins becomes desperate for conversation. Unbridled, he offers the first comment that comes to mind: "You know Roger cuts himself?"
Benny chokes on his coffee. Mark merely looks at Collins curiously. "Does he?" he asks. "I never knew… he always seemed the stereotype, but then again, he always seemed the type of person who doesn't fit into stereotypes."
When Benny manages to gulp down the scorching liquid, he demands, "How do you know? Are you sure? Why? What does he use? When did you find out? Why are you telling us this now?" After managing to breathe properly, he clears his throat. "Ahem."
Collins bursts into laughter, something that he's found himself doing less and less since Mark moved in (that same morning). It is not a comforting thought. Finally, he responds, "I know because I saw the scars. I'm pretty sure, yes. I don't know why – well, I do, but I can't tell you. He uses a knife. I found out earlier, and I'm telling you because I think you need to know. And, even though you didn't ask this – I suspect he's been doing it for a long time."
Benny inhales sharply. "Collins – can we talk in private?" He looks hopelessly at Mark. "I'm sorry, I just – you know. Family issues. I mean, we're not related, but – we are, in a way. Okay?"
Mark shrugs. "Sure."
And so Benny and Collins enter their shared room and close the door, letting talk of high school and homosexuality and unreturned crushes flow through the crack beneath and to the side of the door. Mark sits on the couch and watches Roger's chest heave up and down as he bears the weight of his clearly troubled sleep.
It is at that moment that Mark first begins to think. He first thinks of himself as a teenager: gangly and blonde, he had elected to wear contacts to spare himself the grief a glasses-wearing boy would undoubtedly receive. Then he pictures his high school friends, the best and brightest (and most popular, of course): the cheerleaders, the jocks, and those, like Mark, with enough charisma and personality to rise to the social upper brances even lacking athletic ability. Then Mark pictures the boy that Roger was then. Roger had wild hair of a dark blonde shade, curling and spiking and jutting out at odd angles – all naturally. His piercing green eyes were barely visible beyond a cloud of dark eyeliner obscuring half his face, and his body was concealed by baggy, oversized black clothing. Mark remembers this boy vividly in terms of appearance but cannot for the life of him recall who Roger was then, apart from the aspiring musician that existed solely for Mark and his friends to mock.
As Mark watches Roger sleep, he wonders if the boy always bears quite so distressed an expression. The answer, Mark concludes, is yes: after years of humiliation and being naturally loathed by his fellow students ("peers," they were called by guidance counselors), it would be impossible not to be uneasy and unhappy. Mark wonders exactly how much of that abuse he himself is to blame for, but forbids himself to answer that inner question, for fear of what the answer may be. The cogs in his brain begin working, against Mark's will, to determine the solution, but he decisively ignores his conclusion.
Roger sleeps like a log, and that is part of what makes it so easy for Mark to gently expose the teenager's arm. He breathes in the scars littering the pale skin and shakes his head firmly. Those aren't cutting scars. Mark has never seen cutting scars, but he knows enough about people to tell that those aren't the marks of someone who seriously wants to hurt himself, particularly someone as determined and unhappy as Roger is (a bad combination, in this case). Maybe the marks are simply indentures from Roger's nails as he clawed at his skin, trying to wake up from a nightmare; maybe they are scrapes accumulated due to the highly shabby, unpolished nature of the loft – nails and bricks stick out from the walls, and Roger often walks around the loft in a trance, not noting where the harmful objects are nor whether or not he is in close proximity to them.
Mark believes that the scars may come from something else entirely: masochism, perhaps, or scrawled messages (written by his nails) reminding Roger to do so-and-so. Something between accidents and self-mutilation – and in truth, that is what Roger Davis is. He was born half an accident (accidental on his father's part, deliberate on the part of his mother) and half a… simply put, a time bomb sprung upon his father in the weeks after Roger's birth. But Mark does not know these things, and will probably never know them. All he knows now is that Roger isn't hurting himself and likely never would; he cherishes himself too much to do that. Roger more than nearly anyone knows the fragility of life, and after watching his mother steadily kill herself (again, something Mark never witnessed), Roger is all-too aware of how easy a lifetime can be cut short.
When Roger awakens, he blinks several times before growing accustomed to the sky-colored stare meeting his own eyes. Roger shakes the nightmare out of his mind and rasps, "Why are you watching me sleep?" It seems very stalkeresque, very typically Roger, rather than typical of the admittedly-curious, admittedly-inquisitive, but altogether praiseworthy and beyond human – Mark Cohen.
"I don't know," Mark replies. It is a half-truth. He began watching Roger sleep aimlessly, hoping to drift off a bit himself, and continued because he was lost in thought and in Roger's steady, slow motions of a one-time sleepwalker. Roger, Mark notes, sleeps with the restriction and constriction of a boy that is used to having a too-small space to sleep in. Then again, Roger is such a dreamer that in daylight, he represents a boy with such wild and unmanagable dreams that he loses himself in them, and for that, logic says, one needs space. But space is one thing Roger has never had, and has never taken for granted – just as one would never grow used to a dollar that one never had.
Roger sits up and leans against one of Benny's stacks of paperwork, for some reason shoved against the couch cushion in place of a pillow. But it'll do. Roger has never even taken pillows for granted, far too concerned with being able to sleep at all, comfortably or not.
"Do you sing?" Roger asks the filmmaker. "I mean, can you?"
Mark nods reluctantly. "I was in a choir as a kid," he admits. "You?"
The moment Mark's lips close around one another, he realizes that he asked an absurd question. But before he can take it back, Roger is shaking his head sadly, hair flopping into his eyes. "I thought I did," Roger says. "I guess not, though. You ever had one of those experiences? Where you devoted your life to something, and then – it was just – gone? Gone? And you felt so empty and such a craving, and you were trying to hold yourself back because you were scared of what your body might do once it realized that it would never be satisfying that craving again?"
Mark nods immediately. Yes, I know that feeling. And he tells Roger as much. Roger is surprised, but does not press the question; he always leaves questions hanging in the air for others to answer in cases where they might be seen as too personal. And curiosity, the overwhelming desire to talk about oneself, always conquers all. Here it is no exception: Mark begins to speak, against his own whims and against Roger's beliefs.
"I mean," Mark continues, "when I left college, I kept wanting it back. I thought to myself, hey, I can always go back if I really, really want to. But the thing is, by the time I overcame my nostalgia, I" –
"You realized you couldn't go back anymore anyway," Roger finishes for him.
"Exactly."
"The sock drawer concept," the scarcely-educated Roger continues, but he does not expand on it. He just watches Mark's eyes dart across the room, schadenfreudically enjoying his companion's discomfort. After a few long moments, Roger silently drops his head to the couch again and closes his eyes – but Mark swiftly cuts him off.
"Don't go back to sleep," Mark pleads. "I need someone to talk to."
"Me?" Roger asks, baffled. "You want to talk to me?" It is a new and foreign concept to him.
"Sure," says Mark. "Who else? Let's go take a walk." As he stands up and peers out the window, Mark casually adds, "It's beginning to snow."