A/N: I feel like the weeks go by so much faster now that I'm actually updating this thing regularly… it's like, where does the time go? Thanks again for the smattering of reviews I got on the last few chapters, and I hope you'll review this one too – tell me what you think! Reading through the plot I have all planned out in my black book, which I initially wrote when I was 15, I'm pretty sure that this fic is not going in it's originally intended direction… at all. Still! I have a lot of hope for it.

Chapter 9: Detour

He's staring at the paper. He's staring at the paper and his hands are shaking. He's staring at the paper and his eyes are itching and his arms are bleeding through the gauze.

The knife lies abandoned in the corner, open and still glistening vaguely red in the dim lamplight.

Mark can't seem to exhale. The breath is burning somewhere in the cavern of his chest.

The ink already scrawled there is all blurring together, incoherent, monstrous, a hideous manifestation of what's in his head.

He's staring at the paper, and the words won't fucking come.

x

Mark is still feeling like an incredible piece of shit the next day when, out of habit, his feet carry him out of the apartment and around the block towards the community center.

It's not that he wants to go to the meeting, really. At all. Ever.

It's not even that he wants something to do.

He wants to stay in bed forever. He wants to lie down and viciously think himself into a corner, mercilessly remember every line and shot and shitty, ill-conceived plotline he's ever made with his own two trembling hands. He wants to suffer for this.

Roger isn't supposed to cry over him. It's the other way around! It's always been the other way around, okay?

He did something fucking wrong, again, and he should pay for it.

Roger doesn't storm off to punish people, that's the thing. He only runs away when he knows he's about to cry. When something gets to be too much to handle. Mark knows him too well to buy his 'dramatic parting words' routine.

It hurts to think that he's become too much to handle, by Roger standards.

Mark doesn't want comfort or distraction or company. He just wants to feel understood, for five minutes. He wants to feel not so alone, not so helpless.

Which is how he finds himself back in the empty lot behind the community center.

The lighter is clenched nervously in his fist.

Gordon looks guiltily up from a cigarette. He coughs. Mark can feel himself grinning, despite the way it makes his throat ache. "Hey."

It's pretty fucked up that he feels like he's betraying himself whenever he feels happy about anything, lately.

"Hey. Back so soon?" Gordon coughs and drops the stub onto the pavement, putting it out with his boot. He's looking sort of pale, even for him, and years of living with Roger have made Mark hypersensitive to every chill in the air, so he unzips his jacket without a second thought.

"Got bored." He shrugs it off and holds the worn bundle of faded flannel out at him, shaking it; when Gordon raises an eyebrow, he raises one right back, until the taller man can't help but smile reluctantly and take it. "Smoking?"

It's not quite teasing, but not accusatory. Mark is too worn out right now to accuse anyone. Even himself.

I wouldn't go that far…

His smile slips a little. He fights it.

Gordon manages to look sheepish. "Well, Paul didn't want them…" He pauses, considering, and then laughs shortly. "And I'm having a shit day."

"Me, too." Mark sidles up beside him and leans against the brick, closing his eyes and finally, finally relaxing.

x

Maureen has known Mark since he was sixteen and still tripping over himself trying to learn the tango in a misguided effort to seduce the Rabbi's daughter.

(Nanette was actually a raging lesbian, so it was hopeless to begin with – but, to be fair, she and Maureen were probably the only ones who knew that at the time.)

They were neighbors, once upon a time – Maureen's family moved to Scarsdale from Hicksville, Ohio smack dab in the middle of their sophomore year of high school, and her family met Mark's with a suburban sort of smile-through-your-teeth passive-aggressive disdain that practically forced them to become best friends.

In hindsight, he'd always been a little on the depressed side.

She nurses a glass of Moscato, tucked into the corner of the couch with her legs stretched out in front of her and a frown set deep in her face. Stop worrying, she tells herself, Mark is fine. He's always fine. Despite herself, though, she can't stop herself from thinking back in circles to the first time Mark had stopped talking to her altogether.

She should have seen it then. She should have probably seen it this time, far sooner than she did.

Collins had said to trust Roger to handle it, but Maureen hardly trusts Roger as far as she can throw him when it comes to Mark's happiness. Roger is Santa Fe and addiction; Roger is the guy who constantly let Mark recede into corners, oblivious to the way his roommate watched him forlornly from beneath his eyelashes.

Maureen has known Mark way too long not to know that look.

And Roger just doesn't notice. It's ridiculous. Ludicrous. Maureen could throw a thousand adjectives at Roger's head and he probably wouldn't even glance at her. His skull's just that fucking thick.

It's like one of those godawful romance novels that Joanne pretends she doesn't have stashed in the nightstand, and that Maureen pretends she doesn't read in secret when Joanne's at work. Except that it's Mark, and it's Roger, so the plot's going nowhere.

He was seventeen and pale and thin and Maureen wondered where he was for a week, throwing pebbles at his bedroom window in the dark, incessantly ringing the Cohen's doorbell.

She'd thought he was pissed off at her, or having a meltdown over college apps. She was fully prepared to chew him out for either one, to smack him on the chest and screech that he'd abandoned her.

She had a whole monologue planned out for the occasion.

Mark came home with limp hair and dead eyes. She'd held him in bed for hours that night in silence, his head tucked under her chin, her eyes swimming; in the hallway, Cindy whispered anxiously into the phone about her baby brother and his bottle of pills.

They hadn't talked about it at all. Not ever. The color returned to his cheeks, eventually, and when the smiles started to look effortless again she told herself that it was over.

Nothing to worry about. Mark can handle anything.

She never found out what happened to him, but she could guess. It sends a sick gut-tension rippling through her, a constant dissonance. Every time she starts to drift she's brought back to uncertain reality with a painful jolt.

Maureen's always been a tad more anxious than she makes herself out to be.

Mark is one of the only people who knew that.

But Mark's not answering her calls… She sets the phone back in the receiver uneasily, staring at it for a long time. Joanne is out, probably getting takeout and pretending that Mark and Roger's apartment building is on her way home just so she can peer up at the fire escape and hope she'll glimpse them. Maybe she'll knock on the door. Maybe Roger will let her in, moody as ever, tell her he doesn't know where Mark is for the fourteenth time this week, so why does she keep asking?

Maureen wants to know, though! Where is Mark? What is he doing? Where is he right now?

It's the first time in years that she honestly couldn't guess.

She stares into her wine glass, watching it fizz happily, and wishes that she had the nerve to call Mrs. Cohen up and invite her for the weekend. Maybe then Mark would have to show his face, and they'd get to the bottom of all this. He'd have no choice. No one says no to Mrs. Cohen, not if they want to be able to hear tomorrow.

God, that woman's voice is shrill. Always has been. She grew up listening to her wailing at her son to come in for dinner… The last time Maureen had had to see the woman was at her engagement party a year ago, and she'd been pleasantly tipsy then so it's all kind of a blur, but Mrs. Cohen's voice had almost been enough to sober her up all by itself.

She still hasn't taken more than a sip. Drinking alone really is no fun…

Maureen also tends to wilt when she's not being watched. Living alone hadn't suited her at all.

Joanne should be back home soon, though. The apartment just feels so vast and empty when she's by herself, without Joanne to keep her mind off it; of course, it looked nice, but everything is white and pristine and even Maureen's bras strewn across the living room like a scandalous rainbow can't make it seem lively right now.

Mark could be lying on the floor dead for all she knows. God, Roger had better be taking good care of her Marky, keeping track of him, or she's going to stick her favorite pair of stilettos right through his miserable heart.

Collins is getting gray nowadays. She can't help but think that, for once, he may have been wrong.

Roger is not enough. Mark needs so much more – she should know!

She'd feel so much better, she thinks with a pout, if she just knew whether or not he was still taking his damn medication.

She hopes to God the answer is yes.

"Mark…" she sighs into her glass, lipstick smudging the rim. "What am I supposed to do?"

She sets the glass back down, still full, and swallows. It's sickeningly sweet. Not enough to rid the taste of ash from her mouth, though, at the thought of Mark so pale and thin and young in her arms…. A decade old monologue sits guilty in her throat as she hesitates and then finally, helplessly, picks up the phone.

Again.

Third time's the charm, right?

x

He has no fucking idea when Mark slipped out, or how.

Roger wakes up with a start and realizes that yes, once again, Mark has beaten him to the punch. He doesn't understand! How can someone so utterly despondent still get up so goddamn early – how is he dragging himself out of bed when half the time Roger finds him curled up into a tiny, shivering ball that looks more like a pile of laundry than a fully grown man?

Mark is getting so thin, lately, Roger is scared to so much as nudge him in case he breaks.

If he did break Mark, Maureen would be the first to jump down his fucking throat. In fact, he's pretty sure he doesn't have long until he's in deep shit for not knowing where the bastard's run off to today – she's been calling every hour she's not working for days, and half of him wants to call Collins up just to tattle on her.

He's not in his room. Roger had checked. (Twice. Okay, three times.) He'd even looked in the closet. He'd poked his head into the bathroom, and (with trepidation) behind the shower curtain for good measure. He'd checked his own closet, as if he thought Mark had spontaneously acquired some incredible stealth that would have allowed him to sneak into Roger's room while he was sleeping and hide himself away… for some reason.

Mark is nowhere to be found. The loft is empty and increasingly, unnervingly quiet, except for the thud of Roger's boots on the floor and his under-breath curses..

It's wearing on his nerves. The pressure. The unbearable silence.

Roger doesn't do well in silence. He needs the tapping pen, the rustle of the newspaper – the endless stream of garbage he plucks out of his guitar strings – anything. Anything!

Mark knows that. He used to leave the tap dripping, sometimes, when Roger was passed out on the couch after a long night of practicing with the band – which was almost always codeword for getting fucked up (with or without the band) – because he knew that when Roger woke up at noon with a killer hangover and no idea where he was, the gentle tap-tap-tap would be all he could stomach.

Mark used to do a lot of little thoughtful things like that, actually.

The fact that he hasn't been, recently, is sort of worrying… Or maybe Roger's just being a self-important asshole.

Mark could have better things to do than trot after him and remind him to take his AZT.

But that's… just not like him.

There's no way to put it that doesn't sound horrible, Roger thinks to himself bitterly. He picks the phone up on the first ring and slams it back down into the receiver before Maureen can even start questioning him. His head is already pounding, and he's only been awake twenty minutes. Now is not the time for Maureen to start in on him like he, personally, is the cause of all the world's woes.

All of this has reminded him too much of the early, dragging days of withdrawal, sick with anticipation.

It's also reminded him that he and Maureen? Had never really been friendly.

Mark is nowhere to be found. He didn't take his camera with him.

Roger viciously chews his thumbnail.

He doesn't know what to do. Collins isn't here to tell him. Maureen won't know, either. He doesn't have time for hysterics…

Should he stay here, pacing in frustrated circles in the hopes that Mark will reappear unscathed? The vivid image of Mark, face covered in blood, keeps flashing behind his eyelids and he wants to kick himself in the shins for taking his knife back.

It had seemed safest, at the time, but now Mark is out there somewhere by himself and essentially defenseless, and Roger just wants to pick him up and shake the sense into him.

Where the hell is he going? What is he doing? Why hadn't he even shouted a goodbye as he left? Left a note, at least? Jesus!

Well… okay. Maybe Roger knows the answer to that last one.

Why the hell did I think yelling at him was a good idea? Yelling at Mark?

God, I am an asshole.

Mark doesn't yell. He's yelled at Mark plenty of times before, though. He knows how to hurt him. He knows where it stings the most, and where to stick his fingers in and twist when he needs to make him let go – but last night had been about Mark, not him.

He should have known better.

He's such a coward. Always running away, when the going gets tough – when it's Mark, all of a sudden, who needs someone to drag him out of the hole he's digging himself. Things couldn't go on the same way forever, and Roger should have fucking known. He's been playing the victim for far too long now.

If it's Mark's turn to hurt, then Roger's repayment starts now.

(He can almost see Collins nodding in agreement.)

Grimacing, he shoos the vision of his old friend from his mind. Focus. If he were Mark, upset and camera-less… where would he go?

Some selfish part of him still just wants to write it off. Mark's having a bad week, a bad month… Mark can handle his own shit, hasn't he always?

But it's not just him that's been noticing.

The phone starts to ring again, and he groans out loud, almost glad to be startled from the rut in his mind. He grabs his jacket off the back of the couch and shrugs it on. His keys are cold and solid in the pocket.

God, he needs a fucking cigarette. He wonders idly if he should pick some up on the way back from – wherever he's going.

Think. Think Mark Cohen thoughts.

But shots and angles aren't applicable here.

Fuck. Fuck. Pay attention!

Mark's missing. The last time Mark went missing, he turned up in an alleyway, and Collins had said something about stitches later that made Roger's stomach turn. No. Focus. Mark is probably still shaken… that part Roger's sure of. It's his fault – the guilt is gnawing steadily at his innards, but he'll deal with that later.

Mark probably wants to blend in the background right now, lick his wounds in the relative privacy of the back of the room… which means…

Mark's probably at Life Support. That, or stowed away somewhere – the Life, maybe, if they'd let him in – with his fucked-up screenplay and pen in shaking hand.

Fuck, why not? It's as good a place as any to start.

He slams the door behind him just as the answering machine beeps.

"Roger, god damn it, I know you're there! Is Mark home? Tell him to call me –"

x

Things are just so easy with Gordon.

It's sort of amazing, the contrast – Gordon, he doesn't have to yell, doesn't have to make Mark feel like shit just to get a point across. Maybe it's not Gordon, maybe it's Roger – but he's getting sick of making all these comparisons in his mind.

(His head's too full of crumpled suicide notes and the jumbled echoes of Roger's angry voice, words he can't even understand anymore.)

It doesn't matter if the words don't come to him, though, because the notebook is stashed away safe and silent beneath his mattress and Gordon is kneeling on it beside him, wrinkling his nose with laughter at something that he said, and Roger isn't home, and everything is fine.

"No, I don't think that's mold," Gordon is saying drily, and Mark remembers belatedly that the whole reason Gordon is here with him in his bedroom right now is because he'd mentioned the stain on the wall beside his bed, which may or may not have been giving him cancer. "Though I'm not surprised you thought so, if you seriously worked for Buzzline…"

He's vaguely disappointed, but fights back the accompanying sigh and forces out a dramatic groan instead. "I knew I should never have told you that."

Gordon is still examining the wall, but he's wearing the shadows of a smirk. "Mutant mold epidemic, I think the segment was called…" He's got that steadying hand on Mark's knee, where it's been all day, and Mark has to keep reminding himself not to grab it and thread their fingers together.

When did you get so pathetic?

The voice is still nudging and needling, but he's not alone right now, and he won't let it get to him. Not now. Not this time.

"This is a pretty nice place?" Gordon comments eventually when he realizes he's not going to get a response, turning back to Mark with that contemplative look he gets when they're alone. It's not predatory, or condescending – he would know, because he's been on the wrong end of both too many times to count since he'd moved here.

No, he's just… looking. Searching.

Mark finds that for once, he sort of likes the attention.

"It's a shithole," he corrects him with a wry smile he hadn't been sure he'd be able to muster. "But our landlord's not so bad. Anymore."

"Anymore. That you know of," Gordon echoes with a quiet snort, in a cynical way that's becoming increasingly familiar. Mark realizes that it makes him feel warm.

He wrinkles his nose to disguise the grin creeping onto his face. "That I know of," he admits.

Maybe it's just because he's gone so long without letting himself want it. It's like, reverse psychology or something… if you try hard enough not to want it, maybe it will come to you?

Gordon hadn't exactly come to him, but if he's honest, that's the way he prefers it.

This is also one of the first times that Mark's been allowed to make the calls. He's thoroughly enjoying it – he's got Gordon's phone number folded up in his pocket, a brand new lighter for the cigarettes he doesn't have (because "I felt sorry for the other one. Rest in peace.") and his knife, which he hasn't touched at all today, except to reassure himself that it was there.

Dark eyes keep following his wrists when he moves them. It's only a matter of time before someone as sharp (and, well, suspicious) as Gordon broaches the subject, and he's dreading it, but that's okay.

"You'll get used to it," Gordon repeats, smirking, as he always does. I'm usually right, words Mark has remembered over and over obsessively since he said them, so that they're worn right into his brain. Something new to cling to, to hope for. He's being pathetic again, isn't he? He doubts anything will even come of it.

But that's okay, too. Really. He's got his camera, he's got his knife. He's got a few bucks in change that he's picked up off the sidewalk the past few days. He's in control.

Today, he's in control.

And Gordon is on his bed.

Mark doesn't necessarily want this to be something it's not – it's just, his imagination is fevered lately. Starved for human contact. When all he's had is his own running commentary, for God knows how long, everyone who makes eye contact with you seems like a lifeline. Like an option.

But that's sick. Gordon's not a puppet, he's a person. With a personality. With a really sarcastic sense of humor and a really, really warm hand suddenly clasped gently around his.

"Um!" He manages, and very pointedly ignores the way his heart skips a beat.

Rebound, the voice chants sweetly. The word you're looking for is rebound.

Oh, wait – you can't rebound from someone who never would have fucked you in the first place!

Mark shakes his head furiously, humiliated. No. No more thinking of Roger. Roger doesn't even like you. This is your own fucking fault, and you know it, and he knows it. He doesn't care what you do to yourself. He shouldn't have to!

If he did, he would have noticed by now. Right?

Right…?

He's standing at the edge of a very ugly precipice, lungs all but collapsed already. Pity, he'd only just gotten them working again.

He feels his face slowly reddening, but Gordon is narrowing his eyes down at the first of the angry red lines peeking from beneath his sleeve. Mark sees the damning words falling from his lips before they even reach his ears.

"…You do clean these out, right?"

He does. Well. He tries. Usually not until later, until he's sure Roger isn't going to barge in on him to take a piss, find him holding his bleeding wrist over the sink –

Oh, God, that is so not the point right now.

Gordon knows, Gordon has always known, Gordon has that damn sympathy in his eyes again and Mark can't stop his breath from hitching like he's been kicked in the chest, clutching at the ruins like he can stop them from falling out of him in the panic.

"I – yeah," he manages, voice wavering. "Yeah, I – do."

There's no point in denying it. The evidence is all right there, and Gordon knows it.

"Can I see?" Bluntly, fingering the end of his sleeve and peeking critically at what Mark knows is only the tip of the iceberg.

Okay, Gordon doesn't know, Gordon thinks he knows. But Mark, he's so much worse. He's so much more pathetic than anyone could possibly guess.

Oh, God, if he sees –

The shame already has his skin crawling, but he nods. Because that's just what Mark does. Because Gordon just makes things so easy, and he wants to hang onto that strand of thought for as long as he possibly can, wants to believe it for a little while longer, at least until tonight when it's just him and Roger and closed doors and silence.

Smiling thinly, Gordon nods and tugs him closer to the light. He doesn't gasp when he pulls the fabric slowly, carefully back, but Mark would have to be blind not to catch the way his eyes widen the way Roger's do just before he starts swearing.

There are never enough bandages. Mark has seen his arms a million times – could point out what each and every scar was for, but not when he made it – and he knows. He knows they look horrible. He knows he's never going to be able to wear a t-shirt again.

He knows he should be bandaging them more often, keeping them clean, keeping his sweater from sticking to his skin.

Gordon holds his arm like he would a delicate specimen, eyeing it doubtfully. Mark gets the feeling that he's a lot more concerned than he's letting on – then again, he is a teacher, and that probably comes with the territory. "Some of these look infected…"

"It's fine," Mark tells him, and he feels like it's okay that he's subdued. Anyone would be in this situation. Right? He's not making that up?

He's allowed to be scared.

He feels so bare, so vulnerable. He feels like he had lying in that alley, pleading for death, except now he thinks he might actually want to live at least a while longer, to see what comes of this.

He's so glad Roger isn't home right now. Fuck if he cares where he is, so long as he doesn't interrupt this.

"It's not fine," Gordon says, firmly, and it's funny how someone who Mark has always known to be so suspicious can manage to sound so very calm. Gordon away-from-meetings is a Gordon that he really wants to get to know. His fingers graze gently over the thick, raised lines of his oldest scars, right at the crook of his elbow. Somehow, his skin erupts into gooseflesh. He shivers, and Gordon takes a steadying breath of his own. "But it can be."