Author's Notes: Thank you so, so much to everyone who reviewed. Knowing that people like this nutty idea makes my day. Still…I can't believe I would even think of something like this… Oy.

"Roger, please..."

"Nope."

Nine o'clock found Mark on his knees on the bathroom floor, his forehead pressed against the back of the door and his wiry hands quivering out of mild stir-craziness. In a desperate attempt to free himself, the poor boy had given into Roger's demands and sifted through his box of things, trying his best to entertain the ideas that he was supposed to have on seeing naked women winking at him and failing miserably. Not even so much as a twitch.

"It's not going to work," he had said, angrily at first, then consistently more pathetically as it repeated.

"You're not trying hard enough," Roger had insisted.

And so a very forlorn Mark had grudgingly consented to go through Roger's things, wishing all the time for disinfectant or for rubber gloves as all manner of indecent, so-called 'toys' passed through his hands, occasionally gasping and letting some of the more unsettling objects fall to the floor. Roger, each and every time he heard a whimper or a gasp from the other side of the door, had pressed his ear close and listened, waiting for more, but generally hearing nothing but muffled swears and exclamations of utter disgust.

At one point, about two hours in to his imprisonment, Mark had resorted to physical violence in an attempted escape; setting the box aside, he had placed his glasses down on the ledge of the bathtub and out of harm's way before taking a running start and throwing himself, left side first, into the door. He had howled, naturally, on finding the door much more solid than he had hoped it would be, due to Roger's weight leaned up against the other side, but had repeated his assault, not only once more, but twice and again, hoping that the wood would crack or a hinge would give under his slight force.

"Nice try, Marky," Roger had snorted after the third attempt, hearing Mark groan in pain from the other side. "But that only works if you're blessed with the physique of a Greek god, like certain people we know."

After three hours of failure, of unfortunate disappointment, and of misery on Mark's part and glee on Roger's, the troubled boy fell into silence, stared at the back of the door much like Pete Townshend's pinball-playing hero stared at a mirror, and refused to speak a word or acknowledge Roger's chides.

"What's going on, Mark?" the smug musician called, tapping thrice on his side of the door. "Find something you like?"

When he got no reply, Roger knocked again, knitting his brow in trying to figure his friend out. "Busy? Can I go now?"

When there was no voiced response, but rather the sound of running water, Roger began to grow a bit anxious. "Hey... come on, Mark. Give me a sign or something."

The rush of running water was soon accompanied by the swish of clothing on clothing, the various onomatopoeia caused by the dropping, tossing, and throwing of assorted objects into a plastic crate, and even, when Roger listened close enough, the low, suppressed giggle of a mad person. Such foreign noises continued for a matter of a minute or two, before one knock from Mark's side of the door startled Roger onto his feet.

"Mark?"

But the voice on the bathroom side of the door did not belong to sweet little Mark. It was at the same time high and guttural and soft, throaty and trembling and strained.

"Your porn dies tonight."

With a shriek that would have been comical had the situation not been so dire, Roger leapt for the door and immediately tore down his makeshift barricade, tossing chairs aside and fumbling with the doorknob until the door swung open towards him, revealing to his frightened eyes what was quite possibly the most grisly scene he had ever had the displeasure of viewing.

Mark Cohen, gentle little Mark who fed stray cats and couldn't even crush bugs, who watched the moon and the stars if he could see them through the smog, who blushed almost without a catalyst, and who was puppet to his mother, under three hours of confinement had finally snapped. He stood beside the steadily filling bathtub, shirtless and shoeless, with a silk scarf wrapped around his head as a headband and his glasses crooked across his nose. He had painted himself in edible colors, in strawberry red and apple green, in non-toxic war paints that were normally used to enhance intimate experiences, all across his face and chest and twiggy arms. More importantly, though, and more frightening than the Lord of the Flies-turned boy was his position, resolute for once, with Roger's heavy crate of magazines and toys straining his arms as he held it over the threatening water in the tub.

"It's going to be a bloodbath." The boy's lips curled into a sinister little smirk as he slowly turned from Roger to the crate in his hands. "Any last words?"

"M-Mark--" Roger, from his place in the doorway, was sweating bullets and trying desperately to voice a coherent and acceptable reason as to why Mark shouldn't have dumped his supply of Playboy into the steaming bathwater. "Let's not... do anything we're going to regret, now... C-come on, pal... you... you don't really want to do this..."

"No?"

"No... you... you're just going to calm down and step away from the water, okay? Okay, Mark? And you're going to give that crate to me, and we can just forget that any of this happened."

Mark, with his light eyes narrowed and his jaw set, looked far from convinced.

"Seriously, man, come on... W-we can go out for dinner or something, or-- oh, I know: we can see a movie. One of those artsy movies that you like. Just you and me, okay? Just you and me; nothing to worry about, no Maureen--"

"Maureen..." Mark's expression softened dramatically; his lip quivered and his eyes began to water while his shoulders slumped .

"Yeah, yeah! Okay, no, fine! Maureen can come. She can come, it's okay," Roger added hastily, taking a cautious two steps towards his suddenly whimpering friend. "Okay? Good?"

In the meantime, though, Mark had started to tremble so terribly that the magazine atop the pile slowly slid, inch by inch, slipping down past the rest of the pile and finally plummeting into the tub with a heartbreaking splash. Roger cringed and whimpered audibly as the noise rattled Mark, who peered over into the water.

"February 1992," he read flatly, slowly lowering himself to sit on the rim of the tub, crate in his lap. "Fare thee well."

"February '92?" Roger exclaimed, rushing over towards the tub and swiftly fishing out the waterlogged magazine. "That's the one that looks like April, you little ass! I could kill you!" Attempting to dry the ruined pages out in his shirt, Roger flopped down beside his morose friend, caught halfway between mourning and rage. "I could kill you," he repeated through clenched teeth, surveying the damage with a frustrated sigh. "If you weren't so pathetic-looking, I'd bash your head in."

And indeed, Mark was looking quite pathetic, in contrast to his savage-boy appearance of two minutes earlier. The mention of Maureen, it seemed, had triggered in him a terrible sense of sorrow that was only compounded by the facts that Roger was angry with him and that Maureen may or may not have ever been coming back to him. He rested his head in his hands and his elbows on his knees while Roger cautiously put a hand on his back, breathing deeply as he tried to comfort his miserable friend rather than beat the living Hell out of him.

"Come on, Mark," Roger sighed, slinging an arm around his shoulders and mussing up his hair. "It's no big deal." What a liar. Out of all the ones he could have dropped, why did it have to be that one, damnit? "You're being way too... too hard on yourself." There was a beat, and Roger bit into his lower lip, trying terribly to stifle laughter but failing miserably, bursting out into a fit of subdued hysterics as Mark eyed him gloomily.

"What?" the strawberry and apple-flavored boy groaned, turning his head out of his hand and towards Roger.

"I s-said... I-I-" Roger, evidently, by the way he was gasping for breath between bouts of laughter, had either found something amazing funny or had somehow passed into one of those 'I'm high on life' phases through which the musician so often passed. "'Being too h-hard on... hard on.. and you-you can't even--" Sighing, the extremely immature Roger chuckled and wiped at his eyes, which were brimming with tears of laughter. "Oh, man..."

Mark, on the other hand, was far less amused and let Roger know so by shoving his weight into his rather jocular friend, sending Roger, much to Mark's surprise, backwards into the tub. While this would have been sweet revenge in another circumstance, Roger, having been so close to Mark, had taken a hold of the boy's shirt and pulled him down with him, successfully soaking his attacker amidst a stream of curses and shouts from both parties.

"Shit, Mark," Roger growled on surfacing, scowling and very red in the face, "You get fucking testy when you're not getting any."

Mark, who was, by this point, dripping with edible body paint, heaved a frustrated sigh and splashed Roger directly in the face with the rather hot water, much to the howling and swearing of his friend. "I am not tes--" But the rest of the word came out only as an airy squeak, as Mark's eyes widened drastically and his voice got caught in his throat, holding breath down with it. As he had been atop Roger, you see, and Roger had been struggling and thrashing about, having very recently been assaulted with a wave of hot water, Mark had found himself on the very, very wrong end of one of Roger's knees, which had struck him swiftly and with enough force to shut him up and double him over into the water, wheezing and gasping for breath.

"Lousy little mother-fucking son of a bastard," Roger growled, pulling himself out from under Mark and hoisting his victim out after him, setting him down on the tile floor in favor of cradling his absolutely ruined Playboy, which had fallen into the tub with them. "Serves you right."

"Serves who rig-- oh."

Naturally, right as Mark was holding himself beneath a very wet, very pissed-off Roger, Maureen had made her unusually lackluster entrance, had appeared in the doorway and had blinked twice, gawking at the strange-even-for-their-loft scene before her.

"Did I... interrupt something, Roger?" she asked, slowly making her way over to the drowned rats more commonly known as Roger and Mark , carting with her two or three nondescript paper bags. She added, on second thought, once she noticed the rather strained expression on her boyfriend's face, "Is he gonna be okay?"

"Not that I care," mumbled Roger gruffly, gathering up the rest of his things and making his way towards the door, "But he'll be fine. In like... two hours, but he'll get over it." Just as he was about to step back into the kitchen, a suddenly smug-looking Roger turned back over his heel and smirked at Maureen, who had since bent down to get a better look at Mark. "Just rub it for him, and it'll work itself out."

"F-fuck you..." Mark wheezed, blushing horribly when he opened one eye and found only Maureen smiling down at him, looking significantly less frustrated than she had been when she had gone out earlier that morning. "O-oh... Maureen... hi..."

"Hi there, Marky," she returned, leaning in a bit more to give him a peck on the cheek. "Mm, strawberry."

"L-listen, Maureen--" Mark started, struggling to pull himself up into a sitting position. "I'm rea--"

"No, Pookie. It's really okay," Maureen giggled, taking his hands into her perfectly-manicured fingers and helping him the rest of the way up. "I'm the one who should be sorry. I flipped out this morning, and... well, maybe I was overreacting a little bit." Smiling, Queen Maureen walked her fingers slowly up a very flushed Mark's arm and to the back of his neck, where she pulled gently at his wet hair. "I think I know how to make it better, though," she added, leaning in to playfully kiss the tip of his nose. "It makes perfect sense."

"Maureen, you're wonderful," Mark sighed, turning a bit to kiss her cheek and trying to ignore the terribly pain in his lower abdomen.

"I know," she giggled, running her fingers back through the boy's hair and watching it spike up behind them. "I'm wonderful and brilliant."

"And that's why I love you."

"And here I thought you loved me because I have a drop-dead sexy body."

"Oh, well--" Mark blushed furiously and grinned his sideways smile, much to Maureen's delight. "Well, there's that, too..." Gently worrying his lower lip, the boy slipped away from his wonderful, brilliant, drop-dead sexy girlfriend and wrung some of the water out of his shirt. "But... what's your idea, exactly?"

"I thought you'd never ask!" Maureen exclaimed, still beaming as she stood to her feet and gave Mark a hand up. "The answer's right here." She gestured to one of the bags she had carried in, but pulled it away sharply when Mark tried to peer into it. "Nuh-uh. You have to come upstairs, first," the diva queen teased, smiling sexily and taking Mark's hand into her free one. "Coming?"

'I hope so,' Mark's inner voice -which, incidentally, sounded quite a bit like Roger- whispered as the boy nodded and followed like a puppy on a leash, trailing just an arm's length behind Maureen all the way up to their bedroom.

Luckily for Mark, it was quite black upstairs, as the bedrooms were quite inadequately lit, and the room that Mark and Maureen often shared with Roger and April happened to be without a skylight. The cover of darkness allowed him to shuck his wet clothes without the constant fear he had of Maureen seeing him naked getting the better of him, but on her request, he didn't get into his pajamas, opting instead to sit on their mattress with the sheets wrapped around him while Maureen got herself situated somewhere out in the darkness.

"No peeking," the self-named post-modern goddess giggled, shuffling about with whatever she had in her bag.

"How much longer?" Mark whimpered, finding that the longer he had to wait, the less bold he was when it finally came time for Maureen to kick things off. "It's really getting cold..."

"Oh, not much longer. In fact..." Maureen, from wherever she was, clicked her tongue and smiled to herself, quite pleased with her plan, just as Roger had been with his. "All done. Marky, this is going to work. I know it's going to."

"If you say so... it's worth a try, Maureen," the boy replied, his voice squeaking a bit in anticipation as he heard Maureen's footsteps approaching and felt her weight shift the mattress a bit.

There was something about sex that still made him incredibly uneasy. Sure, he could say the word without vomiting now, and he was certainly no longer a virgin, having had been with Maureen for a number of months, but he blushed every single time his beautiful lover got into bed with him and shied away at the initial contact, fearing nothing in particular but fretting something. Perhaps that was where his problem lay; maybe he just had a terrible case of nerves all of a sudden, or maybe he was afraid to do something wrong, to mess up or to embarrass himself. Not that this was much less embarrassing... But…no. No. There was nothing to worry about. Even if he didn't feel the usual sensations below the belt, there was nothing wrong. It was Maureen. He and Maureen were in bed again, and nothing bad was going to happen.

"Something the matter, Marky?"

"Oh... no, sorry--" he whispered, blushing terribly and grinning bashfully in the dark. "Everything's fine."

And as her fingers pressed down into his hair and he lost his own in her long curls, Mark really did believe that everything was going to be fine. While she kissed him, he began to believe that his little problem was going to correct itself, that they could go back to normal, that they would be happy again, without worry that there was something wrong with one of them, something the matter with their relationship. Maureen, as she gently took Mark's hands and led them where she wanted them to go- down her neck and chest, across her back- had him convinced that life was good again, and Mark couldn't help but smile as he continued to kiss her and she continued to lead. He heard Maureen giggle a bit when she brushed his trembling hands low across her stomach, and he himself blushed even deeper.

"Good?" she whispered, pulling back for just a moment and playing with Mark's wiry fingers.

"Good," he replied.

"Good." And with his consent, Maureen drew Mark's hands down even further, mentally ticking off the seconds until he would pull them away in shock.

She got to three.

For, as it had taken Mark a moment to register, Maureen had led his hands down and pressed them against something that, while not entirely unnatural to him, was quite unnatural for her and had certainly not been there the last time they had tried to have sex. When the idea clicked, a very bewildered Mark gasped and slid away, pulling his hands close into him and staring wide-eyed at Maureen through the thick darkness.

"W-what is t-that?" he breathed, pulling his covers tightly around him and scooting as far away from Maureen as he could go. "I-is that a-a-"

"Marky," Maureen laughed, groping in the dark for his hands again, "Sweetie, that's my plan. Don't you get it, baby? There's more than one way to do this. This might be just what we need."

It was just around that time when Roger, who had kicked back on the couch downstairs, heard sounds of struggle from the rooms above; the swish of sheets, followed by a thud, followed not long thereafter by a terrible, gut-wrenching scream. Roger, wise as he was, recognized that sound; it was, unmistakably, the cry of a boy who had lost any and all dignity in one foul swoop. Or thrust.

Author's Notes: A…hem… So?