A/N: Woah, look, another update! That's like, two in the same year, that's fucking amazing for me yeah? Love you guys who are reading. Every review restores a dead part of my soul. I really hope other people are enjoying this, because I'm sure as hell enjoying picking it back up after so long. I'll be editing and maybe revising the previous chapters soon, just so ya'll know, but it shouldn't be too much of a dramatic change.

Chapter 5: Story of My Life

Several mornings later, Mark returns from an ill-advised and not entirely willing rendezvous with Maureen at the Life Café with a splitting headache and half a mind to just keep walking, past the hall, onto the fire escape, trip over the railing – until there's nothing between him and the sidewalk eight stories below but the empty air whistling in his ears.

He may or may not have spent a significant portion of the breakfast fantasizing about it.

It wasn't so much that he didn't want to spend time with Maureen as it was that she couldn't shut up for five minutes, and somehow she still managed to eat her entire order and lick the fork clean in record time.

Which, of course, made it even more glaringly obvious that Mark had been pushing his French toast around his plate for half an hour without actually putting any of it in his mouth.

(It's soggy and cold and even Maureen can't justify picking up a fork and shoving a bite of it into Mark's mouth herself, as she might have done two years ago.

That doesn't stop her from nagging him about it, though.)

"Mark, eat up! You've got to regain your strength, don't you?"

Miraculously, she finally stops waxing poetic about her newest dream role in some show Mark is almost completely certain that she wasn't qualified to be in anyway. "What did we talk about? This. This exactly, Mark, you know better, you have to stop putting Roger first and take care of yourself sometimes –"

God, it doesn't even seem like Collins had told her about the stitches. There's a seed of burning gratitude in his chest somewhere, just for that.

Less miraculously, the topic of conversation is now centered entirely around Mark's skinny frame and peckish eating habits, and he can't help but notice – possibly because he's paranoid, there, he can admit it – there's just too much space between his bony wrist and the flimsy fabric of his shirtsleeve.

Smiling woodenly, he'd spit some excuse about having eaten with Roger and then gone running for the door. She hadn't had the forethought, like Collins, to reach out and grab him before he could trickle in with the morning traffic.

Later, maybe he'll feel bad that he made her pay for food that he couldn't even bear the thought of trying to digest.

There's something seriously wrong with him, he thinks. But then, he can't really remember a time when there hadn't been.

Mark was perfectly convinced that he'd been born defective. He has more than enough evidence, all trapped up in his violent whirlwind of a mind.

He consoles himself with the memory that he hadn't suggested the catch-up date in the first place. That was all Collins.

Collins had been brutal enough to deal with, and he hadn't given Mark nearly enough of a buffer period before he was dragging him forcibly out of the loft with that tight no-nonsense university professor smile of his that he seems, unfairly, to be able to turn on and off at will.

"Spill, Cohen."

He's going to remember that moment – that demand – for years to come. It will haunt his fretful sleep, fill up his journal, inescapable and terrifying.

Recently, with his visits so few and far between, it's been easy to forget how scarily perceptive Collins was. Easy to pretend that he was fine, because if Collins couldn't see through him, maybe he wasn't even lying? Maybe he was fine.

Hah.

It makes Mark feel like he's eighteen and spewing half-thought excuses at his professors in a panic, midterms just around the corner, his mother always looming in the back of his mind – sweetly reminding him that he only had six months left to find himself a job or pull his grades up, or he was cut off.

Even more uncomfortably, it reminds him that he's lying. He's lying to Collins, and aside from the fact that he's already busted, he feels like a greaseball for doing it in the first place.

Of all his friends nowadays, Mark thinks that Collins might be the only one who hadn't any ulterior motive or guilt driving his desire to be anywhere near him. That in itself was just a fucking miracle, not that Collins seems to realize that.

Who wants to be around little Marky Cohen when he can barely stand to be himself?

The interrogation lasts a terse forty five minutes. Tom – because this is Tom, his old pos professor, not Collins, his longtime pot supplier and on-and-off roommate – takes his words and turns them back on him, and Mark just parries desperately, face like stone, on the verge of some terrifying metaphorical abyss that he's afraid to even look into.

The very idea of speaking any of these words in his head out loud makes him sick to his stomach.

He wonders if they'd make Tom sick, too.

Every tiny hair on his body stands up on end, prickling sharply so that he has to swallow around the pain and smile so tightly he probably looks like he's about to snap. He tells himself not to scratch. Every single one of his scars and scabs feels like it's on fire. (Two hundred and eighty four, last count.)

In his mind they're a mass of tiny beacons, giving him away. He's used to thinking of himself like that – like a bomb, like a catastrophe.

Tom is giving him that unnervingly patient, expectant look and he almost doesn't realize why.

Stitches.

Right. He has to explain the stitches.

"I slipped," he says, almost without hearing himself. His heart is pounding so hard that he can feel it like a jackhammer to his temple. "With – with a razor."

He doesn't have any facial hair to speak of, except for a few pitiful, pale blond hairs that occasionally appeared on his upper lip if you looked closely enough.

"Roger was there. He'll tell you," he adds desperately, recklessly. Silently, he prays that Collins never, ever asks Roger about this, but he has a bad feeling about it all the same.

The foreboding knot in his gut isn't helped by Collins' narrowed eyes, which stray to his sleeves far too often to be comfortable. He pulls them nervously down over his hands and plays with them endlessly,

Don't think about it. He's trying to unnerve you. Trying to get you to spill.

The excuses themselves are poor, too. He's just too tired, too disoriented, to come up with anything better.

And maybe you're tired of hiding it all the time, too.

But that's pathetic, too, because what does he really have to complain about? Nothing. Nothing in comparison to Roger with his two dead girlfriends and his track marks and his grim life expectancy; nothing compared to Collins, practically widowed and dying and voluntarily spending his day cleaning up his favorite scrawny fuck-ups mess.

"And he didn't come with you, I assume." Deadpan. Collins eyes him flatly, calculating. Mark can hear the words he doesn't say just as loudly as he can hear his traitorous heartbeat under his skin, shaking the tatters of his veins as it travels through his body. He doesn't know, then. About this. About you.

"Spill, Cohen."

But – he's not ready. Fuck, he might never be ready.

Right now it feels like his life is just an endless stretch of this. Nothing more. Possibly less. What's the point of telling people that he feels like shit when they only care so long as they get to keep him a little longer? What if he doesn't want to be alive? What if he doesn't want to quit?

What if he doesn't want to quit?

The thought hits him like a punch to the gut and he really does think he'll be sick this time, throat convulsing, hand sluggishly coming to press at his stomach. As if, by sheer force of will, he can contain what's sure to be the black bile of his own self-loathing come from the empty space inside him just to remind him that he'll never be rid of it. Give it up? The blades, the sound of tearing, the hardened razor-thin lines like body art all up and down his arms, the bloodstained bandages and used up rolls of medical tape and –

He can't. He can't just stop. Not now. Not until – fuck, he doesn't know. What is he waiting for? Death? That's the only thing he can think of.

They can't make him quit. He's not like Roger. He's not some addict lying passed out on their stoop with the needle still in his arm – sometimes he has to fight the urge to steal the dirty needle out from under the guy, but that's not the point!

They can't make him.

But Collins would.

His mouth suddenly feels dry and cavernous.

What would he count, to calm himself down? What would he do, when Roger was pissed at him, when life inevitably disappointed him again? Just drown in it?

Might as well.

Mark disappoints himself every day. He doubts that any serious attempt to prove differently would last more than two hours.

All he wants is to be able to make it to a single goddamn interview without fucking something up. All he wants is to feel productive. Like he's contributing. Like he has a right to complain again, if only because he'd have to work like everyone else.

Now he doesn't even have a fucking interview. What is there to hope for?

Nothing.

Collins talks a lot more than that, but his head is spinning and throbbing and his own nasty inner monologue drowns him out. All he can see is the sidewalk, damp and worn down and broken all over, the weeds trying futilely to grow out of the cracks.

Roger is nowhere to be found when he's finally allowed to stumble into bed. Mark draws a shaky breath, the kind that rattles all of his bones, the kind he reserves for Big Number Days, and curls into himself. For hours, all he can do is massage the hard, slim bulge of his new pocketknife resting against his thigh. He doesn't even think of writing in his journal.

The loft is still, silent, empty.

Mark is so glad that he could cry. This, he thinks, would be an acceptable thing to cry over.

He could be a drama queen, sure, but never let it be said that Roger Davis can't take a hint.

He hasn't seen Roger in almost a week now.

And it's not that Roger has disappeared – Mark knows that he's been home to sleep, during the afternoons and late at night, if only because he's timidly started poking his head into his room to make sure that he's really there, really alive.

It's that Roger is avoiding him.

Mark is pretty sure that this is a first. He also sort of wonders what Roger must be doing with his time, if he's being so fucking quiet.

He tries not to feel stung when the first thing that comes to mind is a girl.

He said that he wasn't interested in dating right now. After Mimi.

For once, the voice almost sounds pitying rather than antagonistic. Maybe it's going soft.

So he hasn't seen Roger in days, or rather, hasn't crossed paths with him. And he still doesn't have a job, or bus fare, or friends that he feels comfortable within a mile radius of right now. There's nothing to do. Nothing but staring at the ceiling, avoiding mirrors, rubbing his battered head, and pretending that taking roughly two showers a week is perfectly hygienic.

Mark can think of about a thousand things he's done wrong in the past two weeks, so he's struggling a little to narrow it down. Knowing Roger, he's probably still offended that Mark had refused to let him come to the clinic. Offended. Angry. Not concerned, because Mark just can't wrap his head around the idea of being worried over like an actual human being.

So instead of thinking about it anymore, he reaches frantically underneath the mattress and grabs for his knife, presses it to the slivers of bare, unmarred skin he has left on his forearms, staring desperately at the blood bubbling up as if it will turn back time.

It doesn't work, but his heart stops pounding so hard it hurts his ribs every time he hears the clomp of Roger's boots.

When even the blood can't keep his mind occupied, he turns to his journal.

Then to his screenplay.

It's terrible. He can't even pretend otherwise. He doesn't really have the motivation to, either. The plot has been reworked a hundred fucking times, and he still doesn't have any idea where it's going to end up.

On top of that, all of the characters are excruciatingly, embarrassingly familiar.

There is nothing wrong with self-parody in fiction. Absolutely nothing wrong with it.

Mark tells himself that until he's blue in the face – and honestly, with all the blood loss, it's not implausible – but it doesn't make him feel any less pathetic as he picks idly at the scabs just beneath his sleeve and chews on the end of his pen, a habit he used to think was disgusting before he'd met Roger.

Or, more accurately, until Roger had ruined him for normal, productive, miserable nine-to-five civilian life.

He can still remember green eyes behind the smoke curling between them, the shape of his lips twisting up into that slow grin.

He can still remember the feeling of pitching forward and plunging into love.

He'd never clawed his way back out of the hole he hadn't even known he was digging for himself. He hadn't known he had those kinds of pits in him, endless, bottomless, gaping maws on the landscape of his pathetic personality.

It's not really fair to give Roger all of the credit for his – his fall from capitalistic ideals, for lack of a better term. (Honestly, why does he write? He's horrible at this, even in recollection.) Collins had played a bigger role, overall, in the physical manifestations of that – inviting him to live in the loft with him, introducing him to drugs he never would have dared touch when he was a cute little senior at Scarsdale High.

But Roger had been beautiful, and dangerous, and God help him, Mark couldn't concentrate on his half-hearted business aspirations and this ridiculous crush at the same time.

Roger demanded his – well, everyone's – full attention. In his glory days, sweaty and eyes gleaming up on the stage and under the neon lights, Roger had been practically manic, spilling energy with every movement, grabbing hands and arms and wrists, faces and shoulders, dragging people along with him at a breakneck, breathless pace, and life next to him was a little like an endless thrill of adrenaline.

Or serotonin, his brain supplies nastily.

Mark scowls. Hard.

Oh, yeah. He'd been in love with that Roger Davis, on the stage, on the posters.

That devilish grin, those green eyes like some seductive personal demon, destined to drag him straight into hell the way his mother had shrilly warned him as he'd walked out the door for the first time.

He'd been in love with the Roger on the fire escape, too, the Roger with his arm slung around his shoulders.

He'd been so damn smitten already that he hadn't even thought to worry about the natural progression of things – the emotional peril he was putting himself in.

Because Roger, he wasn't spectacularly attractive on his own. His cheekbones, his chin, had an odd contour to them that Mark suspected would make him particularly hard to draw, if he had been that type of artist. His hair was awfully shaggy at times, bleached so many times that the ends were brittle. He had scars and drunken, poorly thought out tattoos littering his body carelessly, as if to say what do you want, I'm young, I'm allowed.

It wasn't his face that made people love him. It wasn't just the shade of green his eyes were, if you peered closely enough – which Mark totally hadn't, but was (of course) utterly, sickeningly enamored with anyways.

Roger was restless. Roger was enthusiastic. Roger was reckless, and he was alive.

Roger also had quite a spectacular collection of track marks.

At the time it hadn't seemed all that important. Most things, actually, hadn't seemed that important once Mark knew, officially, that he wasn't welcome back in his father's house, and that no, his mother hadn't been bluffing, and his Chemical Bank card was useless.

But that was all in the past.

He shakes his head again, as if he could shake the intrusive – and, frankly, fucking annoying – thoughts right out through his ear and onto his notebook page.

The page, which might as well have been blank, stared up at him accusingly.

He set the pen against it and chewed his lip and counted backwards from 10, still picking slowly at his own scabs, the bruise on the side of his face throbbing gently.

He can do this. Definitely. Totally.

He's an artist, damn it! He wouldn't let anything take that from him. Not even his own defective piece of shit brain.

'He'd come to New York with hopeless, frazzled dreams of freedom. He had never emerged.'

He pauses and then sits up, looking down uncertainly at the page, before jotting the sentence down with the appropriate measure of chagrin.

The ink clots at the end of the last 'd' and glistens at him, reproachfully, disgustedly –

Calm down, Cohen, for fuck's sake.

He doesn't write that one down, although he thinks he probably should. A thousand times, in a notebook and on the walls and on his face and over his mouth, so that he'll stop stupidly, anxiously babbling every time he opens it.

The protagonist's name isn't Mark, but it's close enough. Michael. Just as generic, but with more syllables. He wasn't Jewish, but that wouldn't throw anyone off. Most people couldn't tell by looking at Mark that he was Jewish, anyways, and he hadn't practiced in years. Michael hadn't started out as a self-insert, or at least, Mark hadn't intended him to be, but that had been twenty balled-up pages ago, and now he might as well admit that he doesn't want to write about Michael.

He wants to write about him. That, in itself, makes him want to sigh until he runs out of air and suffocates on his own paradox.

He hates himself, he hates the bandages, he hates the blades, and yet there they are spinning around and around and around in his mind.

There's no one to tell, and even his journal has to be sick of him by now.

Mark covers his ears, but the voice is still there – sometimes his and sometimes Roger's and sometimes Maureen's and sometimes the unearthly metallic whisper of the tools he uses to unravel himself, one meticulous tear at a time.

You're worthless, it hisses gleefully, distorted and sinking deep into the base of his skull. You're not a real artist, like the rest of them.

He frowns and tries to shake the thought from his head, as though that had ever really worked. You'll never finish another film. You can't even finish a journal entry right.

Part of him wants to tell it to shut up; the other part is chanting miserably along with it.

Everyone else is moving on. And what are you doing, huh, Cohen?

He still hasn't gotten his wallet back. None of them have very much faith in the police.

Sitting around feeling sorry for yourself and pretending that you have a single creative cell floating around in that diseased brain of yours?

He's going to have to get a new ID. Another fifty bucks down the fucking drain.

They could do without the extra baggage, don't you think?

He has no hope of replacing it anytime soon, seeing as he'd missed the fucking interview.

Useless. Worthless. Burden.

He doesn't realize that his breathing has escalated until his bruised temple is throbbing again.

With a groan of real despair, Mark slumps over his lap and buries his face in his hands. The wire rims dig into his skin and he relishes it, because it's easier to feel the sting this way than it is to go digging underneath his mattress, dizzy and so pathetically weak, like Roger so many months ago when he went reaching for those endless hidden stashes that Mark always thought he'd gotten rid of, but never actually managed.

Come to think of it, he's had worse injuries at Roger's hand.

He pushes his knuckle into the bruise until his teeth hurt and then draws his arms up so that he can lie on them, unable to muster the energy to pull out the covers so that he can climb beneath them.

The nice thing about being exhausted all the time, he thinks blearily just before he falls, is that he doesn't toss and turn anymore.

Fade to black just isn't quick enough for him anymore.

When he wakes up, the window is dark. That in itself isn't alarming.

Someone has turned on the light.

He nearly breaks his neck sitting up, eyes stretched wide with panic, feeling for his knife – to hide or to stab the intruder, he doesn't know. Instead, he finds his pen, and then Roger's thigh.

"Morning." Roger glances up at him with half a smile, as though Mark isn't trembling and drawing his hand back like he's been slapped. He looks about a hundred times less tense than he'd been the last time Mark had seen him – the angry crease between his eyebrows has eased, and his hair looks clean for once, no noticeable grease shine near his scalp at all. Mark barely resists the incredibly stupid urge to reach out and touch it.

It takes him a moment to find his words. And his notebook. It's in Roger's lap, and he's thumbing through it casually, poring over the words like it's no big deal.

"W-what are you doing?" Mark blames the crack in his voice on the fact that he'd just woken up, rather than his own mounting anxiety. Sometimes he wakes up already mid-panic attack. Today, apparently, Roger had decided to give him something to panic about.

Oh God, what is he reading?

"Reading," Roger says cheerfully, and offers one of his trademark you-can't-stop-me grins even as he's stretching his arm away from him and out of Mark's reach. He grabs for it anyways, scrambling to get up onto his knees. "You were knocked out." He scans another line, humming in consideration. "This is kind of fucked up, Mark."

"Give that back!" He can't keep the alarm out of his voice, dread pooling heavy and sinister in his gut. Roger laughs.

"In a good way! Don't have an aneurysm, Jesus!" He raises an eyebrow playfully, leaning back and letting Mark fall on top of him in his next frantic grab. Mark gets a faceful of Roger's t-shirt and a whiff of familiar aftershave that makes his head spin without trying to. He sits back up, grimacing at him pleadingly. "Why do you care? You always get to hear my shitty reject songs."

"It's different!" He knows he's blushing but he can't focus, kicking himself further up the bed to grab again. Roger lets him this time, but the gleam in his eye can't bode well. "I'm not going to finish it! It's not fit for human consumption – Roger!"

Sure enough, in the next moment he's on the floor, and Roger has him pinned by the wrists.

Scabs crack and tear. He hardly registers it, breath caught in his throat at the sudden proximity of Roger's face, looming over him smugly.

Whatever funk Roger has been in, he's decidedly shaken it off. Nothing to worry about.

"C'mon, Cohen, tell me how it ends. I'm taking an interest in your life." He says it with a slight curl of his lip, and Mark has a feeling he's quoting it straight out of a Healthy Relationships pamphlet, the kind they have at the community center and that Collins had probably slipped under Roger's bedroom door at least once over the years.

"I have no idea," he manages, stretching his eyes big and innocent. Roger snorts incredulously, but he doesn't call him on it. He must be in a really good mood.

"Seriously." He smiles weakly, a sinking in his chest that he chooses not to identify. It's probably the place where all of the lies have settled, corroding his insides like bitter acid. He deserves it. "I haven't thought that far ahead."

Roger's eyes flit over his face again a last time before he releases him, sitting back cross-legged and planting his chin in his hand, elbow balanced on his knee. "I'd've thought you'd have the whole thing planned down to the costume design," he comments, seemingly casual, but Mark has known him too long – just like Collins – not to hear the underlying question mark.

That it's not his style. That he's been thinking. That Mark could tell him, if he really wanted to, what the hell is up with him lately.

Presented with the option, he feels himself shrivel inward.

"Yeah." It comes out as a mumble, smile faltering. "I'm working on it." Roger's eyes are so green, so earnest. He can't believe it, after everything that's happened, that Roger could still be here – surviving, moving forward, making a life. That wasn't the kind of person that Roger used to be.

But this isn't the person that he used to be, either. Mark doesn't even know what kind of person he is, now. If he's a person at all.

His entire being boils down to scar tissue and the whisper of metal.

The irony doesn't escape him.

Roger shrugs and hands the notebook back to him with a tentative smile. It occurs to Mark, belatedly, that this is probably his way of apologizing for the week-long silence.

"Guess I'll leave you to it, then. Wouldn't want to interrupt a work of genius."

It's not until Roger is gone that Mark dares to stuff it back under his mattress where it belongs. He doesn't want him to know, paralyzed with fear that the next time he'll grab the other notebook – his journal, bloodstained and damning.

His fingers brush metal, and relief washes through him before he even draws the blade out.

If he can't confide in Roger or Collins or Maureen, at least he has this.