Rights and So forth: Nothing is mine. I borrowed without asking.
Warnings; Bit of language is all.
Rating; PG
Psychosomatic Remembrances
Part Three
"And look at this big lug!" Catherine smooshes her face against his and then gives him three kisses in a row on his cheek, making 'mmmwa!' noises in between each one. Mark rumples his nose in amused patience and a little bit of pain; her hanging diamond earrings cut into his face. She's a little tipsy.
"I'm sooo glad you're heeeere!" Catherine gestures with her champagne flute to the other guests Mark had been talking nonsense to. "Last year he couldn't come to Aspen, so I kidnapped him this year. Monte Carlo is good for the soul."
"My soul feels pretty good," Mark admits. "And it was the kind of kidnapping without duct tape, thankfully."
The group gives one of those polite chuckles you make at parties.
"Awww...I just love him." Catherine pinches one of his cheeks next. "I also love his new job."
Mark liked it too. He felt fresh and new, and, at the same time, old and content. He didn't even find satisfaction imagining killing Liam Conners, though he'd left the dude gaping when Mark left his resignation at Waterman Enterprises over a year ago and suggested to Liam maybe there was a place for him all the way at the top. It was like karma, kinda.
"I love this place, I love all of you, I think I love everything." Catherine carries on.
Mark swipes her mostly full drink and signals for some coffee. "Otherwise you'll be too drunk to blow out all the candles on your cake without falling in." He says when she sticks her tongue out at him.
"Spoilsport."
"It's too nice a dress to ruin with icing. And expensive."
"Aww...maybe I just love you," Her head sags onto his shoulder, and Mark excuses them from the group to walk Catherine over to the balcony railing. It's warm, and the sea glitters below by the lights of the shore and a fat moon hovering overhead. Music chases along the breeze. Monte Carlo was good for the soul. They stand together, Catherine with an arm tucked through his and let the salty air assail them.
"Did I?" She says after a time, when her hands are full of a coffee cup and she's taken a few sobering sips.
"Did you what?" Mark asks.
"Love you. You know. Before." She says the last part in a stage whisper. She's the only one he's told about his trip through the rabbit hole. He's proud of her. No matter how much she loves gossip, she's kept it behind her teeth, even if sometimes she thinks he's the Great Oz.
"I don't know." Mark answers honestly. "What do you think?"
"I think...you've always felt like you've belonged with someone else. Like you've got a name. Right here." She zips a finger across his left breast, as if he was wearing a name tag. "I think it took me a while to get it, what you were explaining. That it wasn't man or woman; it was just this one person, and it didn't matter what the packaging was, they were for you. I'm sorry about Jeffery. And Keisuke. And Tony. And Wayne."
"And Dante?"
"Alright, geez, him too. I just wanted you to be happy. You were sad for so long. I thought happy meant you were gay now and a few blind dates would be helpful."
Mark chuckled. He couldn't help it. He pulled her in for a half hug and rubbed her arm. Catherine was just the kind of girl who needed to pull out a label-maker so she'd know where to shelve him. He got that. He just wasn't ready to label himself. That tended to cut back on your options.
Catherine looks up at him, and her eyes go all squishy. "I want that for me, a one true love. I thought about being jealous of you, but then I thought about what it must be like to lose that and remember loosing it."
"Your mascara will run," He fetches a handkerchief out of his pocket in a hurry, and blots her eyes for her before she wrecks all the smokey eyeshadow she probably spent an hour applying.
"I know, but it's so sad."
"It isn't." He goes to work on the other eye.
"Isn't it?"
"No."
"Why not?"
"Because. Even thought you die, it doesn't mean the bonds between the people who mean the most to you break."
"You don't believe in endings?"
"Of course I do. I think it's all the same. An ending is a beginning."
Catherine sniffs.
"No crying," Mark reminds her, and he hears the party go quiet, then start up the notes of 'Happy Birthday'. "Cake."
There are a lot of things Mark has grown to accept. He isn't Marcus, he's his own man who is free to be a little different (even if he does admit a new appreciation for antique Roman weaponry). He hasn't seen Cindra in years. He doesn't need her, or any other counsel. He's got a path. It's not where he thought he'd walk, but he finds it fits under his feet. He's even a pro at meditation. He lets the past go.
Except for the smallest part of him, which is calmly waiting. He thinks it's that part that believes in fate, in circles. It doesn't bother him, and it doesn't stop him from having relationships, from forging ahead.
He doesn't fool Catherine, even if he'd bothered to lie to her. She knows he's waiting, and is okay with that. She seems to have settled with 'Bi-sexual' and leaves it at that.
He's going to be Man-of-Honor at her wedding. He likes the guy she's marrying, even if Darren is old money and wears too many polo shirts. Mark even foots the bill for a bachelorette party, doing the tame half of the planning and letting the other bride's maids pick out the more wild activities. He lets the gaggle of women escort Catherine out to a night on the town in Reno. He knows it would be way too awkward for them to get rowdy and go to sex shops dragging him along. They can at least pretend the limo driver is blind, deaf and dumb, since they probably won't ever see him again.
She gets married at a Victorian church in Lake Tahoe, since that's where she met Darren, boating on the lake. He has a summer place there, a place Catherine has decided she wants to call home. She says she's done flitting around in glamorous places, that she wants to try being a mom. She wants roots.
He believes her, when she comes down the aisle in some ridiculously expensive dress, her eyes soft and and happy from the inside out, and he remembers that people change. Maybe Catherine was always so busy to distract her from the hole in her own heart.
It's a service dripping with flowers, a huge bridal party dressed in champagne and white, beaming relatives and vows that echo off of old ceilings. Mark is so happy for her he's grinning ear to ear, and he forgets he's in a waistcoat. Most weddings seem to take forever, but this one zips by and too quickly that famous music is chiming and the bridge and groom rush out under sprays of ecologically safe bird-seed.
As soon as the bridal party and guests relocate to the beach-side resort where a tent and dance floor is set up under the trees, he gets to tell her in a toast how pleased he is for her. She starts to get weepy, and he watches her husband read the signs and blot her before her eye make-up runs. While it's a big-brotherly duty he's sad to see go, he doesn't begrudge its loss a bit.
Catherine does know how to throw a party. The food is excellent, the music is great, the cake a monumental pile of sugar-paste flowers, no one makes inappropriate drunk speeches and white Chinese lanterns bob in a breeze like fairy spheres. The bridesmaids even tell him their dresses are awesome, and not disasters whey need to feel shame for having photographic record of. Some people shuff off their shoes to dance barefoot in the sand, rather than on the dance floor laid out, and there's a videographer running around catching everything for posterity. After a time, the very old and the very young move on, having seen the cake cut, the bouquet tossed and nearly everyone dance the chicken dance because Catherine says it's tradition. The romantic and the energetic linger as afternoon dips into evening.
He's sitting at a table with his tie undone and sipping a glass of scotch. He's watching the water, and a middle aged couple with their wedding finery held high as they stroll in the tickling waves. The sun is slowly setting.
"Mark!" Catherine is laughing. Flushed. He smiles, setting down his drink and sitting at attention, taking her hands when she thrusts them his way. She pulls him to his feet.
"Why aren't you dancing?"
"You know I need something with a beat. Anyone can sway to this stuff," The stuff, he's fairly sure, is Gershwin.
Catherine laughs and turns, beckoning someone forward. "Mark, Mark, remember how I told you I was having this genius local guy re-do my cabinets and that you should get him to build you a specialty case for all those old weapons you've started collecting? Mark Waterman, this is Calder Brightman," Mark flicks his gaze away from Catherine, his hand extended.
The world drops away and he thinks Catherine is saying how Calder isn't really a contractor, what he is is a wood artist, and he's really debasing himself in just doing a kitchen, but it all runs over Mark like water.
A thousand and more years later and Esca is shaking his hand.
No. Not Esca, he forces himself to think. Calder. But it's so close to Esca. Firm chinned, with low brows and a spiky cacophony of hair atop his head which probably looked sleep fuzzed on purpose. His hand is rough, the hand of a craftperson, and his body is lean and taunt. When Mark looks into his eyes they're gray-blue, and when he looks really deep he just knows. Even if he wasn't wearing a hauntingly familiar face Mark thinks he might have recognized him, because Esca is in his blood, stitched into the fabric of his very soul.
"Well, aren't you going to say something?" Catherine elbows. "He's not really this awkward around new faces." She confides to Calder.
"I know," Calder says, retrieving his palm. "He seemed reasonably eloquent when he was toasting you."
"Just caught me at a tongue-tied moment, I guess. My mind was miles." Mark recovers. He remembers to smile. He has to be normal, even when his heart shudders and skips unsteadily in his chest.
"No shit," Calder nods.
"It's...nice of you to do work for Catherine. She's been bragging about you a lot."
"It has not been bragging, Calder, not bragging." Catherine says.
"Boasting, then." Mark smiles. He cannot tear his eyes away. Why should he look so much like Esca? It doesn't seem right at the same time as it swells him with heat. He knows that he doesn't look all that different from Marcus.
Circles.
"It has been a few minor comments about how you are going to make my kitchen an artful place to cook, and artists should be nurtured in economies like this one, so Mark should commission you." Catherine says.
"I'm flattered you're pimping me out." Calder smiles. Brief, polite.
Catherine laughs and is swept away into her new husbands arms for another dance.
Alone, with Calder, Mark has never been so inarticulate in his life. Their conversation shudders and pauses, then lumbers. There are so many things he wants to say, but on the spot he doesn't know how to say them. Foolishly, he realizes he should have been practicing for this eventuality. Should have had a note-card all neatly inscribed an carried around in his wallet like a condom, a talisman to bring fortune his way. He doesn't know how to not sound like he's just trying to pick Calder up. It's not the time and the place, he knows that. So he basks in a presence, working over rough conversation about Calder's work, and how he knows Catherine and other banalities and Jesus he wished...he wished there was recognition in those sharp eyes.
But he's not Esca. He's Calder.
And in a few minutes he says that he was just on his way out when Catherine nabbed him, that he better get going.
Bereft, Mark can just watch the little frame turn and stride confidently away. It's the hardest thing he's done ever, maybe, to force himself not to get up, not to make an ass of himself, to keep his mouth shut and not call Calder back and say something horrendously pitiful and borderline crazy.
So he does what any man does when he has to watch something he can't and shouldn't have walk away. He orders another drink.
"Aren't you supposed to be upstairs being deflowered?" Mark asks when he opens the the door to his hotel room, and Catherine is standing there in a robe at some ridiculous morning hour with sunshine being repulsively cheerful. His mood is foul. He hasn't slept well. Alcohol might have soothed parts of him, but he wasn't about to drink enough to get well and roaring drunk at Catherine's wedding. He may have been pathetic, but he wasn't enough of an asshole to ruin the day for Darren and Catherine.
"Funny." Her eyes are sober and he braces an arm against the door. He rolled out of bed to answer the door, and is still in his sweat pants and under shirt.
"Well?" He asks as she just looks at him.
"That was him, wasn't it?"
He stiffens. For a split second he wants to pretend he doesn't know what she's talking about so then they don't have to discuss it. He isn't in the mood.
"After I stopped trying to hook you up, I accidentally found him."
"Yeah." It comes out on a sigh.
Catherine's eyes tumble away, and her murmur is both revelatory and directed not at him. "There are no accidents, are there?" She straightens back to him. "You should have tried dating one of the guys I hooked you up with a hundred years ago, then you would have at least had some practice. I've never seen you fumble, like that. You've always been really good at the lines."
"I wasn't trying to pick him up, Catherine."
"You know what I mean. And I know you. I know it mattered."
Mark presses his hands against his eyes. "I don't want to talk about it." Ever. "And your husband is waiting. Breakfast in bed. Marital bliss. Whatever."
He tries to close the door, but she wedges it open with her hand. Sympathy. Determination. Then she holds up something hooked in two fingers. A coat.
"I promised I'd get it to him. The coat-check guy lost it."
Mark's eyes fasten on the coat.
"Lost it." He repeated.
"Fine. It grew legs and walked into my suite. What you should say is 'thank you Catherine, I won't screw it up this time, thank you for finding my dream man for me against all cosmic odds Catherine, you are the best friend ever'. I put his business card in the pocket. It has the address."
He takes the jacket gently, almost reverently in big hands that are actually trembling. Like it's the damn Shroud of Turin. He resists bringing it to his face to smell.
Catherine smiles. "Go get him, tiger."
It's both a workshop and a home accessed by a two mile dirt road off the lake, isolated enough that a visitor could be heard coming a mile away. There are windows everywhere, so Calder can probably see everything. No architectural spit-up, it's been remodeled and personalized with the clever hands of someone who knows wood to be made into something completely his own. Outside there are stacks of partially chopped fire wood, dirt bikes and the domestic mess of a guy living on his own. Esca lives out here, wild and free, not making war, but art. It pleases Mark.
When Mark knocks on the door and it opens the smell of wood wafts out, warm and earthy. Mark can see the work-room is bright with early morning sunlight streaming in through huge windows with no curtains. The sky is open and endlessly blue today. At night the stars must be breathtaking.
Calder looks at him blankly.
"I'm Mark. Mark Waterman. We met at the wedding. Catherine's Wedding. Last night." Mark rambles.
Calder quirks a brow and it stabs right through Mark.
"You forgot this."
Mark extends the jacket. Calder takes a moment to identify it as his own, then reaches to take it.
Mark holds it, refusing to release. He looks into eyes he remembers. Wildly blue.
"I need to say something. Something crazy. I'm not unbalanced, but it'll still sound crazy, and I still need to say it. I've been waiting a long time to say it."
He watches Calder's eyes go from puzzled to wary. Mark lets go of the jacket and Calder's pose becomes rigid and full of suspicion.
"A few hours doesn't seem like such a long time to wait." Sarcastic.
Mark closes his eyes. "But sometime B.C. is."
Calder snorts.
"Wait, Please," Mark says when Calder turns to go inside, dismissing him. He puts everything he hopes into those words, and knows that, not being much of a liar, his face is an open book. No touching, hands held up. Calder turns, and Mark looks in those eyes and prays something in his face or eyes hesitates the compact body.
Calder makes a sound of irritation, makes a sharp 'hurry it up' slash with his hand and then mutters. "Should have my head checked. Yeah, what?"
Mark takes a breath. Pieces and parts he composed while vigorously showering fly out the window. He can't remember how he planned to start.
"I'm...not good at this sort of thing, with the words." He preludes.
Calder gives him a look tinged with incredulity. " Really? You didn't rehearse your stalker speech? You've had over twelve hours to work it out."
The words should cut into him, but they don't.
He lets go. Some part of Marcus is in him, and he knows what he wants to say.
"Marcus...was full of regret, when he died. Not for anything he had done; well, maybe a few things, but mostly he regretted the things he didn't do, that he wasn't strong enough and he couldn't protect Esca, but mostly that there were things he never got to say and that he left things unfinished between them. He didn't expect to die, not that anyone does, but..." Mark shook his head to clear it, eyes pressing closed a moment. "There was so much...stuff for Marcus. History and honor and the way he thought he should feel about things made something simple and wonderful into something confusing. Esca was everything to Marcus, his friendship saved him and made him a better man. Esca was loyal and true and good and he deserved to be free, really free. Marcus regretted he couldn't give that freedom, and then regretted there wasn't more, but if someone had to be left standing, if one of them was left alone without the other, Marcus would rather have died than to be the survivor."
Mark shoves his hands in his pockets, knowing Calder must think him incredibly lame. What he feels is relief. So much he needed to say. He feels the knotted threads that had been digging bands into his soul release and unwind. He lets the last piece go, the piece that had never been spoken.
"Marcus just needed Esca to know that he loved him, I guess, and that, at the end, he wasn't ashamed of it and that feeling that way for Esca -loving him- was something he would never, ever regret." Awkward now. Mark hunched his shoulders, shoving himself back into his jacket. "That's...that's all."
When Calder didn't move or say anything, Mark turned swiftly and takes the steps down to the gravel, heading for his rental car. Flight seemed cowardly, but he couldn't bear to hear derision, now that the words, in-eloquent as they were, had been said. Calder's face had been impassive for the duration, but his eyes were on Mark, never wavering.
He was groping keys with slick hands when a voice hollered.
"Hey!"
Mark paused, took a breath, then turned.
Calder was standing in the open doorway, still, the sunlight behind him making his hair into a burnish halo. He gripped the frame, the jacket thrown over his shoulder, an odd expression on his face. For a moment, they just look at each other.
Calder shifted his stance, one bare foot inside, the other over the threshold. He looked uncomfortable, now.
"...Would it be weird to say I knew that?" He calls. "But that, even thought I knew it, I'm glad to-or, no...it was important to hear you say it?"
"No weirder than my knowing I needed to say it." Mark answers. He doesn't scale weird any more. He's clutching his keys in a death grip in an effort keep cool.
Calder rubbed his knuckles against the heel of his other hand. "So...I'm Esca, then?"
" You were, maybe. Once."
"And you're Marcus."
"Not any more."
They grow silent and fall back into just looking at one and other.
Calder breaks the contact by looking back into his work room. His stance shifts again before deliberation fades and he flicks his head towards the open portal while looking at Mark. "You want some coffee?"
Oh God yes.
"If you mess with me, I will end you." Calder warns as Mark approaches the stoop. "I'm not big, but I will fuck you up seriously. I have chainsaws."
Mark smiles. He's knows it's a big sloppy grin, but he can't stop it. Doesn't want to stop it.
"Duly noted."
Calder shuts the door behind them. "I had this dream about a dude with a broom on his head last night, and he looked a lot like you, it was really fucking weird..."
Fini.