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It happened the 22nd of August, and Mark found out by accident.
He didn’t know how he felt about that—he understood, because it had been so long, been so established, and, of course, things were different now; but an irrational part of him wished he’d been told directly.
The rest of him didn’t know how to parse out the information, to compute the date he’d been given. He sat at his desk, staring blankly at his laptop, before he turned his gaze to look at the whispering, scurrying interns and programmers outside the translucent windows. Some of them were crying, wiping away tears as they comforted each other. Some of them looked shocked and numb, like Mark.
Chris showed up the next day. He looked tired, and there were more lines in his face than the last time Mark saw him. Mark didn’t get up to greet him.
Chris was quietly whispering with Mark’s secretary, a competent woman who’d always managed to make sure Mark actually ate and slept on occasion. Mark should give her a raise, he decided distantly. The thought was tinged with regret, but he let it pass, because he wasn’t thinking about that, not really.
Dustin arrived as suddenly and as loudly as Chris had been silent and inconspicuous.
He gave Chris a hug. He didn’t even look towards Mark.
Mark understood.
Mark understood a lot, actually; understood more than most people gave him credit for, because caring and understanding were always two separate things, for Mark.
He cared about this, though.
Wardo’s dead, Chris, Dustin said, like they all don’t already know, and Mark could read his lips from where he was sitting.
It didn’t make it any more or less real, when his name was Wardo and not Eduardo or Mr. Saverin, but Mark clenched his fist and closed his eyes anyway.
_____
Eduardo had been thirty miles outside of Palo Alto when it happened, and, according to Chris, no one knew what to do with the remains. He was cremated, stuck inside one of those ornamental urns, and Mark saw it in Dustin’s hands before he had to turn away. Chris and Dustin wanted to send the ashes back to Florida, to his parents, but the airfare was expensive, and Mr. Saverin told Chris on the phone that his wife wouldn’t be able to handle the reminder in their house.
Chris decided to bury him in the Palo Alto cemetery.
_____
Mark went to the funeral.
He didn’t get an invitation, and no one told him to go, but he went anyway. He didn’t change into nicer clothes, but then again, he never did, anymore.
No one looked at him, which Mark supposed he should be grateful for. He wondered if it was because they were avoiding him. He wondered if the crying woman he’d only met once, Eduardo’s mother, blamed him.
He wondered if anyone didn’t blame him.
He wondered if they were right.
…He knew they were right.
It was a car accident, the whispers said. He was speeding, he was frantic to get here, because he heard—
It’s almost poetic, someone else said.
Mark knew it wasn’t. He knew it was a freak accident, that there was nothing to be said of a car accident on a slippery road at night, other than the obvious.
Eduardo had been coming to see him. Eduardo died, because of him.
No one looked at Mark throughout the entire sermon. Mark didn’t look at anyone, either.
It was a closed casket wake, obviously, since all that was left of Eduardo were some ashes, and his things in his apartment in Singapore. Mark stared at the dark wood, not touching, before he turned and walked away.
_____
He went back to work, hunched over his laptop. He knew he was behind, knew what he was typing didn’t make sense, knew that nothing really made sense anymore.
It was August 27th.
It started to rain.
_____
He walked into his office the next day, and they were boxing up his things.
He knew why.
He turned and walked out.
_____
Eventually, on the last day of August, he visited the grave. Eduardo’s name was engraved elegantly, and Mark traced his finger over the letters.
Eduardo Luiz Saverin
March 13 – August 22
“Wardo,” Mark whispered, and it was the first word he’d spoken since it happened. He wondered if that was significant, and then he shrugged. Probably not.
He sat down on the freshly tilled dirt, not caring about the smears on his pants. They didn’t matter, anyway.
“I’m sorry,” he said to the gravestone.
“It’s not your fault,” a voice said behind him, and Mark didn’t turn around, just closed his eyes and breathed.
“You’re not real,” Mark told Eduardo. Eduardo crouched down in front of Mark, leaning against his own headstone.
“Okay,” he said amicably. It was the most pleasant Mark had heard him, in fact, in the last six years. It certainly didn’t help any argument for his reality.
“You’re dead,” Mark said.
Eduardo nodded.
“Yes, Mark,” he said, before smiling sadly. “Mark…” he trailed off, glancing to his left and biting his lip.
“I know,” Mark said. “I’m not an idiot.” Mark followed his gaze.
The tombstone next to Eduardo’s read:
Mark Elliot Zuckerberg
May 14 – August 22
Mark stared at it, and shrugged. He’d always known, he’d just. Ignored it. It didn’t excuse what had happened, at any rate.
“Really?” Eduardo asked, and he actually sounded surprised. Mark frowned at him.
“Yes,” he said stiffly. “I don’t see why you care,” he added.
“You keep going to work, you keep… you’re acting like you’re still alive, Mark,” Eduardo said, and there was the hint of frustration and impatience in his tone that was familiar, but there was also a touch of genuine fear, which Mark didn’t understand at all. “You need to move on,” Eduardo continued. “Didn’t they explain it to you? If you realise that you’re dead, then—”
“Yes,” Mark interrupted. “I just don’t want to.” Mark got up, done with this conversation, done with the reminder of things he refused to think about.
“Mark,” Eduardo said, sounding even more stressed. “Stop. Please.”
Mark paused, remembering the last times Eduardo had talked to him, the cold and expressionless voice. Now his voice was broken and pained and Mark suddenly vividly remembered the glass doors banging open, the time his name had echoed around the offices in a similarly strained voice.
He stopped.
“I know you hate me, Wardo, but this is just… please, don’t do this,” Mark said quietly.
“I don’t hate you, Mark,” Eduardo replied, still sounding panicked, but more controlled, more quiet. “Look at me.”
Slowly, Mark turned back around.
“Did you mean to overdose?” Eduardo asked, and he looked so honestly scared for a moment that Mark blinked. “You. You knew you were dead, you knew who I was, but…”
“I didn’t do it on purpose, Wardo,” Mark said, confused as to why this, of all things, was what Eduardo chose to talk about. “I just grabbed the wrong medicine. My head really hurt, and I wanted to finish the stupid code, and it kept not feeling better so I took more and more. I wasn’t suicidal, just stupid.”
Eduardo closed his eyes and breathed out slowly, which was what he did sometimes after he’d been terrified but the danger had passed, like after finals week and when his father had called. It was interesting he still did it even when he didn’t need to take a breath.
“I was so scared,” he admitted. “You kept doing normal stuff, and they said you’d overdosed, and I just. They said you wouldn’t recognise me if you thought you were still alive, but I had to try, Mark, I had to.”
Mark stares at him. “Wardo,” he said, a little desperately. “It’s okay.” Wardo laughed, almost hysterical.
“Yeah,” Eduardo said, “sure.” He closed his eyes and shook his head. “I don’t understand, then, Mark. Why won’t you move on?” He opened his eyes, staring at Mark in confusion. “What’s keeping you here? Do you really think you can run Facebook from the afterlife? What’s so important, Mark?”
“Why do you think I don’t want to ‘continue on’, Eduardo?” Mark snapped. “What possible reason could I have to not want to go to Hell?”
“But if you didn’t overdose on purpose,” Eduardo began.
“It’s not because I was suicidal, it’s because I was an asshole, Wardo,” Mark said, exasperated.
There was a pause, and Eduardo looked honestly surprised.
“It’s not like that,” Eduardo told him. “It’s not good or bad, it’s just… after. It’s beyond. And you can’t stay here, it’s wrong. You have to let go of whatever’s keeping you here. You only go to… to Hell if you’re sick, if you can’t make it beyond. Like if you thought you were still alive. Or you were really terrible, I guess, like Hitler.” Eduardo looked thoughtful for a moment.
Mark looked at Eduardo’s gravestone.
“Wardo,” he said softly. “I killed you.”
“No you didn’t,” Eduardo said, and he sounded outright annoyed. “Mark, I didn’t even know you had… you had died, when that truck hit me. I was driving in because of the meeting with the investors; it would’ve happened if you were still alive, it wasn’t your fault.”
“It’s still my fault,” Mark said. “I set up that meeting, I made Chris beg you to come, I begged Chris to come—”
“You told me to drive in the dark, at night, in the rain?” Eduardo asked. “You told that truck driver to get drunk and hit me?”
“If—”
“If anything, Mark. We could be here forever.” Eduardo’s mouth twitched. “Not that we don’t have the time, but we should move the argument somewhere else.”
Mark scowled.
“You say that like we’re going to the same place,” he muttered. When Eduardo opened his mouth, Mark added, “Even beyond, it’s your own heaven, right? They explained that part, at least.” Eduardo blinked.
“Mark,” he said softly, reaching forward and grabbing Mark’s arm. Mark shivered; it was the first time someone had touched him—or well, what he thought of as him, now—since he’d died. “Mark, I died more than a week ago. Why do you think I’m still here?”
Mark shrugged. “They sent you back?” he guessed. “To get me,” he clarified.
“No, Mark,” Eduardo whispered, leaning forward slightly. “I didn’t move on either.”
“Why not?” Mark asked automatically.
“You were still here,” he said.
“Wardo,” Mark said, thinking of the hundreds of things he could say, “why?”
“I wasn’t about to leave you behind,” Eduardo said.
“You should’ve,” Mark said. He thought back to Eduardo’s funeral. “It would’ve been… poetic.”
Eduardo laughed, and it sounded only slightly bitter. “You refused to leave me behind either, this time,” he pointed out.
“I knew you were dead,” Mark said automatically. “Logically, you had moved on already. There was nothing of you to wait for. I was just... scared,” he said stiffly, hating to admit to any sort of weakness, even a fear of Hell.
“Mark, you know that doesn’t make any sense,” Eduardo pointed out. “You could’ve moved on, and you didn’t.” Eduardo rolled his eyes at him and gave him a look, the look he used to give him that said you’re being deliberately obtuse. “And you didn’t know I was dead for at least the first 24 hours.”
“Maybe I stayed for Facebook,” he pointed out.
“Did you?” Eduardo asked.
Mark stared at Eduardo’s lips. “No,” he said.
Eduardo kissed him.
Aside from the fact that Eduardo was kissing him, and Mark took a moment to just revel in that, it felt like a normal enough kiss, but there was an edge to it, of not-quite-real, and a soft murmuring warmth that took Mark a second to place as Eduardo’s thoughts.
He could hear Eduardo’s thoughts.
“Come with me,” Eduardo said, after he pulled away, hands framing Mark’s face.
“Why don’t you hate me?” Mark said abruptly. “It doesn’t make sense.”
Eduardo laughed. “I’m still mad,” he said. “A little.” He smiled. “Dying kinda puts things in perspective, though, you know?”
Mark shook his head. “I still don’t understand,” he said, brushing his hand through Eduardo’s hair. Eduardo sighed.
“I love you a lot more than I could ever hate you,” Eduardo told him. “We have eternity to fight about specifics and the deposition and Sean and everything. But only if you come with me.”
“Together,” Mark repeated, just to make sure.
“Yes,” Eduardo confirmed.
“I love you,” Mark said. “Too, I mean,” he added. “I love you too.”
“Mark,” Eduardo said, and he was smiling openly, unguarded, in a way he hadn’t since Harvard, since I need the algorithm.
“Let’s go,” Eduardo said, and Mark finally nodded. “Maybe,” he said as they were fading, “we can try again and do a little better next time.”
“Maybe,” Mark said, voice faint, and then they were gone, the fresh dirt on both graves completely undisturbed.
At the entrance of the cemetery, Chris sighed in relief and turned to Dustin.
“They’re gone,” Chris said.
“Are they gonna be okay?” Dustin asked.
“You know what, Dustin?” Chris replied, “I think so.”
_____
It was the first of September, and Andrew was running late.
He rushed into the room where they were holding the read through, hoping against hope there was still a chance he could get the part. There was a large table surrounded by chairs, various casting directors and his own agent casting irritable looks at him when he entered in a clatter of noise
A boy at the table with glasses and adorable curly hair looked up.
Andrew blinked.
“Hi,” he said, breathless from more than just the running.
“Hi,” the boy said. “My name’s Jesse.”
“Andrew,” Andrew replied.
Jesse smiled.